Since we closed on the house on Thursday (Woo-hoo!) we have been to Lowe's and Home Depot about 6 times, and I am thinking we should just go ahead and sign up for a Lowe's credit card, because apparently, we're going to be there a lot. Like every day for the next six months.
But it's all for a good cause .... painting the inside of our house all the colors that we want. After living in dorm rooms with white walls and then post-college apartments with more white walls for about the last eight years, my need to paint a wall a color ... any color ... is approaching some kind of obsessive level, so the prospect of a whole house with blank, white walls just crying out for color makes me giddy.
We got started this weekend, almost the minute we were given keys to the place, testing colors on the wall. We didn't end up liking the one I'm using here, but look at the glee on my face.

I love this house, and every time I walk into it, I just know how happy we're going to be there. This house probably represents the next eight to ten years of our life together, and that will make you think about the future a lot. Sometimes that freaks me out, but in this case, it all seems really good.
There's a yard with two beautiful trees and flower beds, and I think about all the things I want to grow.

Look, there's even a rose bush in the front yard. I'm going to read all about roses, and maybe I'll plant some more.

There is an office that we're going to paint green, and I'm going to put all my bookshelves there, and have a big fluffy chair for reading. And of course, there are a couple of extra bedrooms that will one day be rooms for our kids. For now, they make great guest rooms, so if anyone wants to come and visit, feel free. You can choose your room. But we might make you paint a wall to earn your keep.

Just a quick note: We've moved into our new house this weekend and should have Internet access by the end of today. Once we do, pictures will follow. That is, if we can locate the camera with which we took the pictures in the midst of the chaotic jungle of boxes that is our habitat for now.
Keep checking back.

In lieu of pictures, which in spite of our new Internet connection, still can't be downloaded for various technology-related reasons, I will tell you a funny story.
Tonight, Dan and I had a lawn care related conversation. It did not go very well. When we moved into the house, I noticed that the grass was looking kind of crunchy, so we've been running the sprinklers religously. However, I'm not a very patient person, so after three whole days of this, I was irritated that we still do not have lush, green grass. Therefore, I was telling Dan that he should get out and turn on the sprinklers again. But also, I added, I think we should aerate the yard. For those of you who don't know, aerating is this odd yard-related procedure where you basically dig up all these little plugs of dirt and grass when it is too packed down to grow grass. It loosens up the soil, or so I have been informed in the last half hour. But at the time, I was just throwing it out there because I've heard people talk about aerating the yard, but based on no real knowledge.

Me: "I think the yard is sick."
Dan: "No it's not. It just needs water. It's getting better."
Me: "No, it's not better. I think we need to aerate it."
Dan: "What do you think that means?"
Haley: "Probably that it puts air in the dirt?"
Dan: "Hahahahahaha." (Sucks in some breath) "Ahhhhhahahahahaha!"

So anyway, we will continue to run the sprinklers. But if it doesn't work soon, I'm going to go get an oxygen tank for the grass.

I am currently having the horrifying experience of watching 65 mile an hour winds rip down the big tree in our backyard. (!) It hasn't fallen yet, but it's roots are coming up, it's leaning badly, and I'm pretty sure it's going to fall or, if it doesn't fall, die anyway from the root damage. I warned the neighbors to get their pets in, and if we're lucky it will fall in our yards and not on anyone's house. But ... it's my tree!

I'll keep you posted. And if it falls, I will try not to cry. But I might have to.

Update: So the wind has died down a bit and the tree still stands. But its roots are kind of tilted up on one side, and I think it might still fall down or die. All in all, though, I'm glad it didn't crash down in the wind. I'm pretty sure it would have been freaky to watch, and if it had fallen on the house, I don't know what I would have done, since Dan is out of town and I'm not exactly experienced at tree removal. Ah, homeownership!

Anyone care to guess how much longer I can put off posting anything of real substance on this blog? Not too much longer, because I have some photos of a friend's new baby to put up soon and those are way cooler than anything else I've got waiting! But this is not the post of substance. This is just a post to show you a photo that noted photojournalist Eric Kluth, a good friend of ours and the former photographer for my former newspaper in Clovis, New Mexico, took when he was our houseguest this weekend. Notice that Dan is wearing his sunglasses. I cannot tell you how many Christmas card-worthy pictures in the last year have been disqualified because Dan was wearing his sunglasses.

Stay tuned.

More pictures! Aside from our kitchen, we have now painted just about everything we intend to paint for the moment. So here are the results. This is our red wall. Notice that we're not totally sure where we're going to put the desk, as it has appeared in two photos now in two completely different locations. The main issue is that frankly, our couch and coffee table pretty much make up our entire furniture collection, so certain areas are bare. But they're bare and painted!
It should be noted that we probably tried five different colors of red paint before we found something between "grape juice" and "blood spatter." Red is a tricky color.

Now we have a shot of the color in our office. I deeply love this color, so if you don't, then lie.

And last but not least, our bedroom. We chose this color that was called "Pear," which looked like a slightly yellow-tinged off-white, and which did not look NEARLY this yellow when we tested it. At first, we were kind of horrified by the brightness. But while this was certainly not the color we intended, it looks good, and it's a color I would probably have never had the guts to intentionally put on a wall. So now the theme song for this room is "Yellow" by Coldplay.

Tonight, we in the Wachdorf home are immensely grateful for our friends Mike and Susan Newnam, who came over today to help us fix our swamp cooler, the evaporative cooling air conditioning system that is extremely popular in the Southwest in spite of the fact that it is very susceptible to getting clogged up by dirt, which as everyone knows, is very rare in New Mexico, the high desert.

Ranting aside, we've been very uncomfortable in our house lately because our swamp cooler has gradually been decreasing in its cooling abilities, and most evenings before the sun would set, our living room would reach a cozy 85 degrees. As new homeowners, we were hoping that the "Ignore it and hope it will go away and not cost you $500" method would be effective, but eventually, we had to admit that it was broken. We were resigned to calling the handyman, who would charge us the aforementioned $500, and then we remembered that we know Mike and Susan. For those of you who don't know Mike and Susan, trust me when I tell you that they are the most competent couple you will ever meet. They build furniture together and recently built a workshop the size of a small home in which they house every power tool known to man. And they are also exceedinly generous with their time and advice. So today they came over and Dan and Mike climbed up on the roof and Mike showed Dan how really, the tubes in the swamp cooler were just a little clogged up, and cleaning them out is no big deal. Susan washed off our filter, which I'm told was covered in some really nasty gunk.

So tonight, we bask in the cool coolness of our living room and are thankful for Mike and Susan. If you're nice to us, we'll ask them how to fix problems at your house, but at the rate we're calling them, they're likely to change their phone number soon.

One of my great joys since we moved in our new home has been the extra little office room we have. We painted it green and when my mom came to visit, she bought me a great arm chair, which I've fluffed up with some colorful pillows. This chair in this green room has now become my own little place. Most every evening this summer, when it's still light until late at night and children are out playing in the street, or lately, when it's storming and people stand at their windows to watch the rain like people do here in the desert, where rain is a novelty, I spend at least a few minutes here in blissful peace. I journal or read and just generally relax and reflect a little. I'm trying to train myself to view it as a place of quiet and refuge so that I don't turn it into yet another place where I have to Accomplish Great and Important Things on a Very Urgent Deadline. The only other things in the room at this point are a bookshelf and a computer desk where Dan surfs the Internet and pays our bills. But I don't think even he would deny that it's really my place. I'm so thankful for it, and just this once, you can see it:

Lately, Albuquerque has been drenched in record-breaing, torrential rain. This has dumbfounded the population and made life really unpleasant for people living in low-lying areas, since the city is not exactly built for rain. But for us, the most serious ramification has been that our home, viewed from the outside, looks like a drug house. We don't have any broken windows or grafitti, but we make up for that with plenty of overgrown weeds, which are flourishing in the abundant moisture. Pretty soon, you won't actually be able to see the house, just the weeds. When we came back from our trip late Sunday night only to be mugged by the overgrown arms of our rosebush on the way in the door, we knew it was time for a BIg Yardwork Saturday. And so that's what we'll be doing tomorrow. Envy us.

Here's a photo of one of the weeds. The scary thing is that I took this photo about three weeks ago. So this monstrosity now has its own zip code.

Being gloriously unemployed right now, my favorite thing about my days so far is the fact that I can spend some time every morning just having breakfast and doing some reading and generally enjoying my house in its soon-to-be-shattered calm. I've been spending that time at our kitchen table, which means I am sitting next to the screen door that looks out on our back yard. It's so wonderfully cool here in the mornings, so I open the door and enjoy the breeze from the screen. From that vantage point, I have observed some interesting things about my home that I never knew when I left at 7:30 and didn't come back until 5. Here they are, in no particular order:

Birds have fights. We have two bird feeders in the globe willow tree in our yard, and the chaos that ensues every time we fill it up with bird seed is just unbelievable. The birds are beautiful, but I am seriously wondering if we're really doing them any kind of favor by putting that food out there if they have to practically kill each other to get at it.

My yelling neighbors do not restrict their yelling to the evening hours as I had previously believed. No further comment on that except to say that this is all fine and dandy right now, but I think we're going to have a problem when I'm trying to get a baby to take a nap in a few months.

Apparently, we have a dog. The first morning that I was sitting here, I was startled to hear a bark come through the screen door and looked over to find a white, curly-haired poodle-looking dog of some variety yapping at me angrily, clearly indignant that I was trespassing on his territory. I have no idea who this dog belongs to, or how he gets into our yard, which is fenced, but every day, he makes an appearance at the screen door, yaps at me for a few minutes, spends about a half-hour wandering around our yard on some self-assigned patrol and then disappears until the next day. I'm sure he really does view me as an intruder, since he's probably been doing this for months without encountering anyone. Yesterday, we had a showdown because I caught him raising his leg, clearly preparing to pee on the only new object in the yard, the new pot we had just the day before moved our long-suffering tropical plumeria plant into. I yelled at him and he backed away, but he was clearly annoyed at having been prevented from marking this new thing as part of his territory, and just sat there glaring at me for about five minutes. So I took a picture of him. Here is our dog. Anyone want to name him?

When Dan and I bought this house in 2006, it was because we loved it immediately. We made an offer within an hour of seeing it for the first time and it only took us that long because I needed a few minutes to breathe deeply and remind myself that when you buy a house, it's perfectly normal to tell total strangers that you're willing to hand over large sums of money in exchange for a property you've just laid eyes on. Dan was ready to make an offer while we were still standing in the house, ten minutes after he walked through the door.

But amidst all the love we felt for the house before, during and after the sale, the one thing we really hated from the first moment was the kitchen floor. The kitchen/dining room in this house is spacious, well-lit and beautiful, but for reasons that I will never understand, the builders of the house decided to sabotage it. They did this by laying a really thin, cheap-looking linoleum in the kitchen area, and then, to add insult to injury, selecting a beige CARPET to put in the dining area. Where the table is located, along with the back door to the yard. So basically, they put carpet where everyone eats and wears their dirty shoes into the house. Brilliant!

Needless to say, this carpet looked as though it had been dragged behind a truck on a cross-country road trip. The linoleum had not fared much better, and was peeling in places. Cleaning the kitchen floors was an exercise in futility, since you could scrub, vacuum and mop all day long and they would never, ever look clean. So we knew that our first major house project would need to be replacing those floors. But we never got around to it. It was hard to choose what new flooring we wanted, hard to find a convenient time to shut down our kitchen, and really intimidating to think about taking on such a big job by ourselves. Prior to buying a home, our entire do-it-yourself experience consisted of picking up the phone and calling the apartment maintenance people whenever anything broke. We're not exactly what you'd call experienced.

This, among many other reasons, is why it is such a good thing that we have friends named Mike and Susan Newnam. Mike and Susan don't just have power tools. They have a two-story workshop on their property that they built themselves just to HOLD all their power tools and the things they are building with them. And even though they are very busy, they are also very generous with their time. So much so that when we really got ready to do this flooring project, Mike and Susan cheerfully came over and spent two days of their lives helping Dan do it. All this went on while I was out of the state, so I contributed absolutely nothing to the work, and only had to leave, have a nice trip, and then come back to gaze at my beautiful new wood laminate flooring. It's really completely unfair, but I'm so thankful.

So without further ado, I present to you some photos documenting the transformation of our kitchen floor, our biggest home renovation project to date.

First, the before. Here is the view from the kitchen looking into the dining room. Notice how you can actually SEE the big, nasty stains on the carpet, even from a great distance.

Here is our garage, filled with appliances that Dan and Mike moved, as well as various manly power tools that Mike brought over for the job. I am told there was a lot of sawdust. I am sure it made Dan very, very happy to have sawdust and loud racket billowing forth from his garage. That's what garages are for.

Here are Dan and Mike hard at work.

And now, the finished product: Brazilian cherry laminate floors that make the room look so much bigger, so much cleaner, that I want to lay down and kiss them just about every time I come into my kitchen.

The days on the calendar are flying away, and soon we will have to move on to the less power-tool intensive task of buying and setting up baby furniture. But for now, we are spending a couple of days marveling at how great it feels to have the one thing we really disliked about our house fixed, and how blessed we are to have friends who are willing to do so much work just to help us out. Thank you, Mike and Susan!

After about six weeks of sub-standard performance, our wretched swamp cooler chose Friday the 13th to refuse to turn on at all. (For those of my readers unfamiliar with the joys of swamp coolers, first take a moment of silence and be thankful that you've never had to listen to anyone claim that they work as well as the real air conditioning being used in the entire rest of the civilized world. Then click here to learn about these contraptions.)

The cooler, as I mentioned, has not been performing well at all this summer, resulting in more than a few days in the recent very hot weeks when the coolest room in our house was 80 degrees by about 2 p.m., meaning that the rest of the house had all the appeal of an unventilated U-Haul truck. Dan heroically climbed up on the roof a couple of times to try to see if something wasn't working properly and even replaced a couple of parts that we thought might be the problem, but those adjustments yielded only minor improvements.

So it was almost a relief when, on Friday morning, the thing just wouldn't turn on. I called a local company with big vans and they sent over a very nice guy named Jerod who climbed up on our roof and climbed down about 10 minutes later to inform me, in a sincerely apologetic tone, that both our pump and our motor needed replacing. About two hours later, I wrote Jerod a very large check. I wasn't happy about that, since it's not like we aren't throwing money at baby gear purchases left and right these days. But it was 90 degrees in my house, and I really didn't want to spend the night in the frozen food aisle of Wal-Mart, which was looking like my other option. And now our swamp cooler works. I still hate it. But it works.

The one useful thing I think I may have gained from the recent weeks of overheating is a good introduction to the kind of mental discipline it would take to get through childbirth with only the aid of deep breathing and positive mental images. Sitting around trying to convince myself that it actually feels a little cooler in the house today, only, say, 85 degrees as opposed to yesterday's 88, is, as far as I can tell, the same sort of self-distraction I'll be striving for as I try to learn breathing exercises in our childbirth class for the next six weeks.

"No, these contractions don't really hurt! (Deep breath.) They're just waves carrying me toward my beautiful child's birth!"

Yeah. And I'll probably be using that deep breathing to yell for an epidural within about 10 minutes.

On Friday, I went into Kate's room to get her up from a nap and found her sitting up in the crib, eyeing the railing to see how hard it would be to pull up on it and throw herself out. Not very hard, really. And since the sitting up from a prone position was new, we figured it was time to lower the mattress in the crib to prevent any escape attempts. That kicked off a list of home projects that we got done that day (and by "we" I mean "Dan), and at every turn, Kate was there to inspect Dan's work. Here she is checking out her newly-lowered crib while Dan tightens the bolts one last time:

Dan then replaced some air vents for me and set about doing something involving setting up our old laptop to act as a server for ... something. I don't know. The computer jargon just flies through my mind. None of it sticks. Anyway, Kate helped with that project by doing pushups on the keyboard of the old laptop.

In the early afternoon, Dan headed out into the yard to mow and deal with some weeds that had gotten seriously out of control in our alley. To give you some reference for this picture that I took from the living room window, safe inside in the air conditioning, remember that Dan is six-feet-six-inches tall, and the weed he's spraying has exceeded that. Recently, the announcement sign at the entrance to our neighborhood has displayed the message "Will you win 'Best Kept Yard?'" No. No we will not.

Meanwhile, a look at what I did while Dan was out battling The Weeds that Deserve Their Own Zipcode. Kate's interest in new foods is growing all the time, and while that's a great thing, it also means that sometimes in a meal, she'll go through multiple courses. As her personal chef and waiter, it is my job to keep the food coming. I also make largely futile efforts to keep it out of her hair, but as you can see from this shot of the aftermath of one of her meals, I'm doing well to keep the food out of my hair. Do you think we have enough Cheerios?

Since Kate has a couple of teeth and more coming in every day, we bought her a little toothbrush, which she largely regards as a new toy. Here she is trying it out.

And after a long day, daddy and daughter now like to relax with a few games on the Nintendo Wii. I have to blog about the Wii in the near future, because that's a story in itself. But here's a picture. Kate's steering-wheel remote doesn't actually work, but she doesn't know that and probably thinks she's totally kicking butt at Mario Kart. I'm hoping to make the same kind of arrangement when it's time for her to learn to drive.