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By kilax, March 8, 2016 6:06 am

… how many left?!

Hopefully not many! I am anxious to get our food back in the Lazy Susans!

Data isn’t doing much for catching the mice, but he does let us know when they’re in the traps! (And tell us that is why he needs to be on the counters – to sniff them out.)

Side story: we originally had a quote in our FHA 203k work to build out a laundry room/pantry on the first floor. The kitchen doesn’t have much for food storage – two Lazy Susans, an odd can storage system, and the microwave shelf that I am using for storage.

I didn’t think that would be enough for my food hoarder ways! I was used to a closet for all my food, and dreamed of a walk-in closet with shelves. And thought it would be nice to have laundry on the main floor.

Then it had to be nixed from the budget. Darn. Then we found out we put aside way more money for close than we’d need and might be able to build it! Then we set up the office (where we were going to take space to build it) and decided we liked all that office space. Then we spent all the extra money (on many house things, including a water treatment system I still need to post about). So, yeah.

Back to using those Lazy Susans. I think they’re annoying (all that spinning to find my food – wah!) but… it does seem to be enough storage space. So I was wrong! As much as I’d love my walk-in food hoarder closet, this will work for now. It has to. Ha.

Funny what you think you’ll HAVE to change in a house, then you find out what you can live with and what you really need to change (the water, ha ha).

Back to the mouse!

So we found mouse droppings and a chewed off corner of a bag of tortillas last Wednesday. We took all the food out of the Lazy Susans and put it in grocery bags on the kitchen table. Then Friday night, I actually SAW a mouse run across our kitchen counter. Um, no gracias. We put all the food in plastic bins with lids that night. And went to look for no kill traps and didn’t see any.  Steven was telling our old neighbor, Troy, about it the next day, and he had some live traps we could use. Yay! We set them up Sunday night and got our first guest at 12:30 am this morning. I was up for some reason and heard the mouse go in the trap. Data did too, and ran downstairs, all excited. Ha ha ha.

We’ll release the mouse in to the beautiful countryside… far from our house. I feel bad dislocating him from his family! (I am not even joking – I really feel bad about these things – better than death though.) If we find more family members, we’ll make sure to take them to the same place!

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By kilax, March 5, 2016 6:19 am

Time for odd (almost) spring running tan lines!

Capri tan lines. That’s a new one for me. I usually sport the crazy back tan lines and shorts tan lines (and the good ole inner elbow ones).

I just had this feeling yesterday, when it was so sunny, that capris might not be such a good idea during my run, for tan line reasons, ha! (They actually were a good idea for warmth though, as were the gloves and face mask that I used for the second, windier half of the run.)

Something exciting happened before my run yesterday – the mailbox fairy came! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!! Eventually we’d like a fance brick mailbox (with a big box for packages) that matches the style of our house, but this is PERFECT for now! I can’t wait to stop our mail hold at the post office, and just walk 300′ to the end of my driveway to get our mail.

I hope our postal person doesn’t mind making the trip down our driveway to bring packages to the house. We’re hoping to catch them sometime next week and introduce ourselves and talk about it.

At the townhome, we had a huge communal mailbox, and everyone had their own box in it, and key. When you got a package, they either fit it in your box (TWSS?), put it in the big package box (and left a key for that in your box) or brought it to the door.

We order quite often from Amazon, and a few times our box was stuffed too full (with Amazon orders) to fit in the next day’s mail and the postal person left some notes for us… oops. I’ll make sure to get my mail on the daily at the new house!

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By kilax, March 4, 2016 4:03 am

We knew we’d had animals living in our attic because of the openings in to it. But hey, roof work (part of the FHA loan) started yesterday! Pretty soon those holes will be gone (and eventually the attic cleaned and new insulation installed).

Denali came over to supervise (we hadn’t seen Denali since February 22!).

Steven kept insisting he was hearing something in the attic. Suuuuure, Steven. Uh huh. Ha ha. Actually, one of his super powers is insanely awesome hearing, so while I couldn’t hear it, I believed he was hearing something.

Um, yeah.

The roofers must have screwed in some loose bulbs when they were working, and the front of the house was lit up really bright before we went to bed. We couldn’t find the switch to turn these “new”(ly found) lights off, so Steven went outside to just unscrew it a bit with his hand, and was greeted with this:

Oh, hai.

Yeah, that would be a flying squirrel!

Steven watched it scurry up the wall and back in to the attic.

I was thrilled he got photos and went between “aww, cute” and “eek!” for awhile, looking at them.

Then we talked about all the work it will take to get “them,” out. Yeah, if you have one flying squirrel, it means you usually have quite a few – they live in packs. And may be living in the walls.

And since we’re animal lovers we’ll have to find a humane way to get them out.

Then domesticate them so they can live with Data!

Just kidding. Then take them far far away.

Fun, fun, fun. Ha!

(But at least it wasn’t a ghost in the attic!)

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By kilax, March 3, 2016 5:39 am

• Yay! My snister and her husband booked flights to come out here in late April! I am stoked to see them and show them the house! And have my snister give me her interior design advice (I only pretend to be an interior designer – that is actually what my snis went to school for). Counting down the days!
• My snis is in Arizona for work (schweet) and gets to go to TWO Royals Spring Training games (SCHWEEEET!!!). I hope Steven and I get to go to some Royals games this year – we’re ready!

Our jerseys were Christmas presents from Steven’s dad!

• My bathtub is here!!! Isn’t it beautiful? Ha ha. I am not sure when it’s going to be installed/when the bathroom renovation will happen. Our contractor is still pending permit approval. I hope SOOOOOON! I miss my epsom salt soaks!

• We had our fire place inspected and chimney cleaned out on Tuesday. It’s looking good, um, minus the fact that we don’t have a chimney cap? Oops? That would explain why the starter is a bit rusty. And why there was an empty bird nest inside. We’ll get a cap and all the equipment so we can use it next season. I am looking forward to that! I bet Data will LOVE it!

• Add this to the list of things we didn’t realize was missing from our house – a mailbox. Another OOPS. We put our mail on hold the Tuesday after moving in but it was too late – the post office had already rejected a card my snister sent to welcome us to the new house. Sad. Luckily, it went back to her (and she resent to us). Steven and I tried to install a mailbox on one of the warmer weather days and it did not go well. Now is not the time of year to install a mailbox on your own. It just isn’t. We hired someone to put one in and it should be installed soon. I am excited to stop making trips every other day to the post office to get my mail (and I’d love to stop getting all that fake “URGENT MORTGAGE INFORMATION” mail – don’t even get me started on how much it all pisses me off).

ALL SO URGENT AND IMPORTANT! You know, insurance offers, offers to sell me a copy of the deed to my house…

• Apparently Data didn’t know moving to Zion included country cat duties… we had a mouse get to some of our food and Data did NOTHING about it! So disappointed. Ha ha.

Lazy city cat!

Link to Random Thoughts Thursday 88

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By kilax, March 2, 2016 5:53 am

When I told a friend I was moving close to the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant, he said “That’s where my kids think clouds come from.”

How cute! I can totally see that:

Sometimes you can’t tell where the factory starts and the clouds begin!

I’ve been affectionately calling it the “cloud factory” since, and told my parents about it when they helped us move. They thought the story was adorable. Now I send them text updates on cloud production status:

Ha ha.

But since I’m an adult and have to live in reality (booooo) I decided to actually look up what is being burned there, to create all that steam.

Coal! And lots of it! 13,000 tons a day (according to a potentially outdated wikipedia page)! Maybe that’s what’s on all those trains.

I was curious, so I got a few more stats from the Wisconsin Energy Corporation’s (WEC) 2014 (the most recent available on their site) Corporate Responsibility Report:

• The plant generated 6,231 GWh of electricity in 2014 (the Oak Creek Site generated 11,148!).
• The plant emitted 7,120 1,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) in 2014.
• A chilled ammonia pilot project is (was?) used to reduce CO2 emissions as it escapes the flue gas (this pilot began in 2008… I think it’s still going on?).
• I’ll just have to quote this one: “Pleasant Prairie Power Plant (PPPP) and Oak Creek Power Plant (OCPP) units 5-8 have been retrofitted with selective catalytic reduction systems for NOx emissions removal and wet flue-gas desulfurization units (scrubbers) for SO2 emissions removal. These projects, along with additional measures taken at other facilities, have resulted in more than an 80 percent reduction in SO2 and NOx emissions combined when compared to 2000 emissions.”
• Now it gets interesting! Falcons were living at their power plants, so in 1991, they released “15 captive-bred peregrine falcon chicks in support of the Wisconsin Peregrine Falcon Recovery program” at the Pleasant Prairie location. Since then, they’ve installed nesting boxes on power plant chimneys (I am interpreting this to mean across multiple locations), and 200 falcons (20% of the population in Wisconsin) have been born at them!

• WEC provides its combustion products, including from the Pleasant Prairie landfill location, for use in building materials and used 102% of its systemwide products in 2014. They’re also re-burning combustion products at the Pleasant Prairie location (meaning less coal needs to be purchased).

Don’t worry – this isn’t some sneaky sponsored post – I am just interested in learning what is going on where I live, and like sharing what I learn, here!

And the other good thing about the plant? I see it every time I leave my house for a run and it lets me know how challenging the wind will be that day. If the steam is going out horizontal from the chimney? That’s a bad sign. I want to see this (straight up!):

Ha!

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By kilax, February 27, 2016 7:09 pm

The 5K is the only distance I take a running rest day before if I am racing it for time. Every other distance (and 5Ks not for time), I do a shake out run the day before. But I’ve found with the 5K (and speedwork) I have more pep in my step if I take the day before off running.

So of course, on my purposefully chosen running rest day, we had a beautiful, sunny day with highs in the 50s. Unusual for February! Might have been nice to run in – minus the sun, which is my Kryptonite when running.

On my running rest day, I worked my arms. I taught fitness boxing, spent four hours scrubbing a floor, walls and ceiling with Steven, and moved all of our exercise equipment (including our weight set) around. Yeah… I am going to be feeling that at the 5K tomorrow. Eek!

But, I am going for a course PR, not a 5K PR, and I am feeling confident! My course PR is 22:58, and if the wind doesn’t slay me tomorrow, I think I got it.

Speedwork training went really well. I only cut one session short, due to safety on the indoor track, and skipped my fartleks this week. And I did lots of hill work. But! Did I lose weight like I wanted to, and mentioned in this post?

I did! I lost several pounds in January!

And gained them all back during the move. Ha!

So I’m at the same weight I was when I wrote that. Actually, a few pounds heavier!

And I’m totally okay with it. A move is not the right time for me to focus on losing weight. Too many other things going on.

But… after this 5K tomorrow, I do want to shift focus toward the half marathon distance, and I probably won’t go for a PR unless I slim down a bit. So we’ll see if it happens. Or if I am just a broken record <— very, very likely, hee hee.

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By kilax, February 27, 2016 7:08 am

Since we plan on living in Zion for a very, very long time, I’m interested in learning the town’s history! So I picked up* the Zion Images of America book (there’s over 7,000 Images of America books – maybe they have one for your town?!).

The Zion Historical Society contributed a lot of the photos and information for the book, and it mentioned they have even more at their building – the Shiloh House – where founder Dr. John Alexander Dowie lived. I’m excited to visit the Shiloh House at some point with Steven. The photos and town history will be interesting, but the house looks really neat, too!

I’ve only read a few pages of the book so far, but it mentioned that Dowie completely planned out the town layout before “the first spade broke ground” in the early 1900s. The town streets are on a easy to follow cardinal grid. I’d been wondering about the street names, and read on the Zion Historical Society page that the east to west streets are named in alphabetical order after places and people from the bible (the north to south streets are numerical). Avenues and boulevards also have biblical names, except two that are named for Scotland – Dowie’s birthplace.

It’s fascinating that the town was completely planned out from the get go – it shows Dowie really had grand intentions to build his religious utopia (according to Wikipidea, Zion is named for Mount Zion, in Israel). But was he successful…?  The town was founded in 1901 and bankrupt several years later! And it sounds like it had a lot of political turmoil (what town doesn’t?!). Time to read more!

*Oops, since this is a blog, I have to tell you this means I bought this with my own money off of Amazon.

Based on the articles showing up in my Feedly, the Oscars must be this weekend! We had a fun Oscars party two years ago, missed them last year to watch Downton Abbey, and this year… we don’t even have an antenna to watch them! Ha! We’ve been without cable/antenna since we moved on December 5th to the rental! I’ll have to watch clips of the highlights, later.

We did see two of the films nominated for Best Picture – Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Martian. Honestly… Mad Max was my favorite film of the year. Until I saw Star Wars, of course. It was so unique and engaging. And thoroughly entertaining. I’d love to see it win! No idea where it stands compared to the others, though. I’d like to see the rest of the nominees at some point. We’ll have to rent them on Redbox! We suspended our Netflix disk subscription (still use streaming) shortly after the December move because we didn’t take the time to sit down and watch our disks like we used to.

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By kilax, February 26, 2016 11:14 am

The move doubled my commute time to the studio where I teach strength classes. What was a ten to fifteen minute drive before is now a twenty-two (new record time this morning!!!) to thirty minute drive. Which I am okay with! I just plan accordingly.

Except when I can’t.

Ha.

I didn’t think about the trains.

There are freight/commuter train tracks just east of the studio that have made MANY students late to class. And now me! I lived on the west side before and never had to deal with them. Oh man. Since the move I have been stopped by a train there quite a few times – and not by the fast moving commuter trains. Oh, no. These are the slow freight trains… the ones where you wonder if they’re even moving. Ha! I’ve text my boss a few times “I am stuck by a train! Can you start setting up x equipment for class?” (Luckily he can!) The bad thing is, the only underpass is several miles up the road and would add way too much time on the trip to drive to and use!

We also live between train tracks – a set less than half a mile to our west, and a set just over a mile to our east. I haven’t gotten stuck by those yet on the way to or from class, but I have when I’ve been trying to get home or get somewhere, during other times – in my car and while on the run! Last week, I was running during lunch break and had to make it back home for work and got stuck by a train. Oops! And there are no underpasses for these either. So, you wait!

And plan to leave places just a bit earlier… or have a back up plan!

We do hear the train a lot at our house, but it doesn’t bug us. An expected and consistent noise like that is not what bothers me (noise-wise!*).

*Ha! I do have a post drafted, also about my main job’s work commute that talks a lot about noise and a huge reason why we moved!

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By kilax, February 25, 2016 6:25 am

• Relationship dynamics are extremely interesting to me, and something I read on quite a bit. Especially the maintenance of relationships, and knowing when to let one go. Anyway! I love when gems like this – “Disposable Friendships in a Mobile World” (pdf here) – show up in my Feedly. Basically, it’s about a study that was done to see if people who move more often also dispose of relationships more often (since they are more likely to dispose of physical items, too). Conclusion: it’s not so much that moving causes you to abandon relationships, but that it pushes you to evaluate them (like many things in life do!). I strongly believe people should constantly be analyzing if they are getting what they need out of their relationships. This, but all the time – “moving also requires making choices about which relationships are ‘worth’ maintaining and which are not, which ties could be replaced and which ties should be maintained.”
• That silly bruise took a week to heal! And didn’t feel too great. Eek! I haven’t had any accidents since then but I do feel like my hands aren’t functioning well – I’ve been having a hard time getting things to open this week (jars, bags, etc). Weird. Work with me, body, not against me!

• My mom’s mom is more on trend than me. When I talked to her last, she told me her girlfriend got her in to doing one of those adult coloring books. Say what? My snister sent me one in the fall, but I haven’t taken time to color much of it. I should do that instead of play with my phone when we watch (parts of) movies (then get up and do house stuff). I should get back to knitting, too! I know where all my knitting stuff is!

• When we got to our house on close day we found out the driveway and yard were a sheet of ice. Eek! We’ve had an odd winter of sporadic warm temps and freeze/thaw cycles. Pair that with all the shade in our yard and you get LOTS of ice! Steven and my dad got an ice scraper on move-in weekend and it’s been SOOOOO useful for getting ice off our driveway, sidewalk and off our patio (and then there was that time we tried to use it during mailbox install but that’s a story for another day…). What a useful and fun tool! I spent a lot of last Friday getting the last chunks of ice off our patio and my deltoids were feeling it!

Putting Dad to work!

This picture doesn’t do it justice – the patio was covered in a snow/ice mix!

This is what I got it down to after a bit of work. Then I broke this in to big chunks and picked up some to toss…

… and did a little curling with the others. Ha!

All clear!

• One more article to end the post! “Why You Keep Signing Your Future Self Up for Stuff You Don’t Actually Want to Do” (pdf here) explains how you think of your future self separate from your present self – which is why you might think you’ll have more time to do things, or an interest in something you don’t now. Interesting stuff. Their advice? If you wouldn’t want to do it now, don’t say you’ll do it in the (near) future.

Link to Random Thoughts Thursday 87

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By kilax, February 22, 2016 6:23 am

There’s about fourteen houses* on our street, and we decided to try to meet the people at the four houses closest to us this weekend (you gotta start somewhere, right?!).

How we gave the muffins – yeah, I am not that crafty! We tried, ha!

Saturday was almost a bust – we walked to everyone’s home and no one was there! They were probably out enjoying the strangely spring-like weather.

On our walk back to our house though, we saw our neighbors to the east pulling in to their driveway, and walked over.

What an interesting couple! They’re both originally from Zion, and born in the late 20s/early 30s (I am guessing, based on when he said he graduated from high school). The wife went to the same university as me and Steven!

They built their house in either ’59 or ’69 (he told us both dates, hee hee), and were there when our house was built in the 70s and remember the doctor who built it. They said “How do we put this politely? There were a lot of girls coming in and out of the house.” HA! So apparently, the house was a bachelor pad. I told them they shouldn’t see that anymore!!!

They recalled that two couples owned our house after the doctor, and that the last ones trashed it (probably because it was a foreclosure?) and that it was spruced up in the summer of 2014. And that it’s been sitting since. Yep, it sure has been.

They also talked to someone in fall 2015 who was really interested in buying our house. Eek! I am happy it was still on the market when we needed to find a house after selling ours.

The couple gave us a lot of Zion history (and their personal history too!) which we enjoyed and have been wanting to learn about. The guy who founded Zion had a lot of interesting ideas… he owned all the land and you leased it from him. The town was dry and no modern medicine was allowed to be practiced. Everyone had to pay in to the Zion bank. Sounds… cult-ish?! Interesting, nonetheless.

It’s really fun learning the history of the people on our street and especially, learning about our house! These families have been on our street for years! It turns out all the land around us used to be one big farm, until the farmer decided to sell it in five acre parcels. That family still owns the first house on the street, and the parcels are still all five acres.

On Sunday, we were able to meet our neighbor to the southwest who has a ton of hens, roosters, and rabbits outside. And we spent more time talking with our next door neighbors to the west – we really enjoy chatting with them (they’ve lived here since ’83) and I can see us spending more time with them!

Hopefully we’ll continue to meet more neighbors in the next few weeks. Steven’s talked to our neighbors to the south before – they own a local restaurant – cool! And the house to their east is actually being remodeled – eventually we’ll have to meet those people too! (We actually looked at that house as well, to buy, but there was no way we could afford the renovations it needed. The work they’re having done looks beautiful!)

*A few people have asked if we met Denali‘s owners – nope! Denali doesn’t live on our street! Denali lives in a house north of ours, on a different street.

Since I showed a bit of our counter in that photo above, let’s talk backsplash. It’s a lot harder to pick it for your forever home, than the house you are trying to sell! We think we’ll go with something simple, since the counters are so busy, and we like the way these two options look (and we’ve looked at QUITE a few options). Now, to pick one. Maybe.

We’d like to get the backsplash up so we can put the hood up, but we need to have a structural engineer look at the wall the backsplash would be going on, so it doesn’t make sense to rush in to it (especially if work needs to be done on that wall). Gives us more time to think, anyway!