It’s been a week since I posted? That’s just sad. I feel like I’m posting every day. I just don’t get it. So I’m going to do Austin Script Works’ 30/60/90 project. Hopefully, it’ll get me writing.

Last Wednesday I ran the Sunstroke Summer Stampede 5k. My whole fan section came out to cheer me on (Mom, Dad, Stella, and Julie). I thought I’d done horribly, especially since I’d only recently started running regularly again, but the time came in ok. I did 26:37, which looking back at last year’s time is a little slower. I find it frightening how consistent I am at running these 5ks.

So what happened this weekend?

I dunno it was a blur.

Friday, I worked from home. Stella and I got in a lot of quality time, as well as a run. That evening we decided to go check out a mid-century modern home we’d seen advertised. It was actually affordable which was a shock. A cheap MCM home seems to be in the $350-450 range. We checked it out. It had a fantastic living room and kitchen, but the rest of the house was just ok. And there was no garage, which we can’t do. Need somewhere to store the table saw, platforms, and props. We came home and I cooked fajitas for Mom, Dad, Christine, Brian, and Julie. It was a nice evening.

Saturday morning we got up and went over to Erin’s to help her move. This year was not as smooth as last time. Erin was far more prepared, and had pretty much everything packed up, but we only had 6 people, so it took about 3 more trips than last time. We vegged for a little bit and hung out, drinking beer and eating pizza. We got home, and got a shower, then went over and ate some fantastic filet’s that Christine made at my parent’s house. And mushrooms. Even Stella approved, and she’s been a bit finicky lately. Julie went to a theater party (you can see her blog post), and I stayed home and watched some horror movies on Netflix.

Sunday I slept in till 10am with Stella puttering around my prone body. She must have mostly slept or pounded on me, because she only pulled her blocks out. We got up and hurriedly got the house ready for our open house. The roses were blooming for it, so that was nice. We went over to my parent’s house for creamed eggs on toast with Christine, Brian, Katie, Ryan, Mom, Dad, Julie and Stella. It was a nice time. We headed back to our house, where we played with Stella and napped, then over to Anna and Sean’s for movie night. We watched DOA which was great fun. And I had to love a twist that revolved around rival writers. Yeah, a film noir movie about writers. Can’t beat it. Got home, did a bunch more chores and went to bed, where I slept horribly because I’d napped during the day.

I got up and helped to get the house ready, and jumped on the bus to work about 9am. What a weekend. We need a weekend just sitting around soon…

We went to see Salvage Vanguard’s production of Mud last Thursday. We started out the night by heading out to spider house for a beer. Spider House has had a paint job and is a significantly nicer place to be. Our cashier wasn’t surly. May have been an anomaly, but may not…

We headed on over to the new Salvage Vanguard theater. I was a bit taken aback. I was expecting this:

But got this:

I can’t believe I was taken in by a PhotoShop job. I am so lame.

Anyway, there was no one in the house that night. Quite a change from the normal Salvage Vanguard show. The chairs were comfy and the show was off. Mud was - episodic. To the extreme. No scene seemed to last for more than about 3 minutes. And often the longer scenes were made up almost entirely of silence. I’m all for silence, but this was a bit much. The script was about several uneducated characters stuck in a dead end existence. As the character Mae (Jenny Larson) tries to better herself in life; first by shacking up with the most intelligent man in town (which isn’t saying much) and then by leaving entirely, she stirs up resentment, and eventually violence in the men around her.

I really didn’t care much about the characters. The play seemed to often be played for laughs which seemed at odds with the purpose of the play. Occasionally I’d get really into a character and then we’d have a scene change (accompanied by shifting lights and long sound effect), that would completely dampen my ability to relate. I started watching in the second act, and I think the play could have been done without all of these interruptions. I think it might have made for a stronger narrative, but perhaps it’s meant to be episodic to mark the passage of time.

In any case, it was well acted. You should go see it and support Salvage Vanguard in their new space. It’s going to be a really fantastic place to see theater.

This weekend was a bit stressful.

We went to see the Pillowman on Saturday night. It was a sold out show. They had all the names from the reservations already attached to chairs. I suppose to make you feel like you were entering a totalitarian regime where the state knows that you’re visiting the theater. This ended up leaving some people pretty cranky, though, as they couldn’t choose their own seats.

I’d read this play before. I should really come out in the open. I don’t read plays. I think the Pillowman is the only play I’ve read in the past 3 years (ok, I read Swimming to Cambodia, but that’s a monologue).

this design is brilliant:

I’m going to have to build one for Stella. The best thing is that you can stack books on the other side and see-saw alone. How awesome is that? Also I suppose it can become a game as you try to balance it out into a flat bookshelf while trying to load the exact same weight of books on both sides. Not to mention that jumping on one side can catapult all of your books across the room. Fantastic!

On the subject of social security… shouldn’t it really be a system where the amount you get after retirement is based upon how much your kids (and grandkids) currently earn rather than how much you earned during your life?

I really hate the conservative rhetoric machine that is always putting words in the mouths of liberals. This all started with this article:

Thomas Sowell Just Another Backwards Cracker

and the original article it came from.

and dinner, really. We’ve finally hit the wall. I knew this wall existed. I knew I had it coming, but I was just hoping if I ignored it, it would go away. But Stella is really, really sick of our pretend “meals” we feed her. We’ve been feeding her basically the same thing since she starting eating solid food.

• Chicken (cooked weekly and slowly growing more slimy over the week) or Cheese
• Frozen Vegetables (mainly corn and peas because that’s what she likes
• Milk
• Water
• Bread or Toasted O’s

She’s finally started getting a little antsy about this same boring food. Especially when she goes out to eat and gets hamburgers and cheese omelets. So last night I was making Grilled Chicken Breasts with Tomato, Olive, and Feta Relish for dinner. Usually dinner gets made after Stella goes to bed, but I made the sauce early and spooned it over her chicken breasts. I even put a piece of mint on there for garnish.

Sidetrack I’d have a picture of this, but Julie’s laptop is a pain to use these days so we aren’t downloading pictures that often. I’ll post it at some point.

It was very artsy. And Stella had another first.

Stella’s First!Realizing garnish doesn’t taste good and is just there to look pretty.

It was amusing. She pulled out the mint. Looked at it. Chewed on it a bit. Then dropped it off of her high chair as an offering to the dogs (who learned about garnish quite a long time ago and were not deceived).

She devoured the food. Which was excellent. And it had vegetables and cheese, so it was sort of healthy.

This led back to the fact that I really need to start cooking for Stella. I’ve been inspired by the past by the site Vegan Lunch Box, even though I could not be less vegan if I tried.

So I’ve been listening to this With Lasers. I suppose we didn’t really want it to sell on day 1. Haven’t heard from the tile place if they’re going to be able to install our tile before our open house.

What else is going on? Julie and I are doing lots of small stuff around the house. Last night I:

• Cleaned the oven. We sprayed it with horrific chemicals a few nights ago. Then I attempted to cook something in it, because I am forgetful. This released magical toxic fumes through the oven vent under the back left burner. Sometimes I feel like my oven resembles a steam engine. And one day it’s going to stand up on spindly white legs. Move forward from its niche revealing it’s long spindley be-gloved hands. It’s two front burners will flip up revealing his eyes and he will begin talking to me with his oven mouth. Inevitably I will say something rude and he will turn on his burner eyes and they will glow red, red, red! What was I talking about? Oh yes. Two hours after I sprayed the over last night I actually cleaned it. It is now nice and clean. And it only releases mildly toxic fumes when I turn it on.

• Replanted a hanging basket with new flowers. The old flowers had died. These were the special magical yellow flowers. Yellow flowers apparently make people want to buy. Or something. I hate throwing away plants that I haven’t given around six months to struggle back to life. But desperate times and all that.

• Played Lego Star Wars. For 10 minutes after I got Stella in bed, while Julie was getting Roxie from the groomers. Roxie looked even more ridiculous than normal. She had two pink ear bows, and a big pink bow attached to her harness. As always she looked naked and mortified.

• Vacuumed the downstairs. Vacuuming is boring. There’s no way around it. No story there.

• Ate McDonalds. The new geniuses they’ve hired are unable to complete an order correctly. I did not get my super-sized fries last night, and they decided this time Honey-Mustard was the same as Honey. Although that’s a step up. Last time I asked for Barbecue sauce and honey, and I got sweet and sour. I suppose she was keying off of the “and”. How sad is it that these teenagers cannot even properly perform a McDonalds job? A job that was designed to require next to no thinking.

• Put on a missing cable TV wall plate.

• But not in that order.

Could this post be my entry for The Holme’s Carnival of the Mundane? Probably not. I’m sure I can get more mundane than this.

Our house went up for sale last night. It’s a bit bittersweet. This is the house that Julie and I did so much work on. We bought a table saw and learned how to put in Pergo floors. Travis and I spent weekends knocking out the back patio and building the frame for our wonderful deck. And the entire gang put so much effort into putting on the decking. And of course, Stella came home to this house. And I will always remember lying on the floor of her room sleeping with her on my chest. Breathing in the smell of her hair. It has been a good house. The listing is here. You know you’re curious you Lookey-Lou:

http://www.austinhomesearch.com/ahs/GetResults2New.aspx?id=185807

We have our first showing today at 11:45. I have a feeling it might sell fast.

This weekend was quite a bit of fun. Friday evening we were going to go out to eat as a pre-celebration for Julie’s birthday. But Waterloo south had a 45 minute (!) wait and we didn’t want to even attempt to go downtown where all the bikers were (Republic of Texas rally was downtown this weekend). So we ended up getting a baguette and some beer and eating Chicken Picatta at home. It was a pretty low key night. We watched “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, which Julie hadn’t seen and which was actually somewhat comical. My parent’s used this as an object lesson in obedience and “How to Behave in a Foreign Country” growing up. It was nice to see it as an adult and not take it seriously. And experience someone else seeing that fantastic climax for the first time. Julie was making fun of Doris Day’s casting for the first 3/4 of the movie and when we hit the climax it was sort of like, “Oh, I get it…”

Saturday was a whole bundle of fun. I went running in the morning with Stella. Then we went over to her Baba and Grandaddy’s house and hung out on their porch for a while. Baba dug out a bunch of old wooden blocks for Stella to play with and we just sat out and enjoyed the morning. I ran back over to our house and woke up Julie around 10:30, so she got a nice long sleep on her birthday. We ate some chocolate muffins for breakfast and then headed out to J.C. Penny. Oh, I forgot. We had gone to Kohls the night before to look for a new shirt for Julie for her birthday party and came out empty handed. It wasn’t that nothing fit, so much that everything was just so ugly that you couldn’t get excited about anything. So on Saturday we headed to J.C. Penny at Southpark Meadows. It was as if the gods were smiling upon us. They had tons of nice stuff, Julie tried on a bunch, and stopped trying things on because she had too much, not because there wasn’t anything else to try on. I like having good shopping excursions with Julie. Stella and I played outside the dressing rooms. We’d stolen Julie’s sunglasses and were playing games with those. Stella was also standing on her tip-toes (which I hadn’t seen before), and attempting to do chinups on the shopping cart. We had a lot of fun.

After that we headed out to McKinney state falls to go swimming, but it was closed due to bacteria levels. Bummer. Then we went to Garrison Park to go swimming, but it cost $3 and we only had about 30 more minutes to swim. Bummer. So we went and got snow cones. Stella had her first tastes of snow cone, and I’m proud to say she prefers Root Beer (my flavor) over Black Cherry (Julie’s flavor).

We headed home and went out to an early dinner with my Mom, Dad, Christine, and Brian. At Waterloo South. So Julie got her hamburger. We came home and had Julie’s birthday party. The usual suspects came out and it was a lot of fun.

Sunday, I slept in with Stella until 10:30. Sleeping in with Stella involves me going into her room about 7:30, and lying down on a pillow and a blanket. Stella then proceeds to crawl on me, alternating with dozing off in odd positions for short periods of time. It’s all very cuddly. We got up and cleaned up after the party, and then went out to breakfast at IHOP. We were bad this weekend about eating out.

That afternoon we went swimming at Dittmar pool with Christine and Brian. Stella seemed to enjoy the water, but I think she was overwhelmed by the number of people in the pool (heck, we were overwhelmed by the number of people in the pool). But it was a free pool on a hot summer day. Better get used to it kiddo, that’s the way you’ll be swimming in Austin.

We got home, and I realized that our Realtor was going to be taking pictures of our house and that the lawn was shaggy, so I rushed out and mowed it. I got out of the shower about 5 minutes before he got there. We got our paperwork signed and he mentioned that he thought we had tile in our master bath, and that no one wants carpet in their master bath. We find that argument hard to argue with. It is just too humid in a bathroom to have carpet. So we’re going to go out and pick some tile at lunch today. We’ll get that put in as soon as possible. As long as we don’t sell the house first.

All in all, it’s been a crazy time getting the house ready to market, but we’re definitely seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And it was a great weekend to boot. Stella has really started communicating with us, and really starting to stand up on her own, and toddle around. Plus she’d started using the “No” word. I really don’t like having to go into work these days. I’d much rather sit around and play with her. Ah well, this post is too long. I’ll let you guys know how the tile goes…