lunchable

i just went to walgreens and bought a lunchable. thought it might be a little bit healthier then driving through somewhere. it had american cheese, turkey, crackers, a reese's peanut butter cup and a capri sun. number of calories=360. which seems kinda high for what little you get. maybe that's normal, but 40% of the daily recommended value of saturated fat is not. and we wonder why kids are getting obese.

i'd probably never eat if i actually read nutrition labels. i'm a total visual consumer. if your box looks pretty and the food looks remotely edible, i'm buying. luckily, we've been getting a steady stream of fresh veggies from aaron's co-workers and i'm not much of a sweets fan. that's probably my own saving grace. that and my i.b.s.

adrian and katie are getting here tomorrow so katie can interview with boone dermatology. it'll be insane if they decide to move here. i'm keeping my fingers crossed. hopefully they'll dig on boone the way we do. they'll be leaving saturday morning and since monday is a holiday and aaron has tuesdays off we're gonna visit the fam. we'll have the dogs in tow, so it should be a really fun ride.

is your mother home?

"hello?"

"hello. we're conducting a short survey on television viewing. would you be interested in participating?"

"sure."

"excuse me?"

"sure. yes, i'd be interested."

"is your mother home?"

"no."

click.

yes, this really happened today.

the list

here's the movie list i've been promising for a month now. we started using the redbox kiosk in our local grocery store to rent most of the movies. it only costs $1 a night unlike blockbuster where you have to rent for 5 nights and pay $5. we were thinking about netflix, but we had this huge ordeal with our address not being recognized by the postal system that it hardly seemed worth the effort and energy to set up an account manually. normally we don't watch this many movies in a one month period.

my rating key
* don't bother, hated it
** watchable, but barely
*** good, if you have nothing better to do
**** definitely recommend
***** i love this movie

children of men ****
breach ***
the number 23 **
beerfest **
hot fuzz ****
black snake moan ****
employee of the month ***
disturbia ****
premonition ***
man of the year ***
the holiday **
music and lyrics ***
at close range ***
babel ***
zodiac ****
barton fink ****
the man who wasn't there ***
shooter ***

the following movies are part of our own stash, so a majority of the movies i'd highly recommend. we usually only purchase movies we love. there are a few exceptions. namely don juan demarco and trial and error. we got these movies free with pizza and there's good reason why. they're awful. i sat through trial and error, don juan was turned off 10 minutes into the movie. if you like johnny depp, don't rent this movie, it may change your opinion of him! ;)

raising arizona
the big lebowski
o brother, where art thou?
fargo
ghostworld
the way of the gun
groundhog day
slums of beverly hills
high fidelity
trial and error
suicide kings
swingers
made
clerks
chasing amy
what about bob?
adaptation
royal tenenbaums
l.a. confidential
office space
closer
rast times at ridgemont high

i've been simpsonized

pretty darn accurate! try it yourself

homicide

today i was checking out one of my high school alumni websites and i noticed a memorial page. there were only three listed that graduated from the 1990s and only one where i actually recognized the name. derek andrew marston. i didn't really know him at all cause he had graduated the year i moved to berlin. but i knew of him. (i dated his younger brother, kyle, for a few weeks my junior year.) i do remember hearing about his death or that he had died but i didn't know any details. the power of google. i typed in his name and found a few articles about his death. here's a short synopsis of what happened:

National News Briefs; Fugitive in 2 Killings Is Caught in Wilderness
Published: August 6, 1998

The man sought in the killing of two campers last weekend was captured tonight after a six-day search, the authorities said.

The man, James A. Finley Jr., 21, of Hickory, was arrested about 7:30 P.M. near a hunting lodge, Sheriff Jeff Jordan of Montgomery County said. Mr. Finley was armed with a rifle and a handgun when he was confronted by deputies on foot, the authorities said.

The police said Mr. Finley pointed one of the weapons at officers as they approached, prompting one officer to a fire a shot. No one was injured.

The campers, Derek Andrew Marston and Tommi Danielle Byrd, both 24, were found shot and slashed on Sunday at their campsite in Linville Gorge Wilderness Area in western North Carolina.

Mr. Finley was thought to be an admirer of the man charged in the Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic bombing, Eric Robert Rudolph, who has evaded a search in the western North Carolina mountains.

***and what's crazy about the whole thing is where it happened. it's less than 20 miles away. insane.***

simon's got back

this video is too cute. little langei is singing and dancing to "baby got back"

his mom would like everyone to know, he learned it from watching shrek. and not from her. although i will say the moves look quite familiar, but i won't point any fingers.

the tooth diaries

a power chain, an additional metal chain, new arch wires and another rubber band. <-- in case you were wondering what this means, i've included a visual representation.

an unflattering photo, i know. my orthodontist informed me i have less than 6 months left in these bad boys. i will have a definitive answer september 24. september 5 will be my 2 year anniversary. i can hardly believe i've been wearing them this long. i've come a long way, oh yes, a long, straight way.

left incisor is the devil tooth that received the root canal. it only took 20 minutes, i could hardly believe it myself. drilled a hole in the back, scrapped out the pulp and infection, sealed it temporarily up and i was out of there. been nursing it with vicodin and antibiotics since. heading back september 10 to have it permanently sealed and internally bleached. $700 for, perhaps, an hour of work. i'm definitely in the wrong business.

the coat, the coat, the coat is on fire

one of our last evenings in springfield was spent burning aaron's white coat. i think he may have been a little too happy doing so. what do you think?

gettin to the root

tomorrow i'm heading to winston-salem to get a root canal. yes, the trauma my incisor suffered 15 years ago has finally caught up with me. when i got my braces tightened, big understatement, this last time it started to throb. my new orthodontist decided to add a power chain, an additional metal chain, new arch wires and another rubber band. i've got a mouth full of rubber and metal. the consequence...the death of tooth number 9. funny thing, i was worried i the orthodontist in boone wouldn't be able to treat me. apparently damon braces are fairly new and a lot of orthodontists don't use them yet. i lucked out cause the guy in boone travels and lectures on them. so now instead of heading to winston for ortho treatment, i'm heading for endo therapy.

what's in your backyard?

here's a gaggle/flock of wild turkeys taking a stroll up our neighbors driveway a few weeks ago. courtesy of my new camera phone. yes, i broke down and purchased a phone with said feature. i've got a few other nature and other boone shots to share and now that we have internet, waa-hoo, i'll be uploading and sharing in the next few posts. how's this brother dear? does this picture make you happy?

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.