I *Heart* the Discovery Channel

This is a total You'd Have to Be There and It Really Helps if You Have a Strange Sense of Humor Like Mine kind of thing, but it makes me giggle--a lot-- so I had to share. To even remotely see the humor, you need to do one thing first: Tune your television to the Discovery Channel and watch for about an hour. It doesn't matter what's on, because what you're going to focus on are the commercials, namely the one for the show "Dirty Jobs." Watch carefully the part about the "chicken sexer." The guy squeezes the baby chick and little baby chick poop squirts out. This is something they do before checking the chick's gender, but that's not important right now. What's important is that somewhere along the way (we watch a lot of Discovery Channel), Baby's Daddy and I developed our own little commentary for the Poop-Squeezed Baby Chick. It goes something like this:

(Chicken sexer squeezes little baby chick and poop squirts out )

Commentary: His tummy feels better now.

More commentary: Yeah, he had a little tummy ache, but they squeezed that poop out, and now he's all better.

And I laugh hysterically.

I know it's not that funny here in black and white (even though I'm laughing right now), but I kid you not, I was driving around town the other day and during a red light, I just happened to start thinking about that little Poop-Squeezed Chick and how his tummy felt better, and I couldn't stop giggling.

So of course, we had to watch the full segment tonight so we could see lots and lots of chick squeezing while we learned other trivial chicken facts. Now that's good television.

The Weekend in Two Photos

Modified just a little from original post in http://spaces.msn.com/members/unloadingdock/
From August 14, 2005

A couple of photos for you here. This is the air bed on which I slept last night. No, no, no, don't worry, I didn't go into a hormonal rage and get myself kicked out of the bed. Our air conditioner went out. Again. Thank God that we have a home warranty and because only 20 days have passed since our last service call, we won't even have to pay a call fee. However, I'd like to strangle our AC man's wife for giving him grief about coming out on a Sunday last month, because he basically just came over long enough to shoot us a little more freon into the unit, thereby merely postponing the inevitable subsequent breakdown. And because he already probably knows exactly what is wrong and because it will be a time-consuming hoe-down, he has already admitted that there's no way he could come and fix it properly until tomorrow.

I don't know what other people do in situations like this, but last year, when the AC went out in our rented duplex, we got a hotel room until it could be fixed the next day. Fortunately for us, our current home has an addition (the big-ol' TV room) that sports its very own dedicated air conditioning unit. So we camped out there last night. One thing about this auxilary air unit is that it WORKS, by golly, and it only has two settings--ON and Arctic. If you'll notice, there are three, count 'em--THREE quilts on the air mattress that we slept on. It was about 47 degrees in there last night. But, hey, that's better than the 97 degrees that the rest of the house was smoldering in. Except I hope I didn't get pneumonia from walking from the refrigerated TV room to the restroom (aka sauna) for my usual three potty breaks last night.

Here is an apple coffee cake that I just took out of the oven--yeah, I'm a genius and decided to bake in a kitchen that is currently not air-conditioned. But, there's a certain apple coffee cake at Starbucks that I am absolutely enamored with, and instead of actually getting dressed, driving in my car (air-conditioned) to our neighborhood Starbucks (also air-conditioned) to buy a $3 slice of cake, I decided to bake a cake instead. OK, it's actually nothing even remotely similar to the one that Starbucks serves (oh, they even call theirs "lowfat." Puhleeeze), but it hit the I-Need-Gooey-Apple-Cinnamon-Goodness spot.

Now, I'm going to go stand in front of the Arctic AC for a few minutes before I change clothes and head to the grocery store, because 1) we're out of milk, 2) the apple cake really needs ice cream, and 3) you guessed it, the grocery store is air-conditioned.

This Not So Old House

Originally posted July 30, 2005
http://spaces.msn.com/members/unloadingdock/ Modified just a tad to save you the boredom of reading about my lack of Nesting Instinct and other pregnancy references. But if you'd like to read that stuff, by all means be my guest--just go to the original (click that link up there).

This spring we began our adventures in homeownership. Because we really wanted a very structurally sound home with a lot of square footage and because we wanted to stay within a particular price range, we had to be a little open-minded about, ahem, cosmetic challenges. In other words, we knew we'd probably do some updating. And updating we did.

When we first laid eyes on what was to be our house, it was carpeted entirely in pink. Pink. To borrow a quote from Steel Magnolias, it looked like someone had hosed the place down with Pepto-Bismol. All the window treatments were either white lace, dusty blue or pink and the original linoleum had faded to a light mustard yellow. It was a fabulous combo, as you can imagine. Our realtor warned us before stepping foot into the place that we would have to "see beyond the pink," because that's the main reason the place was still on the market. Well, underneath all that pink, what we saw was the most square footage and best structural integrity of all the houses we had seen in the price range. So we figured up what it would cost in time and money to make it ours and went for it.

As you will see, there is still some tweaking to be done—we will add curtains in the TV room (that's just a matter of tearing ourselves away from our precious computer games and going to Linens n' Things), and one day, we’ll completely repaper the kitchen and master bath. But for now, it’s home schweet home, toots.

Enjoy these photos, because it's the cleanest this place is going to get for a good long while.