Happy Holidays!

Gah. Now begins that wonderful time of year when people on tv start ranting about "taking back Christmas" from all the the liberals and secularlists. Because Christmas is like, so persecuted. Being the most popular and celebrated holiday in the country must be hard. Poor Christmas.

I love Christmas. But I also don't mind that Juliana's school calls Christmas vacation "Winter Break." Does it really matter?

I wish people would lighten up stop trying to ruin my fun.

God's Pumpkin

Someone threw this pumpkin on the pond over the weekend, probably hoping that it would crack the ice. Instead it just sat out there for a few days as the ice slowly melted. I woke up on Sunday to see it still sitting there even though the rest of the pond appeared to have thawed. I thought it was pretty amusing. By the end of the day it had finally sunk to the bottom.

Hitting the Town (Or the Movie Theatre, at Least)

Michelle took the girls for a sleepover tonight so Jason and I are going to see both Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Walk the Line tonight. That's almost 5 hours of movie total (with a bit of dinner in between.) Mmmmm..... My behind is feeling numb just thinking about it.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Clean Slate!

Yesterday I finally finished the arduous task of shredding all of my old journals spanning from my eighth grade year until my second year of college (when dancing took over writings space in my life.) Good god, does it feel awesome to be rid of all that baggage. I knew it would be beneficial as in now the girls won't be able to blackmail me with my own words and if I ever run for President there won't be written documentation of every stupid thing I did as a teenager, but I didn't expect such a weight to be lifted from me upon destroying all that junk. That seriously must have been the worst feng shui ever to have those things living in my basement all these years. It's like all my adolescent rantings are no longer floating up through the heating vents and ruining my zen. Or chi. Or something like that. Oh come on, you know what I mean.

Just So You Know

1. Hair is blonde again. The ol' pocket book took a hit but at least I feel like me again.

2. Coordinating buying and selling a house- although exciting- is far more stressful than previously anticipated. Phone calls, faxes, emails, inspections, more phone calls, negotiations, loan officers, movers, scheduling issues, appointments and again with the PHONE CALLS, etc.

3. I've officially started packing. It looks like this year Santa's gifts will come out of their wrapping paper and go straight into moving boxes since we need to be out of here by the 28th of December. It looks like we may have our stuff delivered to the new house on the 31st so we will be toasting to the new year amid piles of chaos. Whee!

As you can see I have a lot on my plate so forgive me if I am less frequent with my postings. I'm thrilled that we're doing this but free time is at a premium lately.

Reposting a Few Photos for the Fam

Hi Grandma and Grandpa! You said you didn't see the living room and dining room photos in the other gallery so here they are again:


There are some neat pocket doors leading in to the dining room.



My piano would probably go under that window.


We really like the wood rails in the dining room for dispaying pictures.


That's a built-in china cabinet on the left.


There is a family room through that door but I didn't get a good picture of it.

Now can you see what I mean by the carpeting? Ew.

Hair Update (Because It Matters So Much, I Know)

Ok, I got myself an appointment at a salon for Thursday night. Needless to say, my attempts to lighten it back to it's normal color did not work. It's not as brown anymore but now it's basically the dishiest dishwater blonde you can imagine. Kind of like I stuck my head in an ashtray. I don't have to tell you that it's really not cute. I'm covering my head in a scarf and hiding in my house until I can get this fixed (hopefully with as minimal damage as possible.) I'm really dreading showing this hairdresser what I've done. Cross your fingers for me! I see lots of conditioner in my near future.

I told my sob story to the receptionist at the hair salon and she warned me of the risk of damaging my hair by bleaching it back all the way blonde. I'm going to talk with the stylist about it when I get there. I went through this about ten years ago when I wanted to return to blonde after spending a year as a redhead and it turned out fine so I may have them go ahead and bleach away but cut a few inches off as well. It seems I just can't win with this growing my hair out thing. I'm sure to be set back a number of months now because of my UNBELIEVABLE STUPIDITY. One of the first things I'm doing in Milwaukee is finding myself an awesome hair salon and stylist. I can't believe I'm still trying to do my own hair like I'm sixteen years old.

Enough hair talk for tonight. Can you tell it's all I can think about? Shouldn't I be thinking about how close I am to closing the deal on our awesome house? I wish I wasn't so vain sometimes.

Wherein I Find Completely Superficial Way To Ruin My Good Mood

I think I've finally realized that I am not fully equipped to be my own hairdresser anymore. Today, for some psychotic reason I thought it would be a good idea to dye my hair a couple of shades darker. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea but that part is done. I bought a box of hair dye that was supposed to be a "medium" blonde color- the operative word being blonde. However when applied the concoction on my own hair it promptly turned brown. BROWN. I wanted to cry. Ok, I did cry and then I went back to the store to buy some light blonde hair coloring and re-dye it back to it's original pale color. Unfortunately, now I think my problem was that I didn't wash it first before attempting to color it again so the dye didn't take. It lightened up a little bit but it's still fairly horrid. So, after consulting another fellow blonde who went dark and back (hi Michelle!) I washed my hair about four times and am going to try one more time tomorrow morning to dye it back to normal before bringing in professional help. (Jason is out of town until Wednesday night so I can't go to a salon until then since I don't have anyone to watch the girls.)

So basically with the money I've spent on Clairol Hydrience I could have gone just to a salon in the first place and had somebody with a brain smack me upside the head, tell me what a dumb idea it would be to darken my hair, and spruce up the fabulous color I already had.

If this doen't work tomorrow I'm going to cry like a baby. Yes, I am such a GIRL. And no, I will not post any pictures!

Everything's Coming Together

Front Porch


Originally uploaded by Tracey Gessner.

We put an offer in on the house yesterday! And to top it off, today we got an offer on the house we're selling!



We took lots of pictures yesterday. Click the photo to go the the Flickr gallery. Use your imagination folks- this house needs some sprucing up! I know we're up to the task though.

BUY ME. Please?

The sign and fliers are up! We're so excited!

God's Gonna Getcha Getcha Getcha (and if he doesn't, Al-Qaeda will...)

BILL O'REILLY: "Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I'm not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, 'Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.'"

PAT ROBERTSON: "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."

Peace on earth, goodwill to men (who vote on our side.)

Pins and Needles

Ok, so you're all dying to know what's up with that beautiful house, right? Well I am too. If you have talked to me personally in the past few days you've probably heard bits and pieces about the plan of action but just for the sake of laying it all out, here is the deal:

Me want. Mucho.

I didn't think I wanted this house at first. Of course, I thought it was gorgeous on the outside but honestly, the inside needs work. The kind of work that I think needs to be tended to before we move my furniture in. We're talking about some god awful, gray, office-style carpeting covering the hardwood floors on the first floor and stairs. And don't even get me started on the wood paneling in two of the (four!) bedrooms that is screaming to be removed. Plus, it desperatley needs paint on the GLARING WHITE WALLS in every room. Painting was something I would have done anyway in whatever house we got but oh, the floors. It was really hard for me to get past the grayish, gray-like, grayness of that carpeting and I needed a little help at first to imagine it far far away from there.

Some of the great things about the house? Finished. Attic. Can you say playroom? I can hardly get over the idea of living in a three-story house. There is also some beautiful original woodwork in the dining room in the form of a built-in china cabinet, pocket doors and rails along the walls that could be used for displaying photographs and such. And you guys saw the front porch in the photo so I don't have to rave about it here. There's a balcony off the back too and a backyard that is screaming for a hot tub. The main bathroom has some horrid linoleum but that can be changed and the kithen has been updated- the one thing I was NOT going to be concerned about while house hunting. Funny how things work out.

So that's what the actual looks like for the most part. I'd post a bunch of pictures but my photographer- ahem, Jason- was so excited that he forgot to take many interior pictures. I have tons of photos of the houses we DIDN'T fall for but what good is that, right? I'm finding myself getting more and more excited at the idea of a mini-renovation project. It will be messy and inconvenient for a while but I'm starting to see images in my mind of the finished project and it makes me excited.

It looks like this week we are putting our house up for sale. We are hoping to make an offer on this house contingent on the sale of our Bartlett house and pending an inspection. These two things are keeping me from fully bursting forth and doing the Snoopy dance all around the neighborhood. First, I don't know if our house will be able to sell in just a couple of weeks or not. Second, the house I want was built in 1903 so an inspection could turn up any number of ghosts. I don't want to get my heart completely set and then find out the entire house needs new plumbing, electrical wiring, or that the roof is falling off.

That being said, I'm still excited. Just cautiously so. I'd be lying if I said I didn't already have tentative paint colors picked out for all the rooms and spots for all our furniture.

THE House

Good Times

I just wanted to tell everyone that I'm wearing flip-flops in November. Did you hear that? FLIP-FLOPS. IN NOVEMBER.

Plus, we're going to look at houses tomorrow with our real estate agent. Wahoo!

And They Swam Through The Valley of the Shadow of Death

Last week Jason took Juliana to the pet store to buy some goldfish. My brother had given her his old (and very tiny) fish tank and she had been talking about it nonstop ever since. They came home with three fish named Alex, Alice and Julia (the baby.) Ava especially loved them and would go downstairs where the tank is calling, "Jooooo-ah!" I was going to post photos but as it turns out ALL THREE OF THEM have already died. We went to feed them yesterday and there was Alex lying on the rocks belly up with the other two sniffing his dead fishy body. Let's just say that Juliana was less that thrilled about this development and though I was fully prepared to launch into my little speech about life and death and the universe, all she wanted to know was when we could go back to Petco and get a replacement for poor dead Alex. I scooped the little guy out of there and later that evening Jason changed the water in the tank and scrubbed it out for the remaining to fish.

Not an hour later and Alice and Julia had kicked the bucket too and were stuck to the filter. Such is the short, sad life of a goldfish.

Juliana is fine now but this morning the tears were flowing when we told her the news. I don't think we're going to replace them until we can get a bigger and better fish tank. I feel really bad that we couldn't even keep them alive for a week. I don't want anything to die while under my care-- even a fish. It takes me back the the time when my brother's hamster craweld into the furnace vent that lead to his (very stinky) demise or when my own hamster ate the plastic grocery bag lining in his cage and bloated up like a tomato and met his maker. They were just rodents but even so, it's sad to go out that way.

The Morning After...

What's a great way to come down off that post-Halloween sugar buzz? Spend your morning reading up on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Altio! (Seriously though, can I have Harriet Miers back now?) Merry Christmas liberals! Your lump of coal in judicial form should be arriving in a few short weeks!

Trying to keep my mind on better things. Like this: