Everyone needs 4 computers

Well no one needs 4 computers but sometimes that's just the way it ends up. Matt and I got a new laptop today! We have my desktop that I got before I went to college so it is 6.5 years old. My macbook is 5 years old. Matt has an old laptop that doesn't even work and I don't know how old it is. The desktop is still running strong but my macbook has this fun problem where you can use it for an unspecified amount of time before it freezes. This could be while you are starting up the computer or right when you've finally nagivated to the website you wanted to go to. We were told to try to re-install the whole system from the CDs that came with the computer but of course the computer froze in the middle of that so oh well.

Matt used the laptop a lot for school (as did I when I was in school) so we wanted to get one he could have for that. And it's just nice to be able to sit in the living room on the computer as I am now. I wanted to get an HP laptop because my HP desktop has lasted for so long and is still good. Well I was going to paste a picture in here but I can't get it to work. And I don't really feel like taking a picture of the new laptop right now.

One of the coolest thing it can do so far is to video chat through google chat. I can do that on my desktop computer but I have to hook up the webcam & microphone whereas it's all just ready to go on this computer. Isn't that funny how that is the next wave of communication technology? Soon we'll all just be talking to each other through webcams. For all I know everyone is doing that already and I missed the boat until now. I always see the little camera by everyone's name on gmail chat but just assume that people don't actually use it.

In other news, I haven't been to the house since Sunday! I think I am having withdrawals. This week has been very busy but this weekend we will spend a lot of time at the house. Beginning with tomorrow morning for me - I have tomorrow off of work! I'll work at the house for a few hours in the morning and then Matt and I are going to the High Museum for his Valentine's Day gift I got him. Then it's back to the house for most of the weekend (yey!).

Nothing else really new besides helping host a few baby showers. I love planning and cooking and making people feel special :) Since I cleaned the apartment.. somewhat.. yesterday, I now have time to go read, so until next time...

Going to Home Depot? We'll see you there

It's been a few days.. so what have we been up to? Does this answer your question?

We have gotten a lot accomplished on the house in the past few days. I finally finished prepping all of the baseboards to be painted and have primed about half of them now. I also bought most of the blinds for the house and installed 5 sets so far. The first set took me at least an hour or two. It was pure misery. But apparently there is a steep learning curve on those things because I installed the next 4 in about the same amount of time. I am also stoked because I found some roman shades for $20 at Home Depot.. obviously they are not real roman shades but they are exactly what I was looking for for our bedroom.

From the picture above, yesterday Matt blew insulation into the entire attic over the entire house. If you buy 20 bags of the blow-in insulation from Home Depot you get the machine for free for a day. We had bought one bag that Matt had pulled apart by hand and it was awful. So he talked with the guys at Home Depot about the machine and they told him this deal. It is really a two man job - one to blow it in and one to keep reloading the machine but Matt did it all himself, what a trooper. Running up and down the attic stairs to refill the machine. We even got to return 2 bags in the end that we didn't use.

We went to Home Depot 4 times yesterday. We did try Lowe's last weekend and I actually didn't really like it so we are now true Home Depot shoppers. So about those baseboards.. not sure how bright the white is that I am going to paint them but the primer is pretty bright. In fact, if you look closely you can tell it doesn't match the door frames and windows. I am inclined to paint the door frames as well but the prepping would take me another week. Knowing me I'll probably go through with it, but we'll see.

Also, does anyone have a reciprocating saw we can borrow?

My first groceries picture

Yes you are about to see a picture of my groceries. I enjoy seeing other people's saving so I thought you might enjoy mine. I got almost $50 worth of groceries for $22.77, so I think it's pretty fun. Especially because a lot of our grocery budget went to Valentine's Day this month, and we already have a ton of food in the house anyway. I think the reason I enjoyed this shopping trip so much is that I finally took advantage of the "extra bucks" back at CVS. At CVS I got two tubes of toothpaste, a pack of gum and 8 rolls of paper towels, all for $4.59! See, that's fun :) CVS was my biggest savings tonight. Here is everything I got for $22.77 (a few things weren't on sale but we needed them):

And I just remembered I forgot something.. oops. But after 3 stores I think I'm done for a few days :)

Almost forgot..

In case you didn't know, The Amazing Race started back last night!! I had no idea and Matt was flipping through the channels and it was on. I was relieved to find out that it was the premiere, so I didn't miss any episodes yet and will watch that one tonight online. If you don't watch this show, you should. It's my all time favorite! I can't believe I didn't know it was coming on!! Happy Monday!

House Updates and Valentine's Day

The weekend is drawing to a close. About 45 minutes left to be exact.. if I get to bed at 10 like I try to do. What have I done this week? Been to Home Depot about 5 times :)

We have been busy at work on the house. My tasks this week have included scouring the two bathrooms clean, steaming the carpet and preparing the baseboards to be painted. The bathrooms were disgusting and took me a while but now they are sparkly and clean. The carpet - oh my. Luckily, there are only two rooms in our house with carpet - the family room and our master bedroom closet. So the main one is obviously the family room. The people who lived there before us had a black dog and this dog, as well as their kids I am suspecting, did a number on this carpet. I steamed the carpet for THREE hours this weekend and I am still coming up with brown water every time I run the thing. I am on my second huge bottle of shampoo. It looks SO much better though and smells good finally. I can't believe how different it looks and how all the spots came out! The baseboards are tedious but will be worth it. Whoever painted this last time first painted the wall and dropped paint on the baseboards and then painted over the drips. They also did not nail some of the finishing nails in all of the way and did not putty up the holes of the nails that are in. So I have been hammering in nails and covering up tons of tiny holes with putty in addition to sanding. I am about 2/3 of the way done with the prep work on those.

In other news, you are most likely aware that yesterday was Valentine's Day. My Valentine surprised me on Friday when I got home from work with a clutter-free dining room table set with our fine china, a dozen red roses and a lovely little bag with this in it:

We celebrated last night with a delicious home cooked meal. Matt bought a small chicken and cooked it for 3 hours with rosemary butter. I made my aunt's famous broccoli casserole and biscuits. I also made a praline cheesecake from my new favorite cookbook. Add a bottle of Clos Du Bois chardonnay and you have quite a meal. Everything was delicious!

Meal minus the chicken.. it was hard to get a good picture

Praline cheesecake - yum!

We are homeowners!

I think this post may get a little long.. so I hope I don't bore you. I haven't posted in about a week so I have a few things to catch up on. Starting with the weekend..

Friday night we watched Madagascar (so cute!) and I pretty much went to bed early as usual. Saturday we got up and run a ton of errands. We headed up to Barrett Pkwy to get everything done. First we went to Shane Co to get our rings shined up. I also asked them if they could rhodium plate my necklace but they said it would be $70 so forget it. Next we headed over to Joann's because the button fell off of my jeans. I have never had that happen before and these aren't that old. I had tried Walmart & Michael's for a jeans button but they don't have it. Joann's has everything for making clothes so I lucked out and found some. I also got in line behind about 5 old women who were all standing there even though was no cashier. So I left to find the cashier. I don't know why everyone was just standing there!

Next we headed to Town Center mall. Matt went to Lenscrafters and finally got some new lenses for his glasses. His have been scratched ever since a week after he got them about a year and a half ago. I wandered around the mall for an hour or so and even got my Clinique makeup at Belk with the Clinique bonus (thanks Scott!). We ate Taco Bell in the food court for lunch.. can't tell you the last time I did that. After the mall we went to a nearby pet store to look at dogs. We won't be getting one until June or so but we wanted to look. Of course I fell in love with a little girl puppy cocker spaniel. I'm nervous about owning a dog but I guess I will fall in love with it easily!

Saturday night we headed to the Harlans for a potluck and games. The food was delicious! I also made an angel food cake out of my new favorite cookbook and it was incredible (in my opinion anyway but I'm biased). We played Partini which I had wondered if it was fun or not due to the lame commercials. Cranium had lame commercials too but it is a good game so I thought Partini might be good. It was! I really liked it a lot, and I would definitely buy it over Cranium. What a fun night, I love seeing everyone there when we have those potlucks!

Matt had a solo at church at the 8:30 service on Sunday so I went to that service instead of 11. I enjoyed the service and seeing how it was different from 11 o'clock and also it was nice to get out early and have the rest of the day to do things. I did all of my grocery shopping and got a TON of stuff. Our fridge is overflowing, can't wait to have more room in the house to store things! I even tried out the Dekalb farmer's market finally and got a ton of fresh veggies for cheap.

Monday was crazy because I was told that my mortgage wouldn't be ready for the closing on Tuesday at 9am. Great. I knew it wasn't the end of the world because it's not like we were immediately moving or trying to sell a house at another closing, it was just an inconvenience. So Tuesday I went to work (even though I wasn't originally going to) and waited for a call. At 11:45 they told me that our closing would be at 1. I ate quickly at work, ran home for a few things, went to the bank to get the big check and headed to the closing. Matt met us over there and it was only me, Matt, our realtor and the closing attorney.

Closing only took us 45 minutes! Everyone says how many papers you sign and how ridiculous it is but I didn't really think it was that crazy. I probably only signed papers for about 10 minutes.. there weren't as many as I was picturing. Our realtor was so sweet and brought us tulips and sparkling wine. Matt and I headed straight for the house! Our key was hiding at the house (apparently with foreclosures they re-key and then hide your key there). Once we located the key, we got in and I made Matt carry me over the threshold ;-) Nice.

We spent the afternoon and evening cleaning, cleaning and cleaning. Matt's parents came over and were a HUGE help. Matt and his dad went around fixing a few things while Nancy and I cleaned. I cleaned all of the windows and we cleaned almost all of the baseboards. They ordered us pizza so we had our first official meal all sitting on the carpet in the living room eating pizza off of paper towels. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture of just Matt and I.


I took off yesterday afternoon as half of my flex day so I took the other half this afternoon. I went to work this morning and left at noon to get some things done. I am realizing how hard it will be to balance fixing a house, moving, keeping up our apartment, and other things I want to do (run, cook, socialize, etc). So I got home from work and ran 3 miles and came back in to get boxes together and clean a little. Matt and I headed out for our first Home Depot trip and then up to the house. We got there about 3:30 and worked until 6. In that time I finished cleaning the baseboards and cleaned most of both bathrooms. They were disgusting!

I think this post has gotten long enough. More to come on the house as we work on it. Once I get to painting in a week or two I'll try to get some pictures to show you the colors we've chosen. Hope you all are having a good week!

My new favorite thing

Today has been great. It's my first "flex day" off of work since before all of the holidays. I spent the morning cleaning around the apartment and then headed off to run some errands. Bed, Bath & Beyond was my first stop to look for water filters, of which they did not have the one I needed. It was fun to walk around and look at what they have though and daydream about decorating our house. On to Macy's for a return and to ask the Clinique lady when the next bonus time is (April 1st by the way!). Kind of far away so I still plan on trying Bloomingdale's & Nordstrom to see if they are having one right now. Next I headed to Michael's to try to find a new metal button for my jeans. These jeans aren't that old and the button just popped off the other day. Michael's didn't have what I needed so oh well. I headed to Target where I found the water filter I needed as well as two pairs of shoes for $6.24 each!! See what I got:

The ones on the left are black and the ones on the right are maroon.. hard to tell in the picture. Both are flats.

After running errands I was going to go to Starbucks to read but the parking lot was full so I came home for lunch. After lunch I went and walked 3 miles on the trail behind our apartment, what a nice day! Then Matt got home from school around 3 so we've been spending time together.

Ok, on to my new favorite thing:

I stole/borrowed this from my dad over Christmas and I LOVE it. I have a lot of cookbooks, which I try to use, but it seems whenever I want to make something I rely on allrecipes.com since I can see how many stars recipes got and what people said about them (you can't see that in a cookbook, obviously). But with this Pillbury cookbook, EVERYthing is guaranteed to be delicious. And everything in it looks/sounds amazing. They even have the nutrition listed for each recipe. I love flipping through it and have made a few things on a whim. One night I was feeling the need to bake since I hadn't in a while (and it's my favorite thing to do) so I made these for our dessert:

It was a while ago.. a cookbook picture will have to suffice.

And today as I was flipping through I found this amazing sounding recipe for Maple Oatmeal Muffins for breakfast. Of course Matt started drooling when I mentioned them so I just whipped them up, can't wait to have one for breakfast tomorrow!

And Daddy, if you read my blog, sorry you can't have your book back. I doubt you used it anyway :) If you want it back I'll need a replacement off of half.com!

Lesser of two evils? Please help!

As a blogging formality: Matt and I had a nice weekend, finally got some sleep, got to relax, watched some of the super bowl, yada yada yada. House closing is a week from tomorrow at 9am (yey!).

Ok onto the real reason for this post. I hold huge grudges both with Comcast and AT&T (DSL). I used Comcast for the 5 years I was in apartments before Matt and I moved in together. Over those 5 years, there were always stupid things about Comcast making me mad, just like everyone else. Well the straws (yes, plural) that broke the camel's back happened in my last year with Comcast. Lots of terrible things, the worst of which was Comcast taking $500+ from my checking account. I got it back of course and I don't even want to get into the story and all of the reasons I hate Comcast. So, I vowed to never use them again for tv, internet or anything. Matt and I currently don't have cable television so that's no problem in avoiding Comcast. However, we do have (and need) internet at home and currently have the "no phone line" DSL through AT&T. I have had a few unpleasant experiences with AT&T but it took me calling them today to really put me through the roof about them.

Every time you call AT&T (this has happened to me multiple times) you don't know what department you are talking to but whichever one it is is the wrong one, they can't help you. So they transfer you around and every time you are transferred you go through their telephone system AGAIN and wait another X minutes. Today I was on the phone with them for over an hour and spoke to SEVEN customer service reps, only one of which could help me, but not with my entire problem. Is that even possible?? Did that really happen?? Ridiculous. I still didn't get anyone who would clear this $0.79 charge off of my bill. Every time I reached someone they couldn't help me and then they would re-route me back through the phone system to wait another 14 minutes. I told the final guy I spoke with that I had spoken to 6 other reps and they couldn't help me. He asked which departments I spoke to and I said I had no idea and that I didn't even know what department he was in. Am I really expected to ask each rep which department they are in?

Ok I'm over this. The purpose of this post is to ask your advice in who to get internet from at our new house. I have already checked every provider in Atlanta and my options are 1) Comcast, 2) AT&T, 3) Verizon broadband card (way expensive and you have to pay if you go over your allotted amount) or 4) dial-up. This is what it has come down to. I can't get Earthlink or Verizon at the house, or any others as far as I know. If you know of another one, please let me know.

So your job: help me pick #1-4 or tell me of another option! Also, your mission if you choose to accept: become an entrepreneur and open an ISP business in Atlanta who actually cares about their customers and you will make a KILLING!

One more thing, almost forgot, today marks 6 months of marriage for us and a wonderful 6 months it has been! :)