It's a Roof!

If you've been following our new house saga, we've been working on reroofing the house for the past four weekends now (although, we did have one weekend off in the middle there). We are about 75% done! We got a lot done this past weekend (I do seem to have very high expectations, and thought we'd get more done than possible, so I ended up stripping too much of the old shingles, which sucks since now we're getting about a week of rain). Here's a photo of my dad working on pulling up some of the old shingles during our first weekend:

 

Here's my dad and brother working off some not-so-safe scaffolding as they work on demo and shingling above the porch / living room:


Here's a photo from this past weekend. The weather kept threatening to rain, but luckily it held off. It actually ended up working in our favor, because when it's sunny, that adds 10-15 degrees of heat on the roof; when it's cloudy, it doesn't feel nearly as hot up there:


Here's my dad up on the safer scaffolding off the back of the house (unfortunately, here he is two stories up, instead of only one). The back of the house is much more treacherous, because of the walk-out basement, meaning we are much higher above the ground when on the back side of the house instead of the front of the house:


Here is the less safe option that my dad used on the safer scaffolding. Our biggest problem is safety, because there is so much height (both to the roof, and to the peak), AND the pitch of the roof is so steep:


Finally, here's a photo of the garage, and Mark and Jessica working on the back side of the garage. I love our new roof color (it's call pewter, which tends to be one of Mark's favorite colors)--it's so sexy!

Watch What You're Microwaving!

 

So I had gotten this very cute tea bag that had a "stem" on the bag. I always heat up my water at work in the microwave to make sure it gets to boiling (necessary for black teas), and this time I threw the tea bag in the mug and microwaved the whole thing. After about 20 seconds I heard the microwave make a sound (not a normal sound, that's for sure!) and the next thing I knew, the leaf/stem was on fire! It turns out the stem had metal inside the wrapping, which then ignited the paper. That scared the crap out of me! It happened soon after I started my new job, and the last thing I needed was to burn down my new work place!

I Fell Asleep Around 8 p.m. on the Millennium: Blast from the Past

This is an embarrassing story. (Who wants to be the lame person who fell asleep and missed the millennium??) 1999-2000 was the academic year I studied abroad in Aberdeen, Scotland. One of my friends was also studying that year at the University of Aberdeen, and my husband (my boyfriend at the time) also was in Aberdeen (he said it wasn’t fair that I should have all the fun to myself, so he took a semester off to spend in Scotland). We had three weeks of vacation time during the holidays, and the three of us decided to spend it by travelling around the UK. We started off by going down to London. London was one of the first “big” cities I actually got to spend time in and explore, and I loved it. We saw some museums, Piccadilly Circus, and Big Ben (given how big buildings are now, it isn’t that impressive), rode the subway a lot (mind the gap!), and of course stayed at a sketchy hostel, where the manager was a non-Brit who seemed to be staying in the UK indefinitely (we encountered this a lot at various hostels we stayed at). Next we rode the train through the Channel Tunnel to France (it was a little nervous to think about all that water overhead, but of course nothing happened). For Christmas, my husband and I went to stay at the Abbey of Citeaux. We’re both Catholic, and we thought it would remind us of home, since we weren’t sharing the holiday with our parents. The monks made their own wine, which was fabulous, and you have to love the French way of eating bread and cheese with every meal (that’s also what was available at the hostel in Paris for breakfast). Then it was back to Paris to visit a friend. Thankfully, our friend could speak French very well (she was spending a study abroad year in France), so with her help we got to see the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and other fun sights. Because the weather was bad (this was the year the Seine overflowed) and because the climate was a little tense (there were military at all train stations and major subway stations with guns), we ended up cutting our trip in France short, and decided to head early to Ireland to celebrate the new year. So, back on the train, we headed back into England, and towards Wales, where we could catch a ferry to Ireland. It was a long train ride (longer than we thought it would be) and we arrived at the end of the tracks in the mid-afternoon of New Year’s Eve. Very tired, we decided that if we were able to grab a ferry, it would be pretty late when we arrived in Ireland, and we’d be too tired to enjoy New Year’s Eve. So, we looked for a hotel, and then set out to find some dinner. The three of us all loved curry, so we went to an Indian restaurant (the British love curry too) and had a huge meal. Then we checked out what was going on in town (there was supposed to be a street party that evening). Since it was still early, around 7pm, we went back to the hotel to relax before heading out for some fun partying! I remember my friend and I were tired and we were on the beds, and my husband turned on the TV and was watching one of the Welsh stations, listening to the language. And before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep! It turns out, we all fell asleep early—I woke up sometime in the middle of the night and turned off the TV which was still playing something in Welsh—and didn’t wake up again until around 8am. The good thing is the world didn’t end, like so many people thought. The part that makes the story funnier is that my husband gets to tell people he slept with two women on the millennium!

When we all got up and had some breakfast, we headed to the ferry and went on to Ireland. We had a great time driving around the ring of Kerry and just enjoying the beauty of Ireland (lots of green vegetation, lots of sheep, and lots of brightly colored houses in small towns). We spent about a week going around Ireland before heading to Dublin to catch a ferry back to Scotland, and then driving back to Aberdeen. All in all it was a really fun trip, despite missing the millennium.