While vacuuming on Thursday, I discovered the cord on my 6 year old Oreck is damaged and is on the verge of being unsafe. I called Oreck and getting it replaced would cost $65, but I would probably be without a vacuum for weeks. Not okay with the beags. After some research and finding out I could use Amex points to buy a super fancy vac, I decided on this guy:



Lots of pet people were crazy about the Dyson, but I thought I'd go one step beyond. Hello Mr. Miele! I love you already.

I've never been so excited about getting a vacuum before. I am going to vacuum the shit out of everything.

The deck, which we had held off on finally putting back on the addition after we had issues with the work done in the back yard, is now done! We had a general idea of how it should look, but didn't have an exact plan. My cousin, a carpenter, built it and I think he did a pretty awesome job.

I wish we didn't have to put quite so much stuff on it, but it is still a bit bigger than our old deck, so it feels huge. It doesn't have unnecessarily high railings like the old one -- both decks are/were about one foot off the ground, so railings really aren't necessary at all. We had my cousin build in these ledge/seat things instead so there is a lot of extra seating too if we have a party.

Old shitty deck (with old beige vinyl siding on that addition)


NEW DECK!

Since we were forced to move everything out of the little addition when we got a little water back there a few weeks ago, we decided it was time to change out the flooring. There used to be some ceramic tile right by the door and in the rest of the room I had put Flor tiles down as wall-to-wall so we could easily clean up after the dogs. The Flor worked great, but after four times of washing literally all of them out, I gave up on the idea. We bought some inexpensive slate and had my cousin install it. We've sealed it well too, given that the dogs will be back there during the workday.

Last weekend instead of setting off fireworks or having some screaming children over like my neighbors down the block, we painted the room also. This was the very last room in the house to paint.

Six years and many fixes later, I think the room finally "belongs" with the house instead of being some shitty afterthought tacked on the back:

so may ended on a very low note -- we found out that one of our beagles, watts, has two kinds of cancer. we discovered a mass inside his cheek, which biopsied as oral malignant melanoma. then we took him to uw madison for further evaluation and they discovered he also has lymphoma in the same area. we did lots of tests to confirm that he actually does have both and to what extent. both seem to be early on and are treatable, but with varying success. the cancer comes back in 90% of dogs at some point -- some very soon, some in years. it's very rare for him to have both cancers, let alone at the same time and in the same location. so he seems to be a very odd patient -- whether that works for him or against him, we really don't know.

we have been doing treatments with watts every week since and he has been a trooper. i won't go into huge details here, but things are going along as well as we can hope for at this point -- he feels good and the treatments really have not affected him too much, so as long as he is doing well, we're happy.

on a yard note, on friday, we got some very heavy rains here and the landscaping work that was supposed to prevent water issues in our addition totally failed. landscapers will be meeting with us and coming out to review what happened, so hopefully everyone will be cooperative about fixing the recently completed job. i also got a ton of water in my brand new dryer (it came in through the dryer vent, which is now very low to the ground due to the landscapers raising the grade in that area quite a bit) and this needs to be cleaned out, though from what the repair people said, it is not really broken, just dirty. i also gave up on the flor tiles in the addition -- i have washed them and dried them out three times and they still looked ok, but i think it is time we move to just straight up tile back there. we bought some slate over the weekend and my cousin will be starting to put it down tomorrow so we can get all of the records and shelves and whatnot out of all of the other areas of the house.

so yeah, awesome things happened in may. june seems to be the month of testing the crappiness of things that happened in may, so i'm hoping june is the month of making things better too.

The big stuff is done!







We'll still plant some smaller flowers and whatnot to fill in some of those planting beds with some color, as well as get a railing for the front stoop and get the small deck rebuilt, but the contractors are done and we have grass and plants again!

It was a pretty, but slightly cool day, so it was perfect for Beaglefest, the beagle rescue's annual fundraiser/adoption event/beagle play day. Watts is never crazy about Beaglefest, so I only have one picture of him and he looks like he wants to leave. For Lola, it's the best day of the year:



More here.

so the project should be done today, but it's also supposed to pour -- a lot -- so we'll see. here's where we are at (day 6 and then yesterday, day 9). i got home later yesterday, so those pics were at sunset and a bit dark and shot badly by yours truly:

Here we are on days 2 to 4. I missed pictures yesterday since it rained at the end of the day. There was not much that was very interesting to look at though. They had started to lay down the paths, but had the pattern going horizontally rather than vertically, so basically a chunk of day 3 got undone and redone today.


Hard to tell, but basically some drainage work was finished in the front and some prep work done for the stoop and surrounding boxes.




Brickwork!

The yard project started yesterday. It is unfortunate that we had to undo a lot of work we did with planting and whatnot, but we are saving as much as we can. There isn't a photo of the planting along the side of the garage, but a lot of things got moved there over the weekend.

Here's our progress after day 1:

Front
Monday to yesterday


Back
Beginning in 2003 to yesterday


Beginning in 2007 to yesterday

Fixing a mystery plumbing issue at our house is a project that we had been planning on taking care of "at some point" but had been putting off due to the enormous undertaking it would be. Once we somewhat diagnosed the problem with some trusted plumbers, we learned that, due to some previous owner's interesting and never was this ever code plumbing work to create a pseudo-overhead sewer that used the house's existing catch basin to reroute water that exited the house back into the overhead system. In addition to the large amount of plumbing work, this would require us to repour a lot of our sidewalk, which already was all wonky due to the improper grading of the yard. So incurring the cost of one thing just didn't make sense until we were able to tackle all of the other related items.

Today, we fixed this problem. Well, the plumbers did. Yesterday, they installed a new sewer line outside our house and got rid of the old clay pipe that was leaking and creating additional issues in the system. Today, they cut off all connections to the catch basin, basically a giant 9'+ concrete pit that was built with a lot of houses of the same age as ours in the Chicago area to collect waste water (not sewage waste) before it discharged to the city sewer line, and backfilled it in.



And even though we already had a sump as part of our goofy setup, the sump pit was clay. It didn't seal well and wasn't vented as it should have been, so periodically we'd get kind of a stinky sewer smell permeate through the plumbing in the house. So the old pit had to be dug up out of the foundation, removed and a new sump pit and floor drain had to be installed. This was a HUGE mess. I was tempted to take a picture in the middle of the digging, but I felt so bad for the guy doing it, by hand, standing in a giant old pit of clay soil and sand and water (the water table is high here and probably even higher right now due to some heavy rains we just had), that I didn't want to make more of a spectacle of it.



At least we now have some proper plumbing. And we already had purchased a new sump pump and backup battery system last summer, so at least we didn't face that expense also.

Next week, weather permitting, the giant yard project begins! That will be much more exciting to watch and takes place entirely outside, which is the best kind of project. No mess indoors!

So I think this past week I was finally forced out of my winter doldrums and got out and socialized a bit. The weather was still pretty wintery, especially for April (it actually snowed overnight), so that wasn't very enticing, but Matt's had a lot of shows to go to, so I've been tagging along.

Most interesting thing I saw was the Rural Alberta Advantage. Very Neutral Milk-y at times, but more thunderous percussion, a little more stable and much more likely to get you on your feet. Matt has been booking these guys for a short time and even though they're currently unsigned, there has been a good amount of talk about them and some pretty fabulous attendance at shows, so I'm crossing my fingers. They're very nice and funny and have a good attitude about their success so far, so I feel like they are deserving of the attention too.

We also finally settled on a contractor for the yard work -- Bertog Landscape. We've been working out the particulars, like which plants and which pavers to use, and hopefully we'll be done with that by the third week of May.

So spring has started to emerge and already we've had many many many inches of rain. This weekend was amazing because it was somewhat warmish for this time of year and it was DRY. We can deal with normal amounts of rain, no problem, but when it gets really heavy, we have issues in the back yard. Specifically, the yard is pitched towards the house instead of away from it and we can get a couple of inches of standing water in spots. This is very bad for our addition, which is just on a slab about two inches or so above ground level. When we redid the siding on it last summer, we did some things to help those issues and it's held, luckily, but the real solution is to fix the yard -- fix drainage, level it out properly and then replant everything.

About a few weeks ago, I started researching landscape contractors to gut both the front and back yards (front needs a new stoop very badly and associated front boxes and plantings) and this just seemed to encourage more rain to come. So far we've met with two, seen a full plan from one and have two more scheduled for this week. I'm trying to push it along as fast as possible given that spring is always usually really wet and we already have gotten a ridiculous amount of rain, but it's also going to be some serious money to do all this, so we want to make sure we do it right too.

In other news, Boomer is still with us. He has a bit of separation anxiety when Matt leaves him, but is otherwise a silly beagle guy. We thought we might have a home for him yesterday, but so far it hasn't panned out. Matt leaves for SXSW later this week so we'll see how much mournful howling he does for the four days Matt is gone.

This is our new foster beag, Boomer. He's very sweet, kind of wild, and not at all shy like the rescue first thought. He does have a bit of separation anxiety, which is rough when we are gone for 9 hours a day.

via Rolling Stone

Never pegged Obama for a lover of "Blood on the Tracks" -- he gets awesomer by the day.

we bought a new dryer this weekend. i know this may not seem like awesomeland to most people, but our current dryer was kind of old when we moved into the house, was never very good and has only gotten worse over the last five years and has been the source of constant laundry irritation in the last three (leaves rust marks from the enamel coated drum once in awhile, squeaks, doesn't dry very well). plus the beagles make all kinds of extra laundry and it's always something big, like the quilt we use to cover our couch, that's hard to dry. so i am excited to report we will be getting one of these delivered on saturday.



of course our laundry area looks this good too.

I think it was -19 F (YES Fahrenheit, no exaggeration) when I went to work this morning. I thought by buying my big parka this year that I would be somehow dealt a really warm winter and have it get no use, but it seems like I was just being prepared really well. BOO.

I don't have a good pair of snow boots though and this year we've gotten a lot of snow. I thought about trying to get a pair now, but with my luck, this will just encourage more snowing. I think I'll wait until next year.

In other news, my totally bizy bizy December spilled over into the first couple weeks of January too. It will probably always be this way with this new job, so I will be ready for it next year and better prepared probably too. It's just kind of weird with everyone else not being busy and taking time off and whatnot while I'm scurrying around.

I was hoping really that things would slow down a bit nearer to the holidays, since it seemed like September - November was a pretty action-packed time for me, but not really. Lots of worky work these days trying to wrap things up for the end of the year and lots of little activities to take care of on the weekend.

It has really been ungodly cold here for December this year, so I bit the bullet and decided to get a new parka-like coat. It's hard to find one that doesn't make you feel like a marshmallow or like you're shuffling around in a quilted sleeping bag. The most attractive one I found was North Face, which was also biting another bullet, since I have, for the last 10 years or so, associated North Face with only the douchebags that wore those coats all over Madison. But it's dumb not to buy something that is not bad looking and very useful because of a bunch of stupid people that wore that brand of item a decade ago.

so things have been pretty busy still, but i managed to find some time to do some shopping last weekend (totally struck out, other than a work skirt and some tights). my mom took me because it was my birthday this past monday, but we were unable to find anything birthday-worthy. i did find these though online and they ordered them for me.



i picked them up saturday and they're fantastic! i liked them so much i ordered their cousins today:



and to top it off, my brother took me to get fitted for running shoes yesterday so i have a new pair of those to try out today too.

while we were out getting me running shoes, we happened upon the caputo cheese market on the way home. holy god, this place is amazing. amazing amounts of cheeses from all over, plus an italian deli and market. and it's huge. tons of stuff. it's not too far from my house either, which makes it all the better.

So if this one doesn't swing for Obama, I'm looking into real estate in Toronto. Like very soon. And I know a lot of people said something similar last time around, but I really mean it this time. If we keep on going the same way this country has been moving, I really don't feel like it will be my home anymore.

Everyone here in Chicago is pretty tense. I think most people I know are Obama supporters like me, so we're very excited, but also really nervous. No one wants to think that it might actually be true, that he might actually win, because it just seems too good to be true.

We didn't get tickets to the rally -- I'm not so good with big crowds and I would rather sit at home with the beagles and wine, though I know if I was probably there I would be so amped up that I probably would get over my crowd-related crankiness. And if things went for Obama, I'd probably be in tears by the end of it, feeling all filled with history and hope. Don't worry, I'll probably cry from my couch too, one way or the other.

so our siding arrived last week and started going up on the same day. when i got home that day and saw it all, i wasn't so convinced. i picked a really nice blue/gray color for the siding itself, which looked great, but the trim color i picked, a very paper-bag beige that matched the existing house, was not a good combination. i think it is probably still a good color combination (and the blue looks good with the existing house), just not a good siding/trim combo, especially on a house with white windows/doors. i lived with it for a few days though as the siding was completed and i was hoping it would grow on me, but it just started to look even weirder and more garish.

at first i thought i'd repaint it in the spring, but then i saw that most of the caulking was not done yet to seal up everything, so it made more sense to get it done this weekend before they finished everything up this week. after much deliberation, i went with a cream color instead. good choice?