I turned 29!  Again!  It's like the 7th anniversary of that or something.

Local Beer is Delicious!

I had a really great weekend.  I occasionally get irritated at blogs where everything is always rosy and happy; that's not realistic.  In this case, however, we have had such a great October, it's hard not to post all sorts of happy stuff.

black eyed susans are totally happy

Yesterday, I walked to South Hills Power Yoga for a morning class.  (I took the day off, since there's really no good reason to work on your birthday if you don't have to.)

I talked to the instructor a bit before class, because I have some physical weirdness with my shoulder and she gave me some tips.  The whole class went awesomely after that, and I left feeling happy.  Hot Yoga!

(Basically, if you want to take pressure off your shoulder, stay on your knees in plank.  Seems simple, and works like a champ.)


From there, I headed to the Sugar Cafe for some thing kind of like lunch.  I asked for iced tea, but only if I could pick the tea.  The nice guy behind the counter recommended something called Cinnamon Sunset with ginger syrup.  It was fantastic, but not as good as the apple-butternut-cranberry turnover I had for a post-yoga snack. I have heaps of winter squashes and apples and I am determined to make something tasty out of them.  Sorry, no pictures.  You'll just have to head to Dormont for some of your own. :)

Walked back to my house and lounged around drinking coffee and watching TV shows that I legally downloaded from the internet for a small fee.  We are IN THE FUTURE, people.  If you happened to miss 2 episode of Rizzoli & Isles, the Apple TV is here for you!!!

Jeff came home so we dropped the little one off at meemaw's house and went out for dinner.  He slept over, in preparation for our big bike outing this morning.

Basically, the deal is this. My birthday is around Halloween.  That means every year on my birthday weekend, there are too many things to do, most of them involving costumes and probably involving lots of loud people.  I am not super into loud.  Jeff could not decide between the Terrifying 10k or the Reverse Keg Ride this year, since they were both today.  I basically said "hey, we're doing the keg ride, because I don't want to do a 10k on account of how I'm lazy and don't like to exercise, but I can totally bike to where there's beer".

You can read more about it at the link, but basically some folks tow a keg of beer from point A to point B, and when we get to point B, we drink some!  You know, for charity!  This year, point B was East End Brewing's soon-to-be opened brewery and growler shop, which is also a coffee roaster.  roastery?  Place in which coffee is roasted, I guess.

I am not in shape, so it was a pretty long ride for me.  There was fine.  Back was harder, but we went faster and stopped at the old brewery, so it was an extra mile.  I am totally hurting between arthritic yoga, walking 2 miles, and a 13ish mile bike ride in 2 days.

I won't gush anymore, but I will leave you with some pretty pics.

Today was basically perfect.

To start with, it's fall, which is obviously the best season.  This morning, Jeff let me sleep in and lounge around, which was fab.  Eventually, I got up and we all got cleaned up to go to soccer.

He kicks!

After soccer, we went to the Original Pancake House with my mom and dad.  Someday, I will get there before we are starving and we will order the Dutch Baby and the huge Apple Pancake.  They ask for an extra 30 minutes to make those, and I am never ready to wait 30 minutes.

We split crab cakes benedict and cinnamon apple pancakes.  The boy had rainbow pancakes and hot chocolate.  They were yum.

A friend recommended that we go to Triple B Farms in Monongahela, PA and I've been wanting to go.  It's about a 40 minute drive from our house, which is not too bad, but certainly a commitment.


As soon as we got in the car it started raining.  It rained.  And rained.  And kept raining.  I told Jeff that I was POSITIVE it would stop raining when we got there and it'd be double awesome because it wouldn't be busy, since everyone would have bailed due to the rain.  It was a foolproof scheme!  The guys looked pretty skeptical, but we kept going anyway.

Pretty Farm

I swear, as soon as we parked the car, the rain stopped.  By the time we paid and got inside, the sun came out.  It was like our trip to the farm was blessed by whichever higher power you prefer.  The rest of the day seemed pretty amazing to me after that.  It was sunny.  And warm.  And not crowded.  (That last part is especially important for us introverts.  Crowds make us super cranky.)

We went through a rope maze and a haunted house and down a cool tube slide. We water-raced rubber duckies by pumping a hand pump.

Is this a goat? Yak?  Something?

This is totally a goat.  Love the rectangular pupils.

The guys used a ginormous slingshot to launch tennis balls over towards the apple orchard.

Jeff claims that I have no idea how fun this is. Jeff is usually right.

We got hopelessly lost in a corn maze.  Last year, we went to a different farm and the maze was basically a path with a lot of turns.  Not so, with this maize maze!  We spent about a half hour wandering around before we found our way out.







 I was surprised how fun picking apples was.  They are easy to see because they are so shiny red.  When you get high enough up in the orchard where the apples aren't picked over, it's pretty easy to fill up your bag.  Jeff and I went berry picking last summer with a friend and her and my little boys.  Jeff was kind of whiny about it because he said he detests berry picking.  Turns out, berry picking out in the country where Jeff grew up consists of "hiking for an hour into the woods to pick berries from a big wooded mess of berries".  Picking berries (or apples) from a farm you pay to get into consists of going on a hayride up to where the nice wide rows of apples are, and then moseying down a path leisurely filling your bag.  Totally different experience.

We picked our five dollars worth of apples and realized that the rain was probably coming back.

Ominous Skies in the Apple Orchard

One thing I failed to take a good picture of was the cider doughnuts.  We wandered into the, er, dining barn?  Not sure.  The covered place with food.  Our friend from New York is always talking about how good cider doughnuts are, and Triple B is the only place in Pittsburgh that has them, from what I can tell.  The whole drive out, I was thinking "it will rain, but at least I can get a cider doughnut, and stop caring about those.  They can't possibly be as good as I keep hearing.  How could they possibly compare to those doughnuts full of chocolate whipped cream?  That's just crazy talk."

Friends?  I was wrong.  Cider doughnuts are AMAZING.  We got 3 and some hot cider and sat down. About two bites into his, Jeff said "we should have got a dozen".  I pointed out that we could get some before we left and he said "wait here, I'm getting a dozen".  Hah!

On the ride home, we determined that the deal is this: Cider Doughnuts are amazing in a completely different way the doughnuts full of pudding or chocolate whipped cream.  They are effectively a completely different kind of pastry.  A delicious, delicious pastry.  If you have them, get them now.  They might be the best thing you can buy for 75 cents a pop.





It was a perfect day.  We bought some fudge and picked our pumpkins and drove home.

I love fall.

It is amazing how one purchase can spiral your shopping out of control.

I have been saving up for, and finally purchased refurbished, an 11" MacBook Air.  It is ADORABLE and so far I am really loving it.  (Previously, I was using an older netbook running Ubuntu, which was surprisingly adequate, but just didn't have the full toolset I wanted.)

But now that I have my super portable laptop, I needed an appropriate bag.  My other laptop bags had laptop compartments that were huge and I did not want my fancy new teeny laptop floating around in there.  Enter, the Timbuk2 bag designed for the 11" air

Perfect Bag.  So far, mostly sold out everywhere.

I did my normal thing where I obsess about it for about a week, spending every evening online paying half attention to TV while making myself nuts trying to decide and obsess about colors.  But so far, I am really loving it.  It fits my laptop, my wallet-onna-string that holds my cell phone and wallet stuff (but I can use it as a teeny purse), and my makeup bag, sunglasses, charger.  I am really loving it.

vine

amazon

amazon

I have been considering migrating this blog to a personal domain instead of blogger.  Largely because I'm not really posting much about renovating anymore, since we are on hold with the bath reno, but I have lots of other things I'd like to blog about.  I am still sort of torn about it.

For financial reasons, the Big Bath Reno is on hold.  After going through our finances, taking into consideration the new furnace and new AC we had to put in over the last six months, we are going to hold off for a while.  I think it's for the best, but I'm kinda melancholy about it.

I am trying to focus on the positive. (A few years ago at work, I focused on the positive, and it was pretty successful.  This year, I tried focusing on the realistic, but the folks on my team have told me they liked Positive Connie better than Realistic Connie.)

For whatever reason, I ended up thinking about the apartment I lived at when I lived in Seattle for a year.  It weirds me out a bit how easily I can stalk neighborhoods I lived in 10 years ago on google maps.  I can't actually remember the address.  I am blaming Old Age on that one.

I think it was about here.

The place was really pretty cheap, at the time. But it was awesome, because the balcony, tiny though it was, had a nice view of Salmon Bay and the fishing boats that were docked there.  It was awesome.

I could also walk to the Chittendon Locks, which were nifty to watch, but the botanical gardens nearby were really pretty, so I ended up looking those more than the locks.

This might be the place I lived, but I honestly can't remember.

For some reason, I remember that the local coffee shop I could walk to also was the post office.  And they had orange cranberry bread that I LOVED and tried to make in my bread maker and utterly failed.

This whole post is pretty disjointed.  Sorry ya'll.  Happy March and don't forget to turn your clocks this week (for those of you in locales that do that).

So, you might remember that we ended up out a few grand for a new furnace, among other problems.

We are back on track to start working on the upstairs bath.  Thing is, with the structural engineering stuff we found out, we need to do the main bath on the 2nd floor first.  Jeff says, since we need to sister up a bunch of joists, it's easier to do that from above, rather than below.  Makes sense to me, only we don't have another full bath in the house, so we'll be trying to do this on the quick.  Some plans to make that happen:

• Staging: We're trying to buy basically everything in advance.  We'll probably keep it in the EstroDen, since it's the room right by the bath that we're not using daily.  So, tub, toilet, tile, cement board, 2X4s, drywall, whatever.  We'll have it 'all' here in advance, before we start demo.
• Layout: Layout stays the same.  We're putting in a new floor and fixing up the joists and whatnot, but moving plumbing around takes time, and honestly, the bath room is only 7X7 anyway, so there's not really much reconfiguring we can do.  I'm OK with that.  
• Reusing: We are pretty sure we're going to reuse the existing sink and vanity (and cabinet over the toilet).  

So here I am trying to mock up some finishes I could go with that may 'work' with the pink.  Not loving it, but it seems OK.  The floor here is a white basket weave I found at Home Depot for $6.95 a square foot. I can get something nearly the same at the Tile Shop for $5.29 a sq ft, says their web site, so about $270.  This could work.

I do kind of want to replace the pink top with this nice white one (which is $170 or so, and will fit on our 4' long cabinet).

Pretty nice, huh?

Wandering around Lowe's, we found some even cheaper octagon dot tile flooring for $2.57 a square foot, or about $130.

Octodot

I just don't love it as much, you know?   But it's nice.  Also, this pic has some 1X2 subway tile on a mesh back.  Above is larger, single tiles arranged in a subway pattern which are 8X12.


My big problem is that what I *really* want is marble basket weave, which is OBVIOUSLY gonna be vastly more expensive.


It's just so gorgeous!!!  I really want it with the bigger tiles on the left.  You'll have to forgive my primitive photoshop skills.  You get the basic idea.  Anyway, at $12.99 a square foot, that's $630 or so which is, you know, like 5 times as much.  Kind of hard to sell the husband on that one.  See above for "cheap".

So I'm torn.  I want to buck up for the marble, honestly, because the floor is the  main thing that you're just NOT gonna replace later, right?  So I should put out the coin for the marble and leave the pink top alone, right?  That will save me the $160 for the top, and I can replace that next year when we have some more money.

This could work, right?

So maybe I keep the top, buck up for the floor, and then go with a more blue-ey grey color that I basically made up in photoshop.  I kind of like this.  It's not perfect, and it's not 100% what I want, but I think it might be workable.  Just need to find a nice grey.  The white in between the two tiles is "Opal" from Martha Stewart's Home Depot line of paints.

You guys, I am like bad-news-betty, lately.  And not really stuff for me, but bad news for people one or two degrees away.  Here is what happened last week:

• My sister in law's father died of cancer.  Cancer can suck it.  
• My husband's step mother had to have her big toe amputated.  Diabetes can also suck it.
• My son threw up for about 5 days straight.  Viruses?  Join the suck it club.  

Dumping Ground

Not loving it

I did have, however, a few yards of fabric that I intended to be a bed scarf but decided I didn't like it.  Also, I had this line, clip doohickey from Ikea that I was using to post pictures and things on, but also works like a curtain rod.

And I even kept the instructions and ikea tool!

Butterknives are official staple removal tools.  Seriously.

So, Jeff was nice enough to help me move things around and put up my dignatet.  Dingbat.  Thingy.  

board and desk I already had!

big cushions on the bottom left