Blah Blah Blah..... But what is new with the house?

After my not so successful weekend alone, I got a bunch done for sure but not stuff that leaves an impression, we have had two weeks together to take care of some much needed home improvements. Now let's not get caught up in the amount of stuff Kate does in respect to me, and let's instead focus on how the house is coming together. Deal?

Kate brought home a number of treasures from her trip to Iowa including a crib, two dining room chairs, 5 old advertisements framed, a large milk jug, and some other stuff that I can't recall but will be made fun for not noticing. Kate has painted the crib and a dresser we got from her parents white to go in the aloe baby room. She also made curtains for that room, made a baby bumper out of the same fabrics she used for the curtains, and made cushions for the rocking chair with the same materials. There is a unifying theme of aloe, baby blue, chocolate brown, and shabby chic white. Kate also painted the two new dining room chairs and the other 4 existing ones as well as recovering the seat of one of them. Right about now you are probably wondering what it is that I am doing to contribute but we made a deal not to bring that up. How soon you forget your end of the bargain or fickle reader!

Kate planted the vegetable garden that she started in the raised bed that she made with the help of Joe the neighborhood gardener. He gave her pointers and she nodded politely and then just did it the way she wanted. (Something I know a lot about personally) Kate and I finished painting the baby room and cleared out a soon to be flower bed on the back of the house. I took the saw to some trees growing through our fence and moved piles of dirt from one side of the house to the other to make sure the grade around the house keeps the water out of the basement. So all in all we (Kate) have made a lot of progress in the past couple of weeks and the little changes are starting to add up. I will get pictures up soon, I just need to track down a camera. The babies room is looking so cool and it is vintage Kate. I am continually amazed at her sense of style and the way she has of adding and subtracting in small amounts from rooms until the right balance is found.

Tad is the smoking man

I met the smoking man today, his name is Tad and he seems very depressed. That maybe why I see him out smoking every single time I enter or exit the building. As I was walking up I saw him and thought I must introduce myself and find out his name. There is only so many times you can walk right by a guy without so much as a gangsta head nod before you become cosmically liable. So this morning I did it. I walked up and said "Hi, I;m James, What's your name?" Tad seemed like I was accusing him of something and sheepishly gave up his name. I said "I see you every day and it seems silly to me that I don't know ytour name." and he just looked at me and shrugged. Well I know his name now and I will use each time I see him. Maybe we'll become friends and share stories about growing up in the rural Northwest. Or maybe he will stop going there to smoke to avoid me and my nagging Hello's. The future is wide open and I am excited to see where this goes.

P.S. Basketball was canceled this morning so I went to the 24 hour drug store and got 1 stick deodorant, 1 package allergy medication, 1 breakfast burritto, and 1 Grande Vanilla Latte. You really can get just about anything at the 24 hour drug store. I browsed grills and lawn fertilizer and tried on some shoes.

Can you walk? Then get up that ladder and finish up!

After a great dinner on the porch last night Kate and I headed over to Lazy Days Coffee shop in Irvington to pay off her debt and bounce baby names off each other. On the way there we drove by a guy, in a wheel chair, mowing his lawn with a push mower. It looked 100 times harder then what you are picturing right now but he was knocking it out. I couldn’t believe it, I whined about having to paint the dining room while this dude mowed his freaking lawn from his wheel chair. That’s just great, now when I try to get out of anything Kate is gonna remind me of that dude and I will have to do it. I mean if he can mow his lawn I can paint a couple stripes right?

Wish lists and registries

This afternoon at lunch Kate and I strolled around Target with our bar code gun creating a Baby registry. We stood over whelmed in the aisles of pink and blue waiting for the other to pick out something we needed. We don't even know what we need but we started zapping anyway. I got to use the gun because I earned by working so hard yesterday. Below are the links to our Target Registry and My Amazon Wish list for books and such, you know, just in case you wanted to see it or something.

Amazon

Target

Gender Rohls

As you can see below I got a good deal of the stuff on my list done though some of it was done by Kate while I watched a Laker Game. Yeah that’s right, Kate mowed the lawn while I sat in the living room watching a basketball game on TV. 7 months pregnant Kate, in 80 degree Thunder Storm Warning weather mowing the front and back lawn while I, James Michael Rohl, sat in the cool house watching Kobe and company remind the Suns that they are still dangerous. Now I realize that this sounds bad, it sounded bad to me at the time, but Kate would not let me mow the lawn. She said “How often are the Lakers on TV? How much do you love the Lakers? And they are playing the Suns Right? I would be more upset with you if you didn’t watch this game!” She made great points and I eventually gave in but you have to believe me it was harder then you think.

*update* Weekend Plans While Kate is gone

Kate is heading to Iowa with her mom for the weekend and I will be home alone. I want to try and get some things done this weekend so I am going to put them up here to try and motivate myself:

• Clean out the Library
• Move furniture out of baby room
• Paint baby room
• Hook up home network
• Mow and fertalize lawn
• Finish painting Dinning Room
• Put in a section of fence in the back yard

We will see how well I do on this when I update on Monday, get your bets in now.

* Red equals finished*

We playin basketball...

I played basketball this morning at the church. Nothing like starting the day with some hoops to get the juices flowing. We played 3 on 3 with pretty even teams. The guy I was guarding was about 4 inches taller but only went right and was afraid to put the ball on the floor so it was kinda like guarding Kevin. That is not true at all, Kevin can go both directions and loves to take it to the rim but I can’t pass up an opportunity to senselessly taunt some one with lies.

Any way there was an incident in the rubber match, third game where one of the other guys, not my man, drove past his man and I rotated over. He tried to pass off and we stole the ball and he called a foul on me. Said I hit his arm on the follow through. WHAT? The follow through of your bad pass that we stole? First of all no I didn’t, and second of all you an idiot. You don’t call a foul just because you made a bad pass, if that was the case Len would call fouls all night. Sorry, sorry, Len is a great passer, at least I think he is, I can’t ever remember him actually passing but I have heard stories about it.

Anyway I was incredulous at the call. In the grand scheme of things it is no big deal but it is 20-20 playing to 21 in the final game. I mean it’s not like we get a trophy or anything but an injustice is an injustice. The dude kept saying respect the call and I kept laughing at him. They missed there next shot and we got the rebound. I tried to come up top and get the ball but my team mates would not pass it. In my head over and over I kept saying “give me the ball, give me the ball, I want the ball, for the love of GOD GIVE ME THE BALL!” but we took a bad shot with a double team and the bad guys got the rebound and hit the last shot. We would have won if they had given me the ball, I know I am cocky and have a big head sometimes but I have no doubt we would have won. Some of you reading this know we would have won too. But I didn’t get the ball, and it is better that way. There are no trophies to be won, just guys getting some much needed exercise before sitting all day at their crappy jobs. I thanked everyone for the games and shook hands with the unjust foul caller. We left sweaty and smiley, grateful that no one got hurt, better for the run. But we could have won too.

Of course I don't look busy.I did it right the first time.

Whooa stop the presses! Mark accidently fell on his keyboard and post came out of it. I guess there is some truth to that whole big bang blog theory. Well done Mark Rohl, well done indeed!

A great weekend and not one thing stolen

While driving to dinner before going to a concert I all of a sudden realized that we live in Indianapolis and I really like it. I am not sure which one is more surprising. I never thought I would live in the mid-west let alone really really like it so it was a strange realization. It all started in the morning with Kate bringing back a wicker couch she found on Craigslist for $20. We sat out on the front porch and had some cereal while watching the neighborhood coming to life. Then we want for a walk to the Library around the corner to return some movies. We went to the antique store and looked at bowling shoes and bags, the shoes for me and the bag for the baby. Well for us to carry baby stuff but you know what I mean. We didn't get either but ran into Kate's parents on our walk back home and sat and talked for a while. After they left Kate and I ripped her Dar Williams CDs in preparation for the concert later. She told me about the songs she loved and the people that went with them. Then we returned a ladder we borrowed from a neighbor and sat in the street and chatted for an hour about all that neighborhood stuff. On our way back home we ran into the coolest people in Indy and they came bearing gifts. They put together a bag of baby stuff they had multiples of from the 3 baby showers they have had. We now have enough baby keys for our kid to get a jump start on his career as a building maintence man. After some naps we gussied our selves up and headed out to Yats for dinner. Matt was there and two meals with drinks came out to a little over a dollar. As we were heading to the concert and reflecting on the day I said we were definitely getting broken into. It seems like any time we have a great day we find a missing stereo or a broken window but this morning there wasn't even trash in our yard. Now I don't really believe that something bad is going to happen when we have a good day, I really don't but it is nice to have some proof of that. The concert was good and Dar played all the songs Kate played for me earlier in the day. I still can't believe I am in the mid-west, and I still can't believe I'm so happy.

Blog Adjustment

I have added a couple new things and had to remove some others:

Added

1. Link to my Flickr page where we have our photos online to view. There are some new Hawaii pictures and we will be adding photos as we go.
2. House progress bars. These are handy graphs to show our progress in fixing up our old house
3. Del.ic.o.us links. This is my little black book on the internet where I keep track of pages I have come across and want to bookmark. Instead of bookmarking it on the computer I am at I store it here so I can get to it anywhere and you could too.

Removed

1. Mark's Blog. Sadly Mark does not update his blog more then once every three months so I have made the tough decision to remove the link. It is particularly sad because Mark is like a brother to me.

Well that is what's new around here, thanks for having a computer!

Getting High with the in-laws

1st row: Heather, Mandy, Kate, James
2nd row: Scott, Kris, Meg
3rd row: Tom, Mike

It mean hello and Goodbye

Oh to be pregnant in Hawaii

Mission Impossible: Find J*'s Cube

So I don't know where to Find J*. But we have this handy map on our internal web portal that shows what everyone's extension is and where their cube is so I should be able to find it right? I mean I know right from left, north From south so this should be quite easy. Should be up two flight so of stairs and through a couple of locked doors, I can do this. We'll see.

The power of environment

I work in a three story building that seems to be shaped like a W. We are called Wiley so I thought the shape of the building was intentional but I guess it was already here and we just leased it. How fortuitous! The three story building is split up into a number of large rooms off long hallways through the center of the building. All of the room have an electronic lock that opens with a little grey piece of plastic that we carry. In order for me to get to the lunch room I need to go through r doors with the electronic locks past many other doors with their own locks. It is all kind of depressing.

The way the building is laid out hinders any kind of feeling of working together. I have a friend of mine that works on the third floor in a different department but I don’t have any idea where or how to get there. Some times I see her in the lunch room and think what is J* doing here? Oh yeah, that’s right she works for this company too. I wonder if this is the intention of the company or just a bi-product of the corporate model. I wonder if they know that the whole arrangement fosters fear and ambivalence. I wonder.

I’m not sure how I would do it if it were all up to me but I think I would try to make the building much more open. The many locked rooms with plain hallways have too much of a negative effect on me. I feel trapped and isolated. I ignore people in the hallways for reasons I can’t even begin to access. When you couple the nature of a Customer phone support job with this environment it is no wonder why it is so hard to motivate workers. Their environment is depressing, they hear people’s complaints all day and then we are supposed to give them all this negative feed back to motivate them to do better. Why would they? There has to be something better then this.

Sunday, Becky, and Penny

So on Sunday night I preached at our church service on Mat 6:19-34. Well not so much preached as lead a group discussion on the topic of money and worry. The gist of which is that we make a conscious choice not to worry and it is a daily choice that we need to make. Fast forward to Tuesday morning and Kate and I are on the way to the Dr.’s office to have a second ultra sound and some other tests. I wasn’t there for the appointment Kate had with our Dr. ( I say “our” but she really isn’t having me drop my drawers and put my feet into any stirrups), and Kate wasn’t worried about the extra tests so I wasn’t worried either.

We saw the baby again in the Ultra sound and it was less alien more baby this time. Things like ears, hair, sucking thumb, and eye lids were easily seen and marveled over while Becky, our technician, took measurements. It wasn’t until I was on my way to work that I started to think why do we need these tests again? Is everything OK? Why didn’t Becky tell us anything? Were the measurements normal? All of these questions started swirling around my head and I started to get worried. But it didn’t last long. There wasn’t anything I could do. If there is something wrong then it’s wrong and I can’t do anything about it. And actually there is no reason to think something is wrong, only that we have a big baby and while that is bad for Kate it is not a medical problem. Half way to work I made the choice not to worry .

Later that night we had our last Lamaze class and we learned about what to expect as we took the baby home. We looked at flash cards of poop just like Rob said we would. She talked about how to change a diaper to keep the little dude from peeing on you and told the ladies to let their men change the diaper however they wanted. “Unless you want to do it all the time, let him do it his way. He will learn and might teach you a thing or two.” As the class was coming to an end I realized just how much I enjoyed our instructor. She had me laughing my way through this process and when all was said and done I had learned a bunch. I could walk around the hospital without getting weak in the knees, that in it’s self is worth the price of admission. I understand the process better and know much more about how to care for Kate through all of this. Thank you that Penny!

Storms and stuff

Last night after getting back home from church we heard the sirens going off again. Is this a Thunder storm warning or a tornado warning. What is the difference between a watch and a warning again? We turned on the news to see that we were under a tornado watch and thunder storm warnings. Then the winds picked up and the rain started to fall. Hail pelted the windows and the wind got stronger and stronger. The rain came down in sheets and we started to see water on our floor. We traced it back to the windows and saw that it was comming down through the window frames. I went upstairs and saw that the wind had blown in an upstairs window frame so it was tilted in and rain was blowing in like spray over the bow of a transatlantic vessel. The water was going between the floor boards and the wall and pouring down through the walls into the windows frames down stairs. I adjusted the window and wiped up the water upstairs and put towels down on the floor in the living room as the storm passed over.

More home Improvement Saturdays

After a pretty uneventful winter Kate and I shook off the dust and got back to the process of improving our home. A run to Lowes for some wood, dirt, screws, and a shovel got us off on the right foot. There were three things we wanted to get done

1. Fix the garage door
2. Finish painting the side windows
3. Make a raised garden bed

Once we got back I called Jerry, the neighborhood handy man, and we got started on putting the garage back together. While we were doing that Kate mowed the lawn a little and started putting the garden together. Once we got the garage fixed Jerry and I helped Kate connect the boards and sink the posts into the ground. Jerry Left after a near miss with the drill and Kate and I started on the painting the windows. Kate is about 3 to 10 times faster painting then I am but I can still beat her in a foot race so she shouldn't get a big head or anything. We finished the windows and Kate mowed the rest of the lawn. There was still no dirt in the garden but we called it a day to watch some basketball. Tomorrow we will finish the garden but today was a good day.