Winding down

It's really weird in the high school when the school year begins to die down. I never experienced this from the teacher end because both of my student teaching sessions were first semester. It's a little harder for the students to stay indoors with the weather being so nice and so they get more talkative and impatient. Also the seniors have their last day tomorrow, and if it was anything like senior skip day, the halls are quieter and the classes are smaller. Some teachers have AP classes and their classes are virtually empty.

Matt and I got a ton of work done over the long weekend. Our washer/dryer came today too so I can have clean clothes again! After we put away all the boxes/stuff (which could take another month), I think we need to thouroughly clean the house again from all of the dust and dirt that was tracked in with our stuff.

I finished a book by Jodi Picoult called "My Sister's Keeper." It's pretty good and I am going to start reading her other books. Her books are all on controversial topics that don't get brought up a lot. For instance, in "My Sister's Keeper," a family has a daughter suffering from leukemia and decide to have a "designer baby" that genetically matches the first daughter's bone marrow. When the second daughter grows up, she basically wants to be mediacally emancipated so she doesn't have to be a donor anymore, even if it means her sister may die.

From Heather's blog:

Your Love Life is Like The Princess Bride

"Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind." For you, love is like a fairy tale - albeit a fairly twisted one. You believe romance is all about loyalty, fate, and a good big of goofy fun. Your love style: Idealistic yet quirky Your Hollywood Ending Will Be: Perfectly romantic

What Movie Is Your Love Life Like?

I had to post this result because Matt loves this movie, but I think it's HORRIBLE.

We have arrived! We're Royal Oakies now!

We have been at our house since Saturday. We still have boxes and junk all over the place, but I expect this to be the case for a little while. We probably need to go to our apartment once or twice more for the last few things and then turn in our keys!
Moving is quite an experience. Sure I've moved from dorm to sublet to apt, etc. But it's nothing like owning a house. There are a lot of things to take care of. For instance, we found out our grass can't be more than 6 inches high and we are not allowed to have any weeds in our lawn as of June 1 or we get fined. We also are finding out how to take care of hardwood floors (we learned the hard way that we can't slide furniture anymore!). And now we need to buy a washer/dryer but I have no idea if we have a gas line or if we need to buy electric!
Back to the lawn thing, I had someone come over to give me a free estimate, and he found out we have poison ivy growing all over our garage and up our tree. I'm really glad Matt and I never decided to touch these things since they are right in our driveway. It made me think of that poem "three leaves let it be, berries of white, run in fright" that alerts you about poison ivy. Yep, did not make that connection!
Besides moving, we did try a restaurant/martini bar around here. It's called Amici's Pizza and the separate bar area is called the Living Room. They have a ton of martinis, but I wasn't a huge fan, despite several people telling me they were really good. They were $7.75 each and watered down. I do have to say that the setup was cute. There is an outdoor section with fountains and greenery and they put up lamps so there aren't any bugs! But the best overall martinis I've had have been Fridays (yeah, as in TGI), Starlight Lounge (in Lincoln) and Goodnite Gracie's in Royal Oak.

Mother's Day in Ann Arbor

We took some more things to the house on Friday. I think we are trying to move everything except the furniture and we'll have movers do the heavy lifting. On Saturday, we went to Jennifer's wedding. The reception was at Penna's and I thought the place was decorated beautifully! I took a few pictures; here is Jennifer and Omar right before they cut the cake:


On Sunday we celebrated Mother's Day with both mothers. First we spent the morning with my family at Gandy Dancer. We had a yummy brunch, although I feel there wasn't as much food as there used to be. Also, the omelets are 2 egg omelets instead of 3! not cool. My cousin and his family are visiting from India so it was at least nice to be able to spend some time with them: Here is all of us after brunch (minus my dad who is taking the picture):


Afterwards we visited Matt's family. We ordered some Indian take-out and hung out at the house with them. The best thing about the weekend was getting to sleep early on Sunday night. I feel I am still sleep deprived so I'm going to try to get to bed early tonight as well. We'll see how that goes...

I am still sick. boo.

After my last post, I proceeded to get sicker. Matt and I wanted to try Amici's Pizza on Sat night. I felt so horrible that we decided to stay in. I'm getting better, but I think I may have to take tomorrow off. I'm covering a math teacher on Wed, Thurs and Friday and have an interview on Friday so I really should get back to 100% for the days to come. We did manage to catch Spiderman 3 on Sunday. The movie was good except for the fact that everybody was a crybaby. Do people cry that many times a day and in public??

Merry Maids came in to clean our house today. When I called to confirm that they came, and asked how much they charged me, they totally gave me a number that was higher than the quoted price. I had to talk to them for a little while so they could see it my way. :) I felt bad because they had to send an extra person to our house because it was so dusty/dirty from being unoccupied for a year. It was nice of them to do that, but I didn't ask them to and was not willing to pay the extra charge.

Even though I may take tomorrow off, I still have a full day. I need to meet the carpet company at our house in the morning. They have to take pictures of our screen door because we're asking them to fix it after they broke it trying to get the carpet in and out. I need to do some grocery shopping, run some errands, and make sure my portfolio looks like perfection in time for my interview!

House News

Our house is coming along! We had carpet installed on Thursday. It looks much better than the cheap carpet that was there beforehand. Although we think the installers busted our screen door so I'm going to have to call and see if they can fix that. I took pictures of our new carpet to post, but the pictures look so generic. You can't tell the real color or texture and it honestly could be the carpet that we had before.

We hadn't celebrated the acquistion of our house yet, so we went to Melting Pot Thursday night. We got cheese fondue, salads, and then chocolate fondue. Sooo good!

My allergies are out of whack today. It's been bothering me off and on lately and I think a great deal has to do with how dusty our house is. After an hour in the house and I'm already wheezy. After a few weeks of that and you have an allergy attack waiting to happen, which is what happened to me last night/all of today. But that doesn't mean I stop myself from going to the house. We're still devoting our weekends to getting it move-in ready. I'm so mean to myself and my lungs.

On the bright side, one of the things we finished today was having our air ducts cleaned. That should really reduce the amount of allergens in the house. We have to buy an air filter for our furnace and we're having MerryMaids scrub the entire house on Monday. After all that, I better not be sneezing from the dust!

Tomorrow we're going back to the house to mow the lawn. I have no idea how to operate the lawn mower that the previous residents left us. I know there's something about filling it with gas and pulling a crank. Hopefully Matt knows how it's done. Our lawn is a little embarassing. A month ago it was short and dead from winter. Now it's like a jungle, by far the longest grass around, of course complete with dandelions.

After Monday, we're going to line up a painter and then MOVING VANS!!! woo hoo! I have no idea where we're going to get boxes. I can't imagine buying boxes and then throwing them out the next day. I asked for boxes while we were at Home Depot and the lady said that they smash boxes as soon as they get them. And then I asked if she knew where the distribution center was that gave them the boxes and she said "no". Very helpful.