The look of LauraCatoe.com from the beginning of December 2003 to the end of May 2004.
See a reconstructed veresion here.
Monthly Archive for May, 2004
Kris is downstairs playing the PS2. I keep having to throw the cat off the keyboard. We’ve been on the ‘net like 6 times and already we have a virus (Welchia.B.Worm). I downloaded iTunes but have yet to open it. [Dammit, Satine. Off the keyboard!]
We told the electricians that we had a tenant that wanted to move in June 1. They figured it was Jaimie’s side since hers is the one that’s had so much work done. Wrong, guys. Jaimie isn’t on a deadline. Chris and Liz are. Which is why Jaimie could move in tomorrow, and Liz ‘n Chris still have no outlets or fixtures.
But they do have a bathroom floor again. Whoever did all the repairs on these duplexes always chose the cheapest, most ineffectual route. Looks like the toilet in Liz ‘n Chris’ side was ajar from the wax ring. When it began to leak and soak the flooring, what did they do? Added some caulk and another layer of floor. Brilliant! So there were four or so layers of floor to remove, and the water damage had gone all the way to the supports in the sub-flooring. Great.
The claw-foot tub in there weighs about a gazillion pounds, though. You don’t just “move it out of the way” or anything. Kris’ dad came up yesterday, and he is a genius. The tub is now hovering, supported by some strategic 2×4s. There is enough room to get under there to fix the subfloor (done) and prime the floor for some stick-and-press tiles (not done) and get to the wall behind the tub to prime and paint (not done). It will take manly men to get that tub back in place (Kris and Chris, this means you).
Speaking of Kris, he’s done with the PS2, so that means I’m done here.
This is how close I am to finishing the magazine collage of Jaimie:
I’m actually a little closer, cause after I scanned it this morning, I finished most of her shirt. My goal was to finish the background tomorrow. But a) I’m about to run out of rubber cement and b) I decided to take a vacation day tomorrow to work on the duplex. I can’t help Kris one iota when it comes to the plumbing. But I can caulk like there’s no tomorrow.
Tonight: grocery store. If industrious, make lasagna for tomorrow night.
Tomorrow: duplex the day, lasagna and borrowed movies the night.
Saturday: duplex the morning away, hang with the Abercrombies by day’s end.
Sunday: church. duplex. chili.
Monday: if it shines, hopefully swim at the Pickles. if it rains, duplex. @#$%!
Tuesday: lunch w/grand’rents. work 4pm to midnight to cover local elections.
I got an e-mail from my cousin Cecily today. She lives in Dothan, my mom’s hometown. She’s thinking of starting a business and wanted to know if I could help her come up with a logo. That is right up my alley, so I said yes.
She asked how Aunt Janis is doing (cause my GJ is Aunt Janis to her). Cecily’s grandmother was GJ’s sister Hilda, and she passed away in the 1980s. I figure that since my mom has been gone, GJ is sort of like my surrogate mom, the way she was when my parents would drop me off in Dothan with her while they were at school or conferences. I’m guessing that with Hilda gone, as well, that makes GJ a surrogate grandmother to Cecily.
Cecily and her parents (Joe and Sharman) want GJ to move back to Dothan. That’s what I’d pick for her, too. I know they’d take care of her. I understand that she doesn’t want to stay up here, especially in a house that is adjacent to her former son-in-law. But she’s not going back to Dothan (even though her nephews offered to buy her a house!). She bought a lot in Florida, next to her remaining son’s house. She actually bought it years ago, knowing mom was sick and thinking that if mom passed away before she did, that GJ and her son Richard (Doug’s twin � Doug being the son in Florida) would move down to sunny FL. And then Richard went and died before mom and Doug (who worked for Enron) told GJ “hey, my company is really great, why not invest?” and GJ lost lots and Doug lost his retirement funds.
So there ya go. Doug works insane hours, and he’s the only person she knows in that city. And with all that she lost in the Enron scandal, she doesn’t have the money to build a house on her lot, so she’ll have to go to the bank and hire a contractor and then she and Dad have to sell the house up here and she has to move, and did I mention she turns 90 this October? Yeesh.
But you know how crazy people can be. Wanting to make their own decisions. And she’s decided that moving to Florida is the way to go.
She’s says she’s lived too long, cause she’s outlived her husband, 4 of her 5 children, all her siblings and most of her friends. I told her that when she gets to heaven, she’ll have a big table waiting for her. Friends and family saying “Janis, what took you so long?” And I picture that Ralph, the granddad I never knew, will stand up from his seat and pull out a chair for her. One next to my mom. Then they’ll all sit around and tell stories, cause that’s something their family loves to do. And nobody will be sick or in pain. Just laughter and smiles and full heads of hair.
In my locale, basic cable is $45 for 50+ channels. You get the major networks and the specialized channels (VH1, Discovery, MTV, TLC, TNT, FX, Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, etc.). “Movie channels” are extra.
For Kris and I, this amounts to $35 a month for VH1. See, for $10, you can get just the major networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, WB, UPN, FOX). So all the rest of the stations equal $35, but the only one we ever watched seemed to be VH1. We sure didn’t watch $35 a month of it.
We had the cable guy come out yesterday to downgrade us to sub-basic cable. (Yeah, I know. They don’t really have to come to your house to do that. But, as I said a few days ago, the people at Comcast are asshats.) The cable company will do its absolute best to talk you out of $10/mo. service. And the dude himself was all like “can I just ask why?!?”
{The cable company is to people who want the fewest channels possible what women who use tampons are to women who don’t: irate about someone else’s decision.}
Last night, Kris and I sat down with our less than 15 channels and did something we never did when we had over 50. We just “saw what was on.” Not surprisingly, what was on was reality shows. We watched 2 episodes of Fear Factor on NBC, a few minutes of some kind of historical reality series on APT and then some karaoke on the local access channel.
Jaimie used to tape the karaoke when we lived at Apt. 711. We’d watch it and I always hoped to see somebody I knew. I said this very thing to Kris last night, and then it cut to the next person on stage… who happened to be one of my coworkers.
That’s sub-basic cable karma, for you.
Oy, vay, these duplexes. I asked Kris if he could go back in time if he would do this again. He says yes. I say no. I hope it turns out like our wedding: there were times during the planning that I wished we had just eloped. But the day itself was so cool, I’m glad we did it. I’m not there with the duplii yet. And after all the work Kris put into Chris and Liz’s bathroom floor yesterday and today, maybe I should ask him my metaphorical question again.
Our neighbor Brad is in a new band and their first gig was last night. We thought it would be very cool to go, but as every inch of Kris seemed to be exhausted and/or in pain, we stayed in and watched Underworld.
The heating and air dudes are done and paid. The electricians are (surprise!) not done. But hey, the money isn’t exactly there to pay them even if they were, so there ya go. Not done painting the place… about to run out of paint… can’t afford more at this juncture.
We took Saturday off. Went swimming. Ordered pizza. Rented In the Cut (which was not what I expected) and Pieces of April (which made me cry).
GJ says her tests went okay. Polyps were found, but she said the doc didn’t seem overtly concerned. I’m going over to hang out with her tomorrow night. I predict a stop at Quizno’s on the way.
Lorna lent me the first Anita Blake book, but instead of starting that, I flipped through my sketchbook and decided that since the magazine paper collage of Jaimie is the coolest thing in there, it really needs finishing.
On both Tuesday night and last night, Cindy came over to use the oven. It was for biscuits on Tuesday and garlic bread last night. So both nights Kris came home to the smell of freshly baked bread and asked me what I’d been cooking. “Nothing.” What a tease, huh?
When Cindy came over Tuesday, Jesse (age 4 if memory serves me right) was playing video games. She told him where she’d be, but in the fog of gaming, he forgot. When she came back to him, he was upset and crying because he thought he was all alone. Aww.
So last night, he walked over with her. She was on the phone with her mom, so Jesse sat down with me and told me he has this special thing just for kids so they can make sandwiches. “He means Lunchables,” Cindy called from the kitchen. And then he said I could borrow his Blue’s Clues cd.
Somehow, we got on the subject of swimming and holding your breath underwater and such. Jesse says he’s never gotten water up his nose. I told him it’s awful. That it burns and then goes down your throat and chokes you. “So, dude, when they try to teach you how to hold your breath underwater without holding your nose, totally learn. Cause I’m 26 and I don’t know how and it’s a pain in the… it’s a pain.”
We went over the three common ways to avoid water up the nose. #1 - pinch your nose with your fingers. #2 Blow air out of your nose. #3 Well, I don’t know how to do that one, so I couldn’t really tell him. How do you teach someone that? It’s sort of like closing off your windpipe or something, right?
I won’t talk about the Angel finale (since Rowan won’t see it in Australia for another few weeks) except to say I found it mostly perfect. Sure, the folks at Mutant Enemy pissed me off more than enough over the last 2 seasons, but still I will dearly miss a show that could make me laugh and cry in the span of a single hour.
Liz is gonna go with me to Birmingham today, so that we can scope out cool papers/envelopes for her wedding invites.
GJ, my maternal grandmother, called last night to say the doc found blood in her colon. That’s never good. Tests are scheduled for tomorrow. My other grandmother will have a cow when she finds out, so GJ’s not telling her until after the tests. I’m glad that my uncle is town so that someone will be there with her.
Dad’s in Philadelphia for 2 weeks.
The electricians still aren’t done.
The people at Comcast are asshats.
I miss The 11th Hour. Specifically, the messageboards. The group of people that posted there, I liked their taste, their sense of humor. I could trust their take on movies and stuff. I mean, it was from reading that messageboard that I thought “Huh, maybe I ought to give Sandman a try. The 11th hour gals seem to like it.”
I lament that my beloved zine for chicks who dig sci-fi was deceased before Buffy and Angel were. That I never got to read any articles there about Harry Potter. That I can’t go and see what they think of Van Helsing before I see it at the theater. C’est la vie.
Now I have Television Without Pity. It is so not the same, but it does give me a place to go when I think “Well, that was an interesting episode of ‘…’ � I wonder what Recapper X thought of it?” (Except when it comes to Angel, cause the recapper always makes the recaplet blurb rhyme and the recaplets themselves in the voice of various Buffyverse characters — conventions clever but grating.)
Last night’s finale of Gilmore Girls had some of those milestone moments that make you want to hear other fans rejoicing/rending garments. There was the Luke/Lorelei angle: the couple that you know should be together but that the show delights in teasing you, leading you on, etc. (Think Niles and Daphne on Frasier or Mulder and Scully.) Luke and Lorelei finally kissed. Not a fake kiss (think Niles and Daphne in the episode where they tango) or a dreamscape/alternate reality smooch (think Mulder and Scully in the Bermuda Triangle episode). And there was the Rory angle: the uber-good girl, losing her virginity to a married man. I mean, *gasp*, what must other fans be thinking?
Enter my visit to TWOP. Pamie’s recap summed it up nicely (essentially “Dude, if you missed it, you totally missed it. Dude.”). Then I lurked on the forum, which was basically 25 pages of “Holy shit!” But then there was this comment from a user named kieyra, speaking from her own experience in regards to Rory being so smart yet making such a bad decision:
“You tell yourself you’re the exception to the rule, and sometimes when you’re smarter it just makes the dumb moves easier to rationalize.”
Immortalize that in technicolor celluloid and Dolby THX, cause it is so true.
* * * * *
{fangirl glee}
2 degrees of Neil Gaiman!
Every so often, I happen by NeilGaiman.com to catch up on the blog, etc. I was scrolling through today and the esteemed Mr. Gaiman mentions being interviewed by Jason Ahlquist. “Ahlquist” not being a name you see every day, I immediately wondered if it was the same Jason Ahlquist that I went out with. And it is! I once dated a guy who later interviewed Neil Gaiman. Is that cool or what?
{/fangirl glee}
I have a pal who’s into Buffyverse RPGs. On her site, she has a link to Once More, with Hobbits, a crossover between the Buffy musical and The Lord of the Rings. If you like BtVS and LotR, you really must check this out.
I have a grocery list in my back pocket. Can I go to my grandmother’s house for dinner, stop by the store and still make it home by seven for the Gilmore Girls? We shall see.
I have finished Fight Club, a drawing of Gwen Stefani in my sketchbook and the illustration for Monday’s Life section.
