record highs

still no internet/cable, hopefully the problem will be remedied tomorrow. the cable company keeps sending installers before they’ve laid-the-line. and since the local office doesn’t have a phone number, at least one available to the public, we’ve had to physically go down there and make arrangements three or four times. so they finally laid-the-line wednesday, which was scheduled for friday, and we’re supposed to have everything (phone/internet/cable) installed tomorrow. i’ll be quite surprised if everything goes according to plan. i guess it was a good thing they didn’t come friday, they would have been vying for a parking spot in our driveway. we had the invisible fence installed, the plumbers working, and both our real estate agent and builder all here that morning.

even when you purchase a new home, you’re still going to have a few kinks that haven’t been completely worked out beforehand. ours was no different. luckily it’s still under warranty and all the problems are being fixed at someone else’s expense. the main culprit seems to be sediment from our well clogging screens and building up in our toilets causing them to continuously run. we noticed a wet spot on the ceiling in the living room after one toilet ran all night and immediately shut that water off. then the toilet in the master bedroom started to run, so i shut it off as well. (didn’t want to have a bigger problem than a few running toilets.) this was about a week after we moved in. we called the builder and informed him about the problem. he said he’d send a plumber to fix the problem, we hadn’t heard from him or a plumber since. jill and jerome suggested we call vivian, our real estate agent, and sic her on him. plumber was here two days later. we now have functioning toilets upstairs. thank goodness, i was getting tired of running up and down stairs to relieve myself. jerome with the help of aaron installed a filter on our water pipes and it has made a huge difference. i don’t have to fill the washer with buckets of water anymore. it was much easier to do that then to unscrew the hose, clean out the screen and reattach the hose again.

then a few weeks ago i was reading the Mountain Times, which is the equivalent to the Illinois Times, and i couldn’t believe how bad ‘design wise’ it looked. i ran upstairs to grab a copy of the IT to do a side-by-side comparison and when i walked into the guest bedroom i noticed a shard of glass on the carpet. i walked into the bathroom and the plate-glass mirror had fallen off the wall and shattered into a million pieces. it must have happened while we were bike riding that day and luckily we had closed the room off so the dogs were unaffected by the crashing glass. it looked like it was only held up with double-stick tape, which i found quite disturbing. we ran out and bought brackets for the other mirrors and replacing the mirror has been added to the list of things for the builder.

i did start painting some rooms this past week, the mudroom, my sewing room and two bathrooms. i didn’t have any problems till i reached the second downstairs bathroom. i decided i wanted to paint it yellow along with the other bathroom downstairs. so i bought a gallon of “pale butter” paint. i put on one coat and decided the color was too yellow, almost florescent for my taste. i only used a quarter of the paint so when i went back to lowes i bought a quart of the “sunglow” color. i was quite happy with this choice but it ended up taking me five coats and two quarts to cover up the other original yellow. i couldn’t figure out what was going on. i knew that i was covering up another color but it shouldn’t take me 5 coats to do so. i finally figured out the new paint roller i was using was spooging out some type of gray color along with my yellow and that was why i wasn’t making any progress. i switched rollers and problem was solved. i felt like i was in a steven king story and the room refused to be painted. after that ordeal, i’ve taken a short break from painting, mainly to give the blisters on my hand a rest. later this evening i’ll start painting the computer nook/craft room gray and red. i’m starting small and will eventually move up to the bigger rooms, but that might be a while.

tomorrow will be a busy day for all. aaron finally starts working. bosco and marley will get their first taste of the “correction” (shock) from the invisible fence, and i’ll be painting and waiting around for the cable people to install everything. it’ll be easier to update once we have everything in-house. i’ve only been going up to use internet every other day. it’s too much of a chore to make a special trip just to check email and browse. yeah, i’m lazy like that. i’ll post our movie listings tomorrow. we’ve watched an abundance of them the last month, probably more than we have in the last year. a lot rented and many from our own stash. we’re on a coen brothers kick. new favorite movie for me…the big lebowski.

till tomorrow.

oh, the reason for the title. apparently they’ve set record highs in temperature this summer, highs in the upper 80s. the humidity is what’s killing everyone, every single person i talk to says it’s never been this bad. i guess we brought the midwest weather with us. although i’ve heard it’s reached over 100 in springfield, so i really can’t complain.