So.... it's been a while.

Even before, but especially since the frolickingman and I were married, we've been wanting to get a home of our own. There's a lot to be said for a small single family home, but we're having trouble finding such a place that also fits our other criteria: near the subway, near the Metro North at 125th or Fordham, and affordable. Yeah, that's a pretty small selection. But I want to do some more school stuff and I'm really looking at Yale and Fordham (for different things), so in a long-term way, it does actually make sense.

We looked into some condo and coop situations, but the maintenance and common charges that we were seeing were quite simply insane. So we decided those weren't really good options for us. That leaves us most likely buying a two-family home and renting out the apartment to help fund the mortgage. Okay.

I found a nice house with a crappy kitchen on a nice block 8 minutes from the subway and 4 minutes from the train. Perfect! It was sold already, but still listed. Bah.

So I found an amazing place listed below market value (short sale) just barely in our range. Gorgeous house, beautiful neighborhood, 4 minutes from the subway and 15 minute bike ride to the train. Worth it for a house that beautiful in such a lovely location. Amazing! It was in contract, but still listed. Bah.

After a couple days of moping, I started looking again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Then I got a couple leads. I emailed the one guy today since two days ago when I found it, there was no contact information. The other, we saw yesterday. Based on newly accurate numbers, we could probably just barely scrape together the necessary funds in a month or two and the mortgage would be about $300 more than we've been paying in rent. We'd also have to raid our retirement accounts and pay those back over the next 5-10 years, as well as liquidating some stocks we hold and clearing out our savings. But....

The house is gigundo. It's listed as 1958 sq. ft., but we think that must be only the first and second floors, not the attic (third floor, really) and basement. The attic is a really a full third floor and not just a little storage crawl space. (Do you know, my parents never in my life let me into the attic in the house where I grew up? To this day, I have no idea what it looked like!) It was built in 1910 so there are definitely old house quirks, but it could be very pretty. There's a little front yard where, with some adjustments to the porch, there could be a parking space. There's a decent back yard for barbequeing and growing flowers, herbs and vegetables. (How's that for buying local?!) There's a first floor apartment with one or two bedrooms, depending on how you look at it, full bath, eat-in kitchen, laundry machines, and yard access. There's a finished basement with laundry hookups, a full bath (weird), yard access, and lots of storage space. The second floor has a kitchen, living/dining room, bedroom and full bath. The third floor has two bedrooms and a half bath. Everywhere you look, there are closets.

But there are issues. In order to create the parking space, the stairs up to the porch would have to be moved to the center or other side, which is weird since the front door is on the side where the stairs are now. The yards are concrete, which we would have to tear up to put in dirt and plants. The linoleum on the first floor is ghastly and the floor felt a little weird under my feet in a couple places. The entrance now is into a common hallway, which means that the second and third floors are cut off from the basement by a common area, which would ideally be private. The second floor kitchen is barely functional and the floor tile throughout the second floor is mismatched. The whole place is kind of grungy with badly done paint in hideous shades and it smells like the pets have been peeing inside and the cat's litter box is not cleaned enough. There are separate meters for the first and second/third floors, but the basement where there are laundry hookups (which would ideally be for the second/third floor apartment) is on the first floor meters. The circuit breaker box for the first floor is in the basement and would therefore be inaccessible to the first floor tenants unless we gave them a key to the basement with our laundry machines and storage.

But.... There are a few key renovations that could make the place really nice.

1) Make the second floor kitchen functional. We think we know how it could be done, though it involves moving a wall(!) to get the fridge out of the way. With that change, we could actually make that kitchen small, but quite nice and very efficient. I've been designing kitchens in my head for ages, so I have a lot of ideas about how to make it work if there's enough space to get that fridge out of the way.

2) Change the meter setup so that the basement is on the second/third floor meter and move the first floor circuit breaker box to the first floor. Then cut a doorway from the vestibule into the first floor living room and seal off the doorway from that living room into what is presently a common hallway. Possibly seal off the door from the first floor kitchen into that hallway also, thus isolating the first floor entirely from the basement. Weirdly, I actually know how to do that and probably possess the basic saw, hammer, nail, and spackle skills necessary to seal off the wall where there are currently doors.

3) Get rid of the concrete in the yards. Add dirt; plant plants.

4) Replace the floors with hardwood throughout the house, starting with the second floor, then third floor, then first floor.

5) Paint. Nicely.

6) Make the half bath on the third floor a 3/4 bath. This would provide something like a master bath without taking up a lot of extra space (probably have to move a wall to do it, but worth it) and a shower stall would be good for cage cleaning.

The changes to get the first floor apartment really separated from the second and third floors would have to come first so that we could rent it out. I scoped out Craigslist and it looks like we could get something in the neighborhood of $1000 now, $1300 after renovations for that apartment. It seems like an awful lot of work, but it means that we could have an actually nice house in a couple years that we can afford now. And there's something to be said for that, isn't there?

Another bonus: the current owners don't want to move for another few months, which would give us time to scare up the $10,000 we're short to buy the place with the 25% downpayment the bank requires for a multi-family home....

Ay me, renting is easier. But this would be ours and we'd be free of scuzzy landlords. We could even be scuzzy landlords. Awesome.

I've been reading Bakerella and Cake Wrecks in the past several months and it's inspired me to bake more and try my hand at cake decorating. I'm not much good yet, but I'm making progress.

First, there was the wedding cake:


Then, I made a birthday cake/tombstone:


Next a cake for the reception at St. Mary's after mass on the Eve of the Assumption:



And yesterday I bake and make a cake to take to the lake (not fake!):



YUM! I don't yet qualify for Sunday Sweets (on CW), but at least I don't belong in with the wrecks?

I recently met incoming new teachers who were looking for quick, easy recipes and it reminded me that I haven't posted any in a while, though I've been doing stuff. So....

1/2-3/4 lb beef stew chunks
1-2 tbs olive oil
2 potatoes, cut into chunks
3-4 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
1 onion, peeled and cut into chunks (optional -- I don't use them, but I bet it would be tasty)
3 bay leaves
beef broth
red wine

Brown the beef chunks in olive oil. Put the ingredients in a small crockpot in layers: potatoes on the bottom, then carrots and onions, with beef on top. Tuck bay leaves into the beef. Fill the crockpot halfway with beef broth and the rest of the way with red wine. Cover and simmer until beef chunks are soft, at least an hour (2-3 hours is better). Stir before serving.

Lamb stew variation:
Substitute lamb chunks for beef chunks and vegetable broth for beef broth.

Courtesy of Collabi and others.

We got married.

I'm quite happy.

Pictures will follow.

Most smoothies are easy -- just throw in fruit and yogurt and OJ in any combination and proportions and it does nicely. Not so with kiwis and strawberries. Proportions are tricky and because the berries and kiwi are quite tart, honey is necessary. So....

1 kiwi
6-8 medium-large strawberries
plain yogurt
milk
large dollop honey

Milk and yogurt are to taste and until the desired consistency is achieved. The large dollop of honey and the proportion of kiwi to strawberry are the key points.

95 days. Fear.

Is it redundant to have an iPhone and a Kindle? I was thinking of getting one for Mr. B, but he's likely to get the other within a year or so. Kindle does have access to stuff that's still copyrighted, which ebooks generally aren't, right?

And then there's this.

I recently decided that while I eat plenty of vegetables, I don't eat enough fruit. I started snacking on fruit before my last class, but I still have a ways to go. Then I thought, "ah! smoothie!" The potential pitfall with smoothies is, of course, that they're loaded with sugar. But if I'm making my own, I can use just the good stuff: fruit, juice, yogurt. Yum! So far I've made two (with helpful advice from the internets).

1) Gracie's Tasty Banana Mango Tango! 1 banana, 1 mango, orange juice and vanilla yogurt to taste (and consistency)

2) Gracie's Tasty Spikey Blues! 1 banana, 1 small can pineapple chunks & juice, vanilla yogurt, 1/2 cup (give or take) blueberries

I also found whole wheat mini pitas and roasted red pepper hummus at Trader Joe's. Yum! (I have garlic hummus, too, but it's not as good. It feels weird to like red pepper better than garlic, but there it is.) Yes, I know, that's not fruit: but it's a healthier snack than some of the crap I've been eating lately and it's incredibly yummy, so that gets to be posted here too. And, after all, hummus is also smOOOOOOOOOth!

I haven't done a real post in ages. Meh. Whatever.

School is going pretty well. I kept almost all of the same students in the same classes this semester, which is incredibly helpful. I even teach in the same rooms! I didn't waste any time at the beginning of the term going over class rules, reviewing what we did last term, or anything like that because everyone in my classes (but for 2) was there with me a couple weeks ago and we're all in the same place. It's fantastic!

Also, a few weeks ago, I plotted out the entire spring semester day by day, so I never have to stop and figure out what I'm teaching from one day to the next or how long I have left in the unit or anything like that. Major yay! That applies on to my freshmen, however, and the AP class is still the same old mess.

I was actually impressed with my freshmen yesterday. We were taking a look at the outbreak of plague in medieval Europe and instead of just showing them pictures of sores and blackened fingers and rotting toes, I also brought the conversation back around to effects of massive population loss. I was very surprised that the kids were able to figure out as much as they did.

"How does that affect society?"

"There aren't people around to do work, like on the farm."

"And how do you make sure that the people who are available work for you and not the other guy?"

"Pay them more!"

"Very good. What else?"

"There's no famine."

"Excellent! So what you see here is that the poor people will actually get more money for doing the same work and there's more food to go around, so life kind of gets better in some ways in the long run."

"But they lose their families."

"Exactly. But at the cost of the their friends and families."

We even touched (just barely) on religious implications (God must be angry), which I'll try to develop a little more when we talk about medieval intellectual life on Monday. Maybe it doesn't seem like much to someone with a college education, but that's pretty sophisticated reasoning for my population (age and development being considered). Hooray!

In terms of personal stuff, things are pretty well on track. Wedding planning is coming along nicely and is not stressing me out! I'm doing a lot of things myself, but I'm happy with that. A long-lost friend with whom I'm in only occasional contact stayed over with us last night and we had a fine time. We went to the local fancy diner for dinner and mostly just sat around gabbing for a few hours. I got up at 5:40AM to make sure he got on his train (went down to Penn Station with him, which was a particularly good idea since his alarm didn't go off and there was a subway diversion this morning). I'm not a fan of 5:40AM Saturday, but I'm back in bed now and plotting my day. I must go to Trader Joe's, sleep, and cook. I should also do some housework and I must go to mass. I had thought in terms of going to see the opera broadcast at a local high school, but it's that or a nap and I think sleeping will win. The only reason I'm not asleep now is that I think I'll make a break for the grocery store early, rather than in the afternoon, so that I can be in and out before traffic picks up. I haven't driven over to TJ's on a weekend in months because it sucks, sucks, sucks.

That said, I think I want to get a few minutes' rest before I head back out, so I'm going to curl up now. No one likes an overlong post on nothing in particular anyway.

I can't describe it, so I'll just link. Suffice it to say, one of my friends is a psycho magnet and though I *have* once abetted a psycho (by accident!), I had nothing to do with this one.

Handy cooking trick I learned today. Know how sometimes you don't quite seal the brown sugar bag and it all goes to hell, solid as a brick, can't get at it?

Put the brick in a bowl and cover it with a damp (paper) towel for several hours. Fluff it with a fork, put it back in the bag, and seal it properly this time.

You wouldn't believe how excited I was that this worked.

I have a pretty new bag. And I made it! There are materials enough for another. Anyone interested?

I made a pretty black and silver brocade evening bag. I have enough fabric for another and not much else to do with said fabric, so does anyone want it? I'll post pictures when I get the last couple pieces and attach the chain to the frame.

I'm going to two weddings this weekend.

I'm going to a concert this weekend.

I'm going on a shopping trip which involves a fair bit of walking this weekend.

I sprained my ankle this morning.

Whoops.

*me sitting in bed with laptop reading XKCD, frolickingman sleeping beside me*

Mike (while rolling over onto my knee) "frOOOOt!"
me: "What?"
Mike: *laughs*
me: "Are you awake?"
Mike: *snores*