Help me!

Seriously, I need help.

I have two sets of lovely, double windows in my house. One set in my living room and the other set in my soon-to-be guest room. Look at the picture above closely and you might notice that the window frame runs smack dab into the corner of the wall. How the heck am I supposed to put up a cool curtain rod above the window when the wall is right there? That means I either can't have a decorative end on one end or no decorative ends at all. That sucks and I'm not happy.



I became even more upset as my pathetic and useless attempt to track down Roman Shades have left me window fixture-less for over two months now. Why hello neighbors! I didn't think it was so bad until I came home the other night and realized from the street I could see all the way through our house to the dining room, where I could make out the wedding pictures on the back wall. I told the hubs getting curtains up on the front of the house just became top priority. Even more important than the dead tree that may fall on our house at any given moment (Dear Mother Nature: please stop with the major storms!).

After some Googling I thought I was on the right track when I found these lovely custom Roman Shades from a fantastic Dwell Studio fabric. That's when I noticed the price tag.

$306 for one window! And that wasn't even the right size! My windows are over 40 inches wide!!! And I have four of them! $700 for curtains per room is NOT in the budget.

Okay, realize, you don't need a cool custom fabric. Instead, go for a simple linen fabric because that's got to be cheaper.

Really, for that price I might as well get the cooler fabric.

I, personally, love this answer in the above website's FAQ:


In a nutshell, I'm screwed. I need help. Please recommend any and all affordable places to get decent Roman Shades. I swear I've looked everywhere, but so far I can't seem to find any fabric shades I like that come in weird sizes. When we bought the house we thought having 8 feet of window space would be so much fun. Lots of light! Big windows!


Stupid windows. This makes me miss our old townhouse with it's four windows total. So what if the dogs love sunning themselves all over the house now. So what if I love reading books in natural sunlight. Totally overrated.

Can we please not repeat last week?

In one week our house has survived a pig roast for 50+ people, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake, and Hurricane Irene. It's been a rough week and thankfully we pulled through just fine.


The hubs and did everything we could do to prepare for the oncoming storm, short of boarding up the house and buying a generator, on Friday night. He climbed the roof and broke out the 20ft ladder to cut down as many tree limbs near our house as he could. We were both terrified that the dead tree right behind our house would come crashing down. So scared in fact that we bunkered down in our living room on Saturday night for a restless night of sleep. We stayed up until 1am just listening to the wind howling outside and hoping that a tree didn't come down on our house. I was worried about our cars too, but in the grand scheme of things I would have gladly taken a destroyed car over a destroyed house.


We tried to be jovial and joke that we had enough booze and water stashed in our house to survive a few days without power, but really we were both on edge. A large tree limb came crashing down at 11:30pm Saturday night and in my paranoid state I threw on my rain boots and slicker to go outside and dragged the limb to the back of the yard. I was certain the wind would pick up the limb and throw it through either our patio door or bay window. If I would have had some rope or a fisherman's hook I would have been a great character on a horror movie set.

My brother was supposed to come over and ride out the storm with us, but unfortunately the high winds came sooner than expected and it wasn't a good idea for him to drive over in 50+ mile hour wind gusts. That was just another thing I worried about, my poor brother stranded all alone during a hurricane.

Thankfully, we're all okay. We were even in the very small minority of people who didn't lose power on Saturday. Sunday afternoon we took a walk through the neighborhood to get the dogs out of the house and see the extent of the damage. I couldn't bear to take pictures because how do you stop and take a picture of your neighbor's house with a tree on top of it? I couldn't do it. One of the great things that attracted the hubs and I to our neighborhood was all the trees. However, this week it looks like a pack of monsters ran through the neighborhood and ripped down every tree and tree limb they could get their hands on.



Jewels needs a vacation because she didn't sleep a wink over the weekend. She was really on edge and had so much to do with all the growling every time our house was pelted with another acorn or tree limb. Both dogs had to be coaxed out of the house anytime we made them go to the bathroom during the storm. We tried to pick times when the rain was less of a monsoon, but it rained for almost 24 straight hours!

I hope you and yours made it through the storm. Irene caused a lot of damage, especially in the Northeast, and people died during the storm. Of course that made me want to cuss out the idiots shown on the weather channel even more.

What the hell was that?

I'm sure you know by now that an earthquake rattled the East Coast yesterday afternoon. Thankfully, it appears that although the 5.8 magnitude quake was strong enough to do some damage it didn't do nearly the damage it could have caused elsewhere.

I, however, failed miserably at all forms of disaster preparedness. The rattling came in two waves with the second being the more powerful wave. At first one of my co-workers and I looked at each other and thought, "what the hell is that?" Then, when the second wave hit most of my co-workers ran for a doorframe and looked somewhat prepared. Like an idiot, I ran to the window to see what the hell was going on. Finally when I looked outside and didn't see the end of the world coming at me, rather that the trees and light posts were shaking too, I figured out what the heck was going on.

I'm probably to blame for the cup of water that was spilled all over my desk. I still maintain that the quake was the sole responsible party for the flipped picture frames.

Then the building was evacuated, no one could get a darn cell call out, text messages were getting dropped, yet I could post on Facebook with zero problems. Note to self: if the end of the world comes, get the word out quickly via Facebook. I really should buy the hubs a smart phone already so he can see my last post. I couldn't get ahold of him for 30 minutes and that bugged me.

While marooned outside everyone seemed in good spirits as news was traveling in that there wasn't extensive damage. Relief overcame pockets of individuals as one heard from so-and-so that so-and-so was fine. But then, we all saw the look of panic on one of our co-workers faces.

She couldn't reach her husband. She couldn't reach her daughter's school. She couldn't reach anyone.

Unfortunately, she'd been in that very same spot before except the last time the world went crazy her daughter was at a daycare facility in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 where she had been dropped off just an hour before by her dad, who worked there. Seeing that look of panic on my co-worker's face really brought everything back together. That's when I felt really bad for everyone in downtown DC, who probably thought something a lot worse was happening. Many people are already on edge because the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up and the ground shaking made people start to think the worst was happening.

Fortunately, cell service came back in. Everyone was fine. The mood quickly lightened and later in the day my formerly-freaked-out co-worker sent this along to cheer everyone up:





I'm happy to report that when I finally got home (note to self: mass transit sucks during any type of disturbance) all we had were a few upturned picture frames and items. The dogs didn't even soil anywhere and Jewels didn't look like she spent all afternoon growling at the ground.

Happy Anniversary!

Way back on August 11, 2007 aka just over four years ago I said, "I do!" to a pretty sweet guy. Unfortunately, on August 8 - 12, 2011 I was scheduled to be down in Puerto Rico, again, for work. Well that just wasn't going to do!

So the hubs tagged along for a few days. We had a very frank conversation in which I outlined that he couldn't get mad at me for working 8+ hour days because that's what I was there to do and the reason he could stay in my hotel room for free.

In the hubster's own words he had a great vacation acting as a "trophy wife." Venturing around shops, hanging out in the pool, laying out, walks along the beach, etc. Although, in typical man fashion he would go gambling in the morning and then that would be his "drinking money" for the day.

Thankfully the guy was sober enough for breakfast on our actual anniversary! I kid, I kid! He had to hop a flight home later that day, but it was sweet to go out for breakfast overlooking the ocean. Not too shabby.

The pups are running amuck!

The hubs and I were very fortunate that we closed on our house on Friday, June 3rd and our rental lease didn't end until June 30th. That gave us almost an entire month to clean up our previously vacant and foreclosed upon house, move our stuff, and then clean up our rental.

We were also insanely fortunate that once we had installed the new door locks on our house we were able to bring over the dogs well because we owned the place! Our intention was to bring them over as much as possible that way they could get as comfortable with the house and feel like they were home themselves. We knew we'd be moving them in on a Saturday and then leaving them all home alone on Monday morning while they went to work. Actually, the hubs went to work and I hopped on a flight to Puerto Rico.

Note to self: next time you buy a house, don't leave on a work trip less than 48 hours after moving in. The hubs will make a few comments about how he's unpacked more than you.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. I remember when we first moved from our little apartment in Newark to our duplex in Towson. The dogs were amazed by the stairs in our house. They ran up and down the stairs for hours on end and it was exhausting just to witness. There was no need to take them for a walk because they would wear themselves out on their stair workouts.

With that in the past, we were kind of curious of how they would react to a much bigger place. Well, here's the video to show you.

I cut off the video in the end because you can imagine what Jax continued to do once the camera was turned off. He has a few "favorite" trees and likes to rotate between them.


Hopefully, we can get some grass growing in the backyard next year and then we'll all enjoy running around like a crazy person.

The dogs have been great over these past six years with all the moving we've put them through. This is their fourth place of residence and very sadly it'll be their last. I promised myself I wouldn't think like that, but it's true. We're going to make this the best darn house for them possible because they deserve it.