emerald dreams.

it was more than a week ago when i told you about how we ripped out the vines and junky vegetation in our backyard. unfortunately, we didn't have very many dry days in between, and i had to travel [yet again] for work. when i finally had time to put down seed, irene was on her way. so finally, on monday, i pulled out the rake to get rid of the debris, and here's what i had...

this was two weeks after steve initially cleared the plot. you can see how quickly the bad vegetation is returning. thankfully, even though it's back, it wasn't quite at mutant level, so i pulled out the pruning shears and chopped back all those little suckers.

now i know some of you are probably thinking, "you need to pull out the root system, or they're going to constantly come back." and you're totally right. but our problem is that because of the massive sumac tree and the massive ivy vine, our whole back yard is a tangle of big thick roots. if we were going to get rid of all the quickly returning vegetation, we would need to cut down the big tree and vine, and rip out the main stump as well as all the little stumps all over the back yard.

and since we may only be here a year (or two), and we don't own this place, i'm just not willing to put in that kind of effort. plus, who knows if our landlord would even let us??

so i cut back everything i could, and ripped out roots where i was able. and this is what i planned to put down...

it's really meant for people who have big yards and they've got an empty spot here or there that they want to fill. i opted to go this route because

1. our yard is so small, it's practically the size of some people' empty spots.
2. it was economical--only $9.99 for this bag that says it will cover 100 sq ft
3. it was all-in-one. this concoction has seed, fertilizer, and mulch all mixed in, so i don't have to worry about getting fertilizer too, or something to keep the seeds from blowing/washing away on me.

i had bought one bag originally, but grabbed a second when i saw it on clearance at target. here's what the stuff actually looks like...

it has the consistency of insulation or cotton candy (minus the itchy or the sticky). and the "mulch" is small bits of biodegradable paper that have been mixed in with the seed and the powered fertilizers. the picture on the box shows gloved hands spreading the stuff, but i went with my bare hands. i will let you know that the powder does waft in the breeze, the more you pull it apart, and when i blew my nose later that night, i def had some up there.

this is how far one bag got me...

which makes me glad i'd gotten the second bag. i had used a heavy hand, and also sprinkled it all up into the tree's roots, so i'm sure that if i'd needed to make one bag work, i could have.

all those big brown nobby things you see?? they're all the small roots popping up, that have been repeatedly chopped back.

so now i water twice a day and hopefully i'll have a lawn in 7 - 14 days. i'll keep you posted. :)

ps gold stars to anyone who knows what this title references. ;-)

first day of school.

even though i have hipster neighbors, and i have high hopes of becoming bffs with them [one of them works on the community garden and i'm *super* stoked about jumping on that bandwagon], i don't get the whole hipster thing. it's like i've officially become old and passe because i've become that older person ... you know, the one who needs everything spelled out to them. and then still doesn't get it.

[sample quote from me: so they do things to be ironic?? but do they actually like those things?? oh, they like them ironically?? what does that even mean?? and why not just like something if you like it??]

so this week, when the bloggess posted about stocking, which was the newest hipster trend at approximately 11:30p on august 28th, i felt like i kinda got that. though why you would just imitate a photo for no reason other than irony is still beyond me.

however, imitating a photo for comedy, that i get. and after perusing pinterest the last few weeks, i decided that it would be hysterical to make steve a sign and take a picture of him on the first day of "school." [does that make me a hipster?? maybe instead of "stocking," it can be called "pin-mitating." yeah, maybe not. i'm not cool at all. so this is what this feels like.]

so i pinned like a fiend to get ideas, and here's what we came up with :)

sorry that you can't really read the sign and the photos are a bit blurry--i'm lucky he even agreed to do this, but the one condition was that we do it fast, so there wasn't a lot of time to adjust settings/zoom for sign readability.

and the last one is my personal favorite :) the inspiration photo can be found here. it's artistic in a hilarious kind of way. [is the child in the witness protection program?? have chickenpox?? camera shy??]

all quiet on the western front.

hi folks.

i shared on friday that we had prepared for the worst. (my husband was in new orleans right after katrina. the reality of the nightmare that was happening on the ground was something that didn't really make the media. and because he grew up on the gulf, i trust him when it comes to hurricanes. he's weathered a lot of them.)

we had a safe place to go to that was on high ground, and plenty of water and peanut butter. but in reality the scariest thing for us is that we may not have had insurance.

i know. i ought to know better.

let me first say that we do have a renter's insurance policy--it's just from tucson. and with moving cross country, and traveling all over for work the past few weeks, we hadn't gotten around to transferring our policy. steve was finally able to get them on the phone on friday, and as it turns out, our company isn't licensed in maryland [jackwagons!! didn't they know that we would need their services?? geez!!], so we couldn't just transfer our policy and would need to find a completely new insurance company. like anyone would be willing to add us 12 hours before a hurricane. yeah, no.

flooding was our main concern (we're only 2 miles from water, and probably less than 15 ft above sea level), especially in our basement, where our washer and dryer live, and are probably our most expensive possession that had to stay behind (not counting electronics).

so we opted to stack them, and put them up on those little feet that you can put under your bed to raise it up. this bought us 5 inches for the washer, and about 3 ft for the dryer. also, steve and i did this ourselves. at 6 am. on saturday morning. i am a beast.

once the house was hurricane ready (and our insurance-less fingers were crossed), we headed for high ground and friends. and breakfast.

this was the amazing goodness i was able to gobble up before the first big winds of irene started to make us nervous and we dashed back to the house.

thankfully, where we stayed, the winds only took down trees in the backyard, so our car was safe, as were we. we lost power there, but once things began to calm down in the morning, we headed back into the city, to assess the damage.

and i cannot convey to you how overwhelmingly thankful i was to God that our place was fine!! no broken windows. no big branches down. only an itty bitty puddle in the basement--and not even close to our washer/dryer.

and most amazingly ... we never lost power!!

my heart was overwhelmed with gratitude because truthfully--we could have lost it all, and had no insurance to get it back. and i have all my office electronics in my apt!! expensive stuff that i would need to replace!! ugh!!

the reason we made out so well was the way irene came over the chesapeake bay (the body of water baltimore sits on)--her rotation fell so that the winds pushed a lot of water out of the bay, as opposed to pushing a big storm surge up the bay. so instead of surge plus tremendous rainfall, we only had rainfall, and it could run off into the bay.

so so so so thankful!! :)

but also still thinking of those who do now have power, and have massive floods.

c'mon irene.

well, it's the proverbial calm before the storm. steve & i have been out gathering supplies (15 gallons of water, 2 bags of ice, am/fm battery powered radio, nonperishables, cash, etc).

this is my first hurricane. having lived in upstate ny, hurricanes have usually fizzled out to tropical storms or depressions by the time they get to our latitude/longitude. and then i lived in the freaking desert. so yeah, this my first real experience with these crazy beasts. and i was totes magotes [how much do you hate me for saying that??] nervous. like anxiety, shakey on the inside, kinda want to make myself vomit i feel so out of control nervous.

but right now i'm feeling a little better. i'm just glad that steve's weathered a few hurricanes, growing up in southern louisiana, so he knows what's up. he's also an eagle scout, and a marine. how much more prepared can one dude be?? and unfortantely, today is also his bday. poor guy. all we've done is run around and try to prepare.

and we're not staying in the city ... we have friends who live in the 'burbs, and we'll be bunking with them, so if there's a bad storm surge and flooding, we're on higher ground.

the move: the numbers.

if you're a data dork like myself, then you might be curious about some data related to our crazy cross-country move. if you're not a numbers / data person, you may want to skip this post, or bookmark it in the event that you too, have to move cross-country, and need to know some deets to plan it. initially, i had this as one long post including mileage, hours, and money. it was too long. so i'm breaking it out into two more bite-sized portions. this post deals with the non-monetary numbers ... mileage and hours.

so i told you that we did the trip in two pieces, right? part i was  tucson to southern louisiana. here's a pic of the route we took:

google maps tells me that this route was 1,378 miles. since it's mostly just i-10, and we didn't have to turn around because we lost something out of the open trunk [if you don't know what i'm talking about, read the move: part i], i'm going to go ahead and use the google map as a good estimate. after all, getting off the interstate to hit a gas station probably only adds a few tenths of a mile here or there.

the time estimate given by google maps is 23 hours and 2 minutes. we left at about 2:45p PT from tucson on saturday and pulled in at steve's parents' house around 7p CT on sunday. [i didn't mark the exact time because i was ready to get out of that truck, can you find it in your heart to forgive me for being so thoughtless??] so if i do the math, accounting for timezones and all, that's about 26 hours and 15 minutes of travel time. and that jives pretty well with google's estimate, because when steve and i drive, we stop to get out and eat at a sit-down restaurant for each meal. so if you add about 3 hours to the google estimate (1 hour for each of the 3 meals--dinner, breakfast, & lunch), and you also add a dash of time for the craziness in the middle of the night in el paso, then we made pretty freaking good time.

part ii was SoLA to bmore.

google maps gives this as 1,116 miles. and again, we were able to drive straight through, didn't have to take any real detours, so i'm going to go ahead and claim that :)

as for time, google gives an estimate of 18 hours, 5 minutes. we left SoLA around 7:30p CT [we were supposed to leave earlier, but i had a conference call that ran long ... again with the being crazy and trying to work while moving cross country], and we arrived in baltimore at i'm not sure what time. [sorry peeps, at that point i was brain-dead and butt-numb.] but i do know that it was probably between 4 and 5p ET. we hit more construction and more traffic on part ii of the trek. so part ii was between 20.5 and 22 hours of total travel time. again, we added 3 hours for meal stops, so it was pretty right on, when you consider slow downs for construction and traffic.

you might have noticed that both legs of our journey began afternoon / evening. i like to try and plan our long road trips this way because you can cover ground really efficiently overnight. and steve is a night owl and i'm a morning person, so by our powers combined, we truck through the night. literally. and just when i think i'm so tired, i might drive off the road, the sun comes up, we stop for breakfast, and get out of the truck for an hour. and by the time i'm back in the truck, it's like my body forgot that it didn't sleep the night before, and i'm ready to keep on keepin on.

so the total trip was 2,494 miles long. [which is freakishly close to what the odometer clocked us at--2,501.4.]

and the total travel time was between 46 hours 45 minutes and 48 hours 15 minutes.

when i step back and think about the fact that steve and i spent two full days in a small truck cabin, driving everything we own across the country, it's not surprising it took me a few weeks to mentally recuperate before blogging about it :)

where i was: an earthquake in bmore.

anyone else feel that??

[souce: USA Today.]

here's what happened to me...

i'm sitting in our livingroom, not doing work, but instead, writing blog posts, pinning crap on pinterest, and just generally enjoying the day.

all of a sudden, i hear thudding noises above me, sounding like someone might be walking on our roof. i think to myself, oh great--they're doing work up there and didn't tell me.

then the thudding gets louder, and even sounds like someone jumping up and down. and like maybe it's in the upstairs, not on the roof.

i start to freak out a little, thinking that maybe someone has broken into our home via the upstairs window with the a/c unit. i walk to the stairs and the thudding stops. there's no one up there. i can sense that. [btw, yes, i'm freaky and have esp that sense other people's auras or whatever. just trust me on this.]

convinced that there are people on the roof doing some kind of work, i go outside to look up. i see nothing.

i walk through our home to the front porch, to look for a work truck or a ladder.

there are people on a stoop down the block, and a guy on his stoop across the street. people are on the street corner. i don't think twice because, well, i live in an urban setting--peeps be chillen outdoors. then a dude with long dreadlocks from the street shouts up to us, "didja'll feel that?? earthquake."

i was like, "weird. i didn't know that baltimore got earthquakes." but after the news media caught up with twitter and real life, i realized that this was a pretty rare occurrence.

super duper glad that no one i know was hurt. also super duper glad i don't live in cali.

seriously.

the urban jungle.

so we're settling in to baltimore. and i feel like so muchhas happened in the past few weeks, and there are quite a few half-formed blog posts in my head that need to make it onto the actual blog, via my fingertips. and i'm also working on one last moving post, that gives a bunch of data (i.e. cost break down, miles, etc), but i need to dig up a few receipts first :) but for today, i'm going to skip ahead of all of that and share with you a work in progress that steve and i have. 

one of the things that i really like about our new place is that we have a back yard. it may be itty bitty, but it's ours. our own little slice of the land that we can set up a grill on, or put plastic chairs on, or even fill a kiddie pool on. [the kiddie pool was looking like a serious option when we unloaded the truck in 106 degree weather!]

but this is what it looked like...

the backyard had been neglected and overrun by weeds and little sapplings of junky trees (like sumac). it was a veritable jungle. and it was also a bit disappointing that the landlords hadn't even really attempted to keep things in normal range. here's the view from the back fence/sidewalk...

there's something so romantic and lovely about ivy and vines. i'm not going to lie--i kinda really like that part. but truth be told, these vines has literally taken over the whole space.

unfortunately, it wasn't all ivy, though. here are a few foliage shots to show you what we were up against:

a little sumac, some vines, and something that looks either like poision ivy or pachysandra--i couldn't decide.

i took this photo of my calf to give you an idea of how high these vines were growing off the ground...

that's like a good 6 - 8 inches of nasty, gnarled weedy vines and trees that needed to come out if my dream of a kiddie pool was ever to be realized.

so enough with the before pictures. here's what happened... i got all excited about all the awesome things we could potentially do with our lovely new spot of earth, if only we could rid ourselves of the bramble. so steve and i went to our local ace hardware [which by the way, is AWESOME and located in an old, brick post office--how cool is that??] and got some tools. we'd never had a plot of land before, regardless of size, so this project took a little up front investment of garden gloves (i was nervous about poision sumac or poison ivy), a trowel, and a spade.

i got back to our little place and started working on a patch, working hard to dig up the roots as much as possible, knowing that if we had any hope of a grassy space, we needed to delay the reappearance of these weeds/vines/trees as long as possible.

well, after about 15 minutes, i'd cleared about 2 square feet, and uncovered all the creepy crawly things that like to live under the vegetation. i got totally creeped out and took a break. meanwhile, steve went to town and started ripping up junk vegetation like it was his job.

my husband is a beast, is he not?? also, this took him a long time. and it rained. but he didn't stop. at one point, we decided that it would be helpful for me to go and buy pruning shears because after awhile, it was clear that some of these roots were just enmeshed with the root system of the big tree. plus, we figured that if we cleared everything from the surface and we left it bare awhile, we would see what popped back up quickly and just rip out the root systems of those buggers. my husband--he's brilliant. but i guess johns hopkins gets the credit for figuring that out first.

my hero!! :)

also, as we [and by we i mean steve] cleared, we found the most random things in the yard. mostly it was just trash. like plastic bags or milk container tops. a ham bone. a whistle. here's a pic of the trash...

gross, right?

so here's what the back yard looked like after steve toiled away at the curse-infested earth...

pretty incredible that my husband was so willing to rip all that out!! it looks so so so good!! not a completely blank slate, but definitely a canvas i can work with. i'll just think of myself as repurposing the back yard. you know, taking something that was a petri dish for weeds and junk vegeation, and making it useful for nice vegetation. like grass.

and of course, it rained cats and dogs soon after steve finished. here's when we almost called noah.

and then the sun came out and dried up all the rain...

steve's little jalepeno plant is holding the fort down for the good vegetation!! :)


we've been away, living the exciting lives we lead [that was tongue in cheek in case you couldn't tell--more on our exciting life later], but all this ripping out happened last weekend and i'm hoping to re-evaluate the weed situation in the next couple of days and get the seed down asap!

i'll keep you posted on our progress!! :)

yardsale signs.

it's so funny being back on the east coast. there are so many little things that are so different in the west.

one of the things that i thought was funniest when i first moved to tucson was how people would put up signs for yardsales and lost pets. let me first say that where i grew up, we made fliers and posters and stapled them to trees and telephone posts along the side of the road. if you were really rich, you might put a stake in the ground and tie your sign to that.

here's how they do it in tucson:

it's a cardboard box. and it says whatever you need it to say, and you just put rocks in it and leave it out, by the side of the road, or in this case, in the middle of the road, on the median.

it's kinda crazy, but it's kinda great too. :)

the move: part ii.

well since yesterday had a bit of an undertow as far as blog posts go, i'm going to recap the rest of our move via photos from my iphone. photographer, i am not. which is why i love me some instagram :)

when we last left our story, steve and i made it pseudo-safely to southern louisiana to spend a few days with his fam. this is what i think of when i think of that area...

while we were there we spent time with steve's family and even saw the dude from swamp people when we were out to eat one night in hammond. here's the quick pic i took from our table. [i felt a little bad snapping it, but i figured that in the grand scheme of things, maybe snapping a crappy photo from across the restaurant is better than running up and asking for a photo when bruce is out with his family. celebrities, even swamp people celebrities, have their rights.]

...and right along with the swamp and the swamp people, we had some delicious swamp food :)

and while i didn't get the frog legs this time, i have had a bite or two in the past when steve orders them. i've also had fried alligator. i'm the envy of 12 year old boys everywhere.

while in lousianna, we also cleared some extra space in the back of the penske, because my mother in law gave us a chest of drawers [which i'm sure you'll see again soon, as it's straight out of 1976 and needs a serious makeover], and steve's aunt gave us a big upholstered chair that she never uses that is in brand new condition [which i'm sure you'll also see as its fabric is kinda begging for a slip cover]. so two quality pieces of furniture, and fodder for my creative side. score! :)

moving stuff around in the truck was fun--since i'm the lightest of me, steve, and his brother, i climbed on all our stuff to rearrange it, and pile things higher in the back. i was literally like a spider monkey. it was a lot like getting to be a kid again and climbing on stuff you know you're probably not supposed to, but climb on it anyway :)

this is how much space we created in the truck. i seriously should quit my day job and become a mover/trucker.

after a few days in SoLA, it was time to hit the road again. we even saw our twin:

though that truck is yellow [ours was white], and it's towing a lexus on a trailer [not a hyundai on a dolly]. maybe that's the truck i'll drive next time we move. {wink, wink}

we stopped at cracker barrel something like 3 or 4 times. initially it was because they serve breakfast all day (giddy-up!), and because they're pretty cheap as far as table-service restaurants go. and later we stopped there just because it was one of the better options as we wound our way through the appalachians.

and of course, the truck ran on gasoline, i ran on dunkin.

and i wore my pink cowgirl hat. because that's what i do when i'm truckin' cross country. it just makes sense. right?

and we took turns driving. the way it went was i'd drive something like 6 or 7 hours. then we'd trade and steve would do 6 or 7 hours. then we'd trade and i'd do something like 3 or 4 hours. then we'd trade and steve would do 3 or 4 hours. in the end, it was pretty even stevens as far as the time/miles division is concerned. 

and eventually, we saw this sign, welcoming us to maryland.

after driving for about 25 hours, we got to the baltimore area around 4p and to our hotel that we had planned to stay in that night. [of course it was a hilton. why are you even asking?? but as an FYI, it wasn't the nicest hilton i've ever stayed in. so if you have a chance to stay in the pikesville hilton, don't base all hiltons off of it, ok??] it was really nice to just be able to collapse into a bed that was fresh and clean, and to be able to just walk downstairs and have a restaurant there where we could eat. i was also in the middle of working with a bunch of folks who were putting together a big proposal, so the wifi was a God-send, and allowed me to catch up with the work and send out a bunch of emails that needed to be sent. [right. because only crazy people try to move across the country and work at the same time.]

the move: part i.

well, it's time to talk about the move. after all my random comments / complaints, here's the full story. or at least part one of the full story.

we decided that since we were driving cross country again, we should stop in southern louisiana, to see steve's family. this pretty much broke our trip into halves. after we'd completely emptied out the apt, and done the final walk-through with the people from the complex, we walked to the truck, to head out. i turned back for one last look.

and looked to the trip ahead. it's a real sobering reality to think that everything i own ... and pretty much my whole life fits into the penske truck, and the photo frame below.

here's the inside view of the truck...

remember those wrapped boxes?? well, they made it into the truck :) this photo also captures my truck-packing philosophy ... toilet paper is the last thing in, and the first thing out :) i'm not usually a bathroom humor kind of gal, but i'm a very practical kind of gal :)

we made it to el paso, tx, before we had to stop for gas. it was around midnight, and i was driving. i tried to pull into a station on our side of the highway, but when i got into the parking lot, we realized that it was under construction. it looked like i could pull around the construction, so i kept pulling in ... until we realized that there wasn't a way to pull through. so i had to try and back the penske (plus the car on the dolly) out. now i don't know if you've ever tried to back up something you're towing, but it's not an easy task.

steve hopped out and helped direct me, but when i pulled back out, i could see the car a little more in one of my mirrors than i could before. we pulled over again and decided that we should take the car off the dolly and put it back on, just to make sure.

to make a long story short, it took something like 11 tries to get the car on right. that's eleven times of backing it off the dolly, and pulling it back on. and in case you've never done it, it's a little like pulling on to and off of a see-saw ... it moves under the car to flatten out or ramp down, depending on how you have the weight of the car. if it sounds hairy it's because it is.

i cried. and i almost killed steve. to clarify, this is not me "mad" at steve and almost "killing" him ... this is me trying to pull the car onto the dolly the first time, and the engine revved and i jumped to find the brake and for a brief moment i saw so much fear in his eyes, reflected from my headlights, and i thought i was about to kill him accidentally, at a truck stop, in the middle of the night, in el paso. once the car jerked to a halt, and it was clear that steve was still safe, i quickly put it in park and cried because that had been one of the worst, most nerve frazzling things that has ever happened to me. it's essentially my worst nightmare. and even worse was for me to look up and see him motioning that we needed to try it again. awful doesn't even begin to describe it. i had to re-do it too many times to count. i finally got the hang of it, but even my pro status with the dolly doesn't negate the split-second thought that the person i love and value more than anyone in the world is about to die, and by my own hand. i'm having anxiety just thinking back on it. ugh.

so that was probably the low part of the trip. and here's a photo. that's the dolly and the truck, and the stuff that i had on the driver's seat of the car that i had to take out so that i could drive on and off the see-saw multiple times. and cry.

{and yes, we *do* have an oreck :) christmas present from my parents a few years ago :)}

the good news is that i didn't kill steve, the car got put back on the dolly straight, and we headed for our next stop, which was middle of nowhere texas. by the time we got to middle of nowhere texas, we were pretty low on gas. which means we'd gotten pretty far. in fact, here's a google map image to show you about how far we'd gotten...

it was morning by this time, and we were somewhere near junction, tx. that's right next to middle of nowhere texas. we hop out, steve fills up the tank, and when i walk around the back of the car to see how it's been doing on the dolly, i notice that the trunk is open.

the trunk to our car is open. and it has been open for several hours and sever hundred miles.

yeah.

the buttons on our little keyless remote thingy tend to be easy to push in your pocket, or so i'm told. and one of us sometimes pops the trunk open without meaning to. i won't say who it is to protect the guilty.

let's just say that thanks be to the good Lord above and Bernoulli because the draft from the truck + car must've kept the trunk down, because nothing fell out. and do you know what was right there in the trunk, precariously perched?? steve's CPAP machine, which keeps him from dying in his sleep [true story--he has pretty severe sleep apnea], and also our suitcase that has all our accessible clothes and toiletries for the trip.

so between almost driving over my husband accidentally, and almost losing some very important possessions somewhere on a 438 mile stretch, i was pretty emotionally drained. i may have had a small freak out moment. it didn't help that i hadn't really slept all night.

[see, and this is the crap i want to tell people about when they say things to me like "oh, what an adventure!!" those people have never almost man-slaughtered their husband in the middle of the night in el paso. those people never had to almost drive back across the barren wasteland that is middle of nowhere texas to find their toothbrush and breathing machine. this isn't hollywood folks. this is real life crap. it's like one part adventure and ten parts suck.]

also?? steve hit bambi. yes, you read that right. as if the insanity weren't enough at this point. the good news is that steve didn't kill bambi. bambi was already dead in the road. but steve, driving a big truck with our car in tow, couldn't avoid hitting the large roadkill. and so bambi [or at least part of him] went with us to louisiana, splattered on the side of our car.

and now you know why it took me 3.5 weeks to write about our trip ... because it was so merry and wonderful. :)

hopefully it won't take me another 3.5 weeks to write about part 2 ... :)

one last look back.

while i was digging through photos of us moving, i realized that i had a few from before the move that i never blogged about. here's a quick look back...

the following series were taken on july 15th...

and these were taken on july 17th...

so yeah. basically boxed chaos.

[did you notice that cute little striped pillow on the couch?? guess who made that?? me!! some day i'll blog about it ... maybe.]

and in completely unrelated matters, the second time we went back to the dumpster to get boxes, i noticed the following sign on the dumpster:

whoops. i guess dumpsters don't like you to "occupy" them. too bad they're full of lovely cardboard treasures.

also, because i'm brilliant, the second trip to the dumpster was in the heat of the day. in tucson. in july. did i mention how smart i am?? literally, the dumpster was hot to the touch. which made it difficult to climb in and out of. to rememdy this situation, steve and i went across the street to target where we bought a step ladder to help me into and out of the sizzling treasure chest of cardboard, without having to touch the hot metal.

and for those of you not fortunate enough to have ever seen the inside of a dumpster, here's the view, complete with stepladder for safe exit, and smiling steve outside the little window aka door...

and yes, that stepladder is precariously perched on a pile of flattened boxes.

it is an exciting life i lead.

and seriously, i will have moving posts soon. i promise. pinky promise. double thumb kiss.