friends' babies

not one but two of my dearest girlfriends had babies this week - what a week!

jami texted on saturday night to say that her water had broken, contractions hadn't really started yet, but they were planning to head to the hospital by 6am sunday unless thing picked up pace that night.  i didn't hear from her or her husband naseem at all on sunday, but finally monday checked facebook and saw that her sister-in-law had posted online late sunday that they'd had their baby boy, kaiden, on sunday.  (i still have yet to see pictures or meet him, but she e-mailed wednesday saying they were a little overwhelmed with the adjustment and would be in touch when they're ready to see people, which is of course fine with me!)

then this morning i got a text from alison that miranda was born early this morning - wow!  from pictures and commentary that her husband matt posted on facebook later today, it looks like she went into labor late last night and things progressed quickly enough that miranda was born by 6:30am.  she is absolutely adorable and has a full head of hair - so excited to meet her this summer!

mulch

one of the big things i'd like to change with our landscaping is the river rock we have going on in our yard.  rock seems to be a big thing for landscaping in colorado, and i kind of get that because it never needs replacing, doesn't require water, and doesn't blow away ... but it's just not pretty.  maybe i say that because i'm a midwesterner used to lush growing things and rich dark dirt, but as much as inanimate ground covering can say cozy and homey, mulch just says it to me and rock doesn't.  rock is fine in moderation, but i don't love it as a covering for the 800 or so square feet (very rough estimate) that it is currently occupying in our front and back yards. and that's not including the side yards!  since our rock is old and desperately in need of removing, washing (to get out all the weed seeds), and replacing the weed barrier under it bare minimum, we're trying to balance wants, price, and, to a certain extent, environmental impact.  research thus far reveals:

• river rock
• cost:  free.  even if we needed more to cover thin spots, there's always some for free on craigslist.
• pros:  only cost is to replace weed barrier underneath.
• cons:  we (i) don't love the look.
• wood mulch
• cost:  about $300.  consumer reports says wood mulch averages $1.50/cubic foot, recommends wood mulch 3" deep, which over 800 square feet would require 200 cubic feet of mulch (according to gardenplace.com).
• pros:  up front inexpensive replacement option.  if used without weed barrier, provides organic material to the garden as it decays, which neither rock nor rubber mulch do.  no need for weed barrier as with rock, but weed barrier can help the decay problem and thus mean less potential upkeep cost.
• cons:  needs a top coat of mulch each year or so to replace decayed/blown away stuff - averaging an extra inch of fresh mulch every year would cost about $100/year.  bugs love decaying wood mulch, and i don't love bugs.  environmental impact depends on source of mulch (ie, cypress mulch is bad, pine mulch from colorado potentially neutral).  if use weed barrier, mulch decay on top of barrier can provide material for weeds to grow on.
• rubber mulch
• cost:  about $1000.  lowes.com has .8cf bags for $8/each, consumer reports recommends 1.5" depth, so 100 cf total would require 125 bags.  we also have a 10% off lowe's coupon that may work with rubber mulch, so that could bring the cost down a bit.
• pros:  doesn't blow away, run off with heavy rains, or fade.  guaranteed for 10-15 years.  made 100% of recycled tires.  no need for weed barrier, and bugs don't like the stuff.  no annual upkeep.
• cons:  expensive out of pocket (although after 7-10 years the rubber mulch would likely pay for itself).

honestly, my gut instinct is to go with the rubber mulch - put in something environmentally friendly and low upkeep and be done with it.  clearly that sort of out-of-pocket outlay of cash requires some input from scott, though, so we'll see what he says!  i dubbed tomorrow a homey day - cleaning, mowing and pulling weeds, finishing laundry, grocery shopping, calling the tree trimmer/landscaper for an estimate and the masonry guy to set a date to fix our chimney, and maybe making a lowe's trip to get the water rebate toilets (and maybe mulch, and maybe light fixtures to add on the back of the house).  here's to productivity and trying not to sleep in too terribly late.

green thumb in training

i planted my little herb planter garden last night!  i planted from plants this year - maybe next year i'll brave seeds, depending on how this year's expedition goes.  we now have cilantro, sage, sweet basil, onion chives, and rosemary growing in a lovely green planter.  it's a little more crowded than i thought it would be, so i may have to separate them at some point.  again, we'll see.  i'm so excited for a summer full of tasty cooking, though!  especially the basil and rosemary - yum.  i saw an article a few months ago suggesting that you cut long sections of rosemary, strip the herby leaves, and use the wood as skewers for kabobs.  i'm not sure my rosemary will get big enough for that this year (it's a perennial, so hopefully i won't kill it this season), but how lovely does that sound??

when our friends jordan and miranda moved to minnesota, they gave us their railing-mount plastic planter.  i dumped out the soil last night, cleaned it up, and am spray painting it the same cappucino color as our shutters, with plans to mount it on the iron railing in front of our front door with some pretty flowers in it!  i have a notoriously brown thumb, so i'm not sure how my forays into gardening will go, but i'm mildly optimistic.  i also have plans to start a mini garden in a bare patch in our lawn next to the back patio - cherry tomatoes and zucchini are currently what i'm planning, but i may branch out.

oh, after pictures of the roof project are finally posted on facebook!  (as well as an early look at my gardening attempts.)

overview

ooh la la, a non-bargain-hunting post!  as i find the boundaries provided by numbering things comforting, i'll do list form (also to keep my verbose narrative in check):

1. we officially have our camping reservation for yellowstone in august!  plus, i spent the morning reading my frommer's yellowstone guide, and i'm getting steadily more excited.  there's just so much to see and do, i'm starting to wish we'd planned more than three to three and a half days there.  our campground is near the grand canyon of the yellowstone, and near the upper and lower falls, which are two of the things that i'd most hoped to see.  it's going to be challenging to balance getting out and hiking and experiencing the nature of the park with driving and wanting to see everything because it's all so cool and beautiful.
2. whoops, went onto facebook to find a link and got totally distracted!  our friends zach and casey, who were our first friends in denver, are moving to africa to work with friends at the recreation project.  their website explains it better, but basically uganda has tons of kids (and adults) really emotionally scarred from the history of war in their country and from being forced into fighting, so they're building a ropes course and sports rec leagues as a sort of recreational therapy, to help the kids channel their aggression and competition and passion into constructive things, and help build leadership.  we went to a fundraising bowling night last night to see them before they leave.  (we haven't seen them as a couple in ages, and casey and i haven't hung out since we both left our first apartment complex, but scott and zach still play poker, watch football, and do the occasional sports team together.)
3. in celebration of being alone in the office today, i had a diet coke with lunch (which i just finished drinking now, four hours later - i'm a slow drinker), and i've totally got the post-caffeine jitters.  i hate that feeling.
4. scott and i pulled our first weeds of the season yesterday.  we do have some more to do, but thankfully it's way less bad than last year - i'm hoping that if we start early, we can keep it under control and not have a thistle forest in our sideyard by mid-june.  we're also planning to call our tree trimmer who also does general landscaping work to get a bid on taking out some dead aspens and pulling out one of our dead-bush-and-dirty-river-rock areas so that we can start making our yard look pretty.  (it desparately needs new weed barrier and bushes, and we're debating whether to clean up the river rock or switch it out with mulch - either the traditional wood stuff or the rubber stuff.)  we're undecided how much to do ourselves vs hiring someone else to do ... it's just so much easier to write a check to someone else, but also obviously more costly.  also, we're excited to start re-planting trees this year!
5. tonight is my last night of tutoring gerardo.  (actually, not tutoring - it's the end of year celebration/dinner.)  he's ending 5th grade, which means that next year he starts middle school.  whiz kids is thinking of opening up a middle school tutoring site in the area since there are so many 5th graders moving up, but i'm not sure if he'll continue with it next year.  we shall see - it could be my last night with him ever, or i could get three more years!  (when i asked him about it last week, he said that he wants to not do it so that i can stay with the elementary school kids and tutor his little brother, who'll be in first grade next year.  how sweet is that??)

heart amazon

i love amazon!  i just ordered an svga cable to hook my computer up to the tv to do things like watch hulu.com on tv for $6.99 including shipping, an audio cable also for computer to tv usage for $6 with free shipping, a wirless rain sensor for $45 with free shipping that will be eligible for full rebate from our water company, and two filters for our vacuum for $8.15 each with free shipping.

for comparison, bestbuy.com listed a comprable length svga cable for $45, had a shorter audio cable for $9, and the reason that i haven't changed my vacuum filter in close to two years is that the filters at target/walmart cost $15-20 each which made me cranky.  that's a savings of approximately $55 total!

now, off to watch lost.  we decided that we're doing nothing but laundry and lounging today.  so far, we're on target!  (slept in til 10am - love it.)

slightly less cheap phone service

our magic jack is back in working order, by the way.  we started using it at the beginning of january, i think, and at the end of march i noticed that the little blue power light in the magic jack that was flickering.  hmm.  i found that if i wiggled it down it would power off, or wiggled up the power would stay on.  i tried using electrical tape to hold in the "on" position, but finally it just refused to power on any more.  right, i wasn't thrilled.  scott contacted customer service and ordered us a new one ($20 since the old one had a physical defect), and we're back in business.  we had kept the old magic jack plugged straight into my computer, but it's like 2.5 inches long x 1.5 inches wide, and i think it got bumped around on my laptop often enough that the usb connection broke.  so, learning from our mistake, we got a 10 foot usb extension cord and now have the magic jack safely extensioned away and taped into place on top of the little power cord box for my laptop.  so far so good, and if you ever decide to give magic jack a whirl and use a laptop as your primary home computer, i highly recommend the usb extension cord route.

2012

scott and i really like watching movies.  as such, redbox is approximately the greatest thing since sliced bread to us, and we rejoiced when one came to the grocery store across the street from us.  anyway, on easter weekend scott came home with the movie 2012, and it was awesome - wonderfully cheesy action, so much unintentional comedy, and somehow predictable yet suspenseful at the same time.  if you're not familiar, the premise of the movie is that the earth's core heats up which makes the plates of the earth shift, which in turn leads to crazy huge earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and megatsunamis, wiping out everyone on earth except a few hundred thousand world leaders and super-wealthy people who can afford tickets on huge arks.  oh, john cusack and his family survive, though, because they manage to get their car/rv/plane out at precisely the right moment - specifically about two inches ahead of the giant chasm opening up in the earth, wheels spinning wildly on the crumbling pavement, but then speeding away ahead of the death crack in the nick of time.  their plane runs out of gas in china rather than the pacific because of the earth's crazy land shifting, and then mere moments later they happen upon a tibetan monk with a pickup truck who happens to have a brother who can sneak them onto one of the arks - something that apparently no other ark workers considered!

when it all comes down, the movie is totally absurd and laughably wonderful - BUT, because we watched it in the midst of this year of heightened awareness of earthquakes, i just can't stop thinking about it!  everytime another major earthquake is reported on the news (and i think there have been six in the week and a half since then), i find myself wondering if this amount of earthquake activity is normal.  when i heard the news of iceland's volcanic eruption and that the subsequent ash cloud is prevent air travel across the uk and europe, i a) wonder how many active volcanoes there are and if they're related to the earthquakes at all, and b) laugh because in the movie they fly their plane through tons of volcanic ash with no problems.  i saw an article this morning about earthquake swarms in yellowstone and found myself pondering the state of the yellowstone caldera, and specifically wondering what the odds are that it would erupt when we're up there this summer.  silly, i know, but still things my brain hangs on to.  no, i am actually concerned about any of it, just something i find myself pondering occasionally.  besides, as the book of matthew says, no one can know the time or day of the end times.
____

vaguely related, we're planning a trip to yellowstone for august, and i'm excited!  i have a copy of the 2010 frommer's yellowstone/tetons guide on hold at the library for poring over this weekend.  we're doing the trip with mike, maura, and kinley, but i'm hopeful that it will work out with both of our schedules and with camping availability to do the first week of august to coincide with our 5 year wedding anniversary.  (5 years!)  if so, we were talking about maybe stopping in jackson, wyoming (an hour or so south of yellowstone, through grand teton national park) to enjoy the view of the teton mountain range, explore and stay the night at an inn somewhere in the valley.  fun, right?

is droughtish a word?

my blog has gotten boring and neglected and for that i apologize.  i think its writer needs a mental revamping.

in the meantime, while i miss hardwood deciduous trees and the bright greenness of spring and early summer in the midwest, can i just say that there are some pretty huge benefits to living in a slightly-droughtish region?  specifically: water rebates.  awesome!  $150 for an high efficiency washing machine, which we took advantage of; $125/ea for 1.28 gpf (gallons per flush) toilets (the general standard since the late 90's is 1.6 gpf, and from the 80s to that point was 3.5 gpf ... before that i think it was 5, 6, 7 gpf depending on the decade), $50 for a wireless rain sensor for a sprinkler system.  amazon.com happens to have a toro wireless rain sensor for $45, so we'll get it for free after our rebate, and lowe's has qualifying toilets for as little as $4 over the rebate price!  yes, i made a spreadsheet, why do you ask?

two of our toilets have had some running issues (which i discovered via our water bill, when i noticed that we were using about 3-4k more gallons of water per month more than we had been last year this time), so scott took approximately 8 trips to home depot, lowe's, and ace, and spent three afternoons trying to fix the toilets.  one seemed like it was fixed only to start running again as soon as we flushed it, and hasn't stopped since, and the other did well for a week or so before we noticed it.  consumer reports suggests that 1.6 gpf toilets are worth fixing rather than replacing, whereas older 3.5+ gpf toilets should just be replaced ... but if we can get a whole new toilet for $4, why not just replace them both?  (one of the toilets is a 3.5, the other is a 1.6.)  my current pick is actually for a toilet that's $35 over the rebate cost as its flushing is rated better, but still, two new toilets for $70 is not too shabby - we'll see what scott says.  in the month since we turned off the running toilets, our water bill went down by 4k gallons, which saved us about $10, by the way.

in other news, some friends posted this link on facebook earlier today that made me laugh because i am a grammar nerd (even though i never capitalize my blog).  the rest of the site also made me laugh, but has some language going on, so if you're sensitive to that stuff, you might just stick with the alot post.

*** google tells me that "semiarid" is the word for which i'm looking, which is too bad as droughtish is a cool word.  it also informs me that colorado is in an overall wet period currently, with the last real dry spell being in '00-'03.  duly noted.

brown rice

so i was just looking on cooking light's website for recipes to make brown rice fun - i have a bunch of it in my pantry because i was ambitiously healthy mood like a year ago and bought a bunch, but it turns out brown rice just isn't as tasty as white rice and scott isn't a fan.  anyway, i have a bag or two to use up, so i turn to the web for help, and what does the web give me?  brown rice and mushroom pancakes.  um, what?  it could turn out to be really good ... but i doubt it.  plus i think scott would be out the door for taco bell in two seconds flat if i tried to make that for dinner!