5 years of homeownership, and for only the first 2 months did our old doorbell work. 1 new transformer, new chime, and doorbell nipple later… DING DONG, BABY! DIIING DOONNNG!

1. I still haven’t written the Letters to My Daughter Months 11 & 12

2. I still have some outstanding freelance work with which I’ve been torturing myself about finishing

3. I’m still missing the other key fob to my automobile

4. This stinky power outage is really f’n up my ability to post all the cute pictures from Reese’s FIRST BIRTHDAY EXTRAVAGANZA!!!!! Which was on Saturday! This past Saturday, before the GREAT BIG WINDSTORM OF CENTRAL OHIO!

So here’s at least the part where she very gingerly takes teeny tiny nibbles of her first birthday cake. She is such a girl!

We’re rounding the corner of 48 hours of no power. This is probably the longest outage we’ve seen since moving to Columbus (well, we probably missed the one outage due to ice storm 2 years back). I have, being a resourceful chick, located a place that haz power AND the intertubes! AT THE SAME TIME!

Columbus Public Metro Library, atyourservice. Embarrassingly enough, only about 3 walking blocks from my house.

So here I am, amidst my fellow neighbor citizens, feeling rather proud to have re-initialized my library card and now am using their wireless. Just need a cup of coffee now.

Maybe I’ll walk down to Starbucks on the corner and see if they’re open?

While I decide, here is another picture of Princess ChipmunkCheeks and her very solemn mug.

This. This is what 48 hours without electricity looks like, folks.

Really bad.

Over ten calendar days since I’ve posted anything. I have so much to cover, but no time to broadcast this tsunami-size brain dump that’s building up in my skull. Here’s the bitter pill today: A powerful windstorm blew through central Ohio yesterday, dropping trees, limbs, branches, chimneys, and a number of Obama ‘08 signs. This storm has bitch-slapped AEP, and knocked around 400,000 people off the grid.  Several pictures of huge, old trees ripped out of the ground on Piedmont are on the Columbus Dispatch website today.  As one neighbor puts it on Twitter “AEP Spokes-pr-droid on WTVN has no idea when power will be back on. Portrays AEP as victim of vicious tree attack.”  Hurricane Ike strikes us down with its fierce wrath.

So, just as I am sooo ready to start writing, all our power goes out. Is still out. May possibly be out for the next several days…perhaps even as much as a week of outiness.
How am I posting this entry, you might ask?

I’m running around the city looking for power outlets and wifi access so I can use this day off of my “real” job to finish up some outstanding freelance bits. Currently, I’m in the brewery district at my former employer “squatting” off of their copious power and internet. They are kind to me as I search for a place to land and try to get a little bit of work done.
Now I’m off to stop at Kroger to get some more ice and some styrofoam coolers to salvage the remaining bits of our refridgerated foodstuffs. Also, need to carefully navigate around town as it turns out most drivers in Columbus have no clue how to behave when traffic lights go off-power. How the heck do these people get licenses???

Seriously.

Anyway, here’s a picture of my daughter handing you my flip flop. Enjoy.  And for the rest of you TOOLS driving around Columbus, breezing through dead traffic lights: FOUR. WAY. STOP. Try not to hit me and my daughter, mmmmkay?

Editor’s Note: A big THANK YOU goes to the fine team at Cedar Craft Products, Inc. and a tremendous BIG SLOPPY KISS and THANK YOU to Rod Tailford for the builder recommendation.  Thank You Thank you THANK YOU for making this not only a wonderful addition to our house, but also for the great working experience.

The painting of the house on Winthrop, that is.

Or as we like to say “The Winthrop Manor”.

Now, finally, the old girl gets to look as stately as she should have thanks to an amazing team that weren’t “just painters”; they were, in fact, an incredibly skilled team of home renovation experts. Reglazing? No problem. Electrical work? Easy. Extensive restorative carpentry due to past water damage and termite infestation that the previous owner didn’t bother to remedy? Piece of cake.

I’m so thrilled with the work done on this house. It was a big project, no, HUGE. And it was really necessary. And now my back mudroom looks just as pretty as the front of the house — which if you’ve been to my house that’s really saying a lot.
I will make a list of all the things that make hiring Dave Burkholder Inc. such a good idea:

1. 1.  The man himself is a skilled carpenter and former roofer who had worked construction some years. Loves things to be perfect, and they will be because his name is on the project. He fixed all our major carpentry issues, put up new cedar siding to match the old siding perfectly, put a new roof on the mudroom (which was in utter disrepair and needed to be replaced), and reglazed and replaced cracked and broken panes in all our windows. Essentially, he restored our 1928 Dutch Colonial AND the original windows.
2. 2.  The team thoroughly scraped the house, fixed wood trim where needed, painted carefully, and cleaned up EVERYTHING. I mean everything — they scraped and broomed my landscaping for paint chips because they knew I have an infant who is quickly becoming a toddler and there is/will be nothing she won’t put in her mouth. They even scrubbed and scraped my concrete in places where they dripped.
3. 3.  Electrical work. WHO KNEW? These guys took the amateurish electrical hackjob on the mudroom and made it nice and neat (and most likely much more adherent to code). Plus, I have a lovely new light out back that matches with my sconces up front, as opposed to a floodlight plugged into a two-dollar ceramic base.
4. 4.  Completely rehabbed my basement door, including rescreening and resurrecting the little original screen door. I thought for sure that door was a goner, so I told him to not even worry about it. His team took it apart, rescreened, repainted, retrimmed, and even took the metal hardware off the door and painted it all black. The door looks amazing. And that wasn’t even part of the contract!
5. 5.  The whole team was very polite, hard working, cleaned up every night and basically made the experience awesome. If you are looking for someone to help you with your exterior, I cannot recommend them enough.

This. This is the holdup.

In this photo, you see the aftermath of what 2 NOOBs (ie. Me and C) and a rental jackhammer can do. But let’s back the story up to this past Friday, when I got a spur-of-the-moment lunch invite from my friend Scott (yes, this Scott):

S: It occurs to me as a dude with the day off who isn’t going anywhere til 2ish…You want maybe to grab lunch today?

D: Would love to. We might have a problem with the concrete steps. There is siding that falls below the top of the steps, so I might have to go out there and try to chunk off the top step. Wanna come over early and help? (Hint: bring the sledge.)

I know, I’m a total bastard for turning a lunch invite around into a “Hey why don’t you come over and take a few swings at that concrete for me?” — especially since that was Scott was technically on his day off. However, I offered to compensate him with lunch AND help him out with some cleanup/mulching/landscaping at his house later that weekend…so I think we’re even (D: we’re square, aren’t we? S: Uhhhmm. My hand still hurts…). I guess when it comes down to it: If you are my friend, don’t be surprised if I enlist you in hard labor from time to time (but I always try to make it worth your while). If you are my husband, don’t be surprised if I enlist you in tasks that you’ve never done before with machinery that you have no experience with that could SERIOUSLY HURT YOU.

So that Saturday, I get a wild idea that we surely must be capable of destroying the steps ourselves. I mean, Scott made it look so easy as he pulverized the top step. Well, he made it seem easy. Oh, who am I kidding, he KILLED that step, and it wasn’t without some serious effort and careful placement of a 16-pound sledgehammer. This I consider: If that is what can be done with a sledge, then perhaps we can destroy the rest of the steps with a JACKHAMMER?

Of course! Rent a jackhammer!

I make a few calls, and soon enough we locate a Home Depot that rents out electric jackhammers. The beast of a machine is heavy. Really heavy, and unwieldy. We start to feel a little less confident that we’re going to be successful in our venture with the jackhammer, as it takes a lot of C’s effort just to hold it upright and keep it steady. However, C had decided that we weren’t going to rent this tool and not use it, so he “cowboy’d up” and positioned the jackhammer for the first round of demo.

I’ll admit, I was nervous and I wasn’t even the one running the beast. Shortly before starting the jackhammer for the first time, I heard C mutter: “What have I gotten myself into?”

You mean, what has your WIFE gotten you into.

Really. I made him do this on Father’s Day weekend. The weekend of all weekends where fathers everywhere are supposed to kick back and enjoy life and be showered with gifts of appreciation, right? What sort of sick woman am I?

I made it up to him. I baked him a cake from scratch.

Also: I wish my front lawn looked that good.

I’m sorry I missed sending birthday wishes on Friday, I hope this makes up for it. Thank you for being such an influential shaper in my professional life. I hope you have many, many more happy birthdays to come.

Fred and 2-day old Reese