Here are the before and after pics of our yard beds. Mucho Mucho Thanks to Mom and Dad for the amazing amount of work they contributed to the project.

There will probably be a set of AFTER AFTER pics once the transplanted bulbs grow and the sunflowers we planted blossom.

Last night we held the 6th (or 5th) Irregular Annual Monty Python party. The first party was held in 1995 at the Fry house. Since then we have had parties at the Toccoa house, the Chicago apartment, and the Tiffin house. All parties include coconuts, House Rules, costumes, and assorted hilarities. This year marked our third Spam sculpting event although there were no prizes this year due to the economic downturn and harried schedules. We crammed about 25 folk into the house, and a great time was had.

Visit our Flickr set for more pictures.

The street lights just clicked on. When I was a kid, that’d be my signal to head home. It’ll probably be dark in just a few minutes.

Mainly I’m excited that I have a porch to sit on, the weather is nice enough to sit outside, and I’ve got a wireless network at home that lets me do some work out in the fresh air. If it’s nice on Monday, I may even try doing my GRE scoring out here.

‘Course, I sit out here long enough, I’m going to decide that we need some flowers or something out here on the porch.

When the stove that came with house died the week before Easter, I entertained the notion of converting to a gas stove. Then I called around to find out how much it would cost to tap into our existing gas line and run a line over to the stove area. Yikes. For about three seconds I entertained the notion of doing it myself (having read an article about how to do so), but then I decided that I didn’t want to die in a firey ball of ignited gas.

So, off we went to the local appliance store to check out the latest in electric cooking technology. After consulting the almighty Consumer Reports guides (Thanks Mom & Dad! Thanks Ted & Nancy!), and shopping around the offerings here in Tiffin, we settled on the Frigidaire FEF375FB. We had also decided that now was a good time to acquire the over-the-range microwave we’d been talking about since we bought the house.

So we put in our order with the nice folks at Burns Electric, located less than 1/2 mile away from the house and right across the street from our church. On Monday, I got a call that the model we’d ordered was out of stock. That was sad. However, because the model was a newer model and they should have had it, they were bumping us up to the next level of stove for no charge. That was happy. Very happy.

When we chose our stove, we’d been intrigued by two features: Speed Bake and expandable burners. However, the model that had both of those features was out of our price range. So, we’d chosen the model that had Speed Bake (a fan in the oven that circulates the hot air–though not true convection) and regular burners. By bumping us up to the next level, we were going to get BOTH Speed Bake and expandable burners without having the pay the $150 difference in price. Woo and Hoo.

So this morning at precisely the arranged time, two gentlemen from Burns showed up and installed our Frigidaire GLEF379D with nary a problem, snag, or worry.

Now, we’ve got to start cooking for ourselves again.

“Later” was yesterday.  I spent most of the day packing out soggy cardboard boxes, trashing various objects, and drying and repackaging what could be saved into plastic totes.  Where there was mold–or even just damp areas that looked like they might get moldy–I sprayed bleach.  Between the dehumidifier and three fans, ventilation was pretty good, but by the end of the day, I was ready to be away from bleach.

This morning I continued the work.  Just need to pack out the last of the trash.  There’s still stuff in boxes, but it was all off the floor.  However, we’re going to be getting everything into totes ASAP.

The major damage seemed to be to our Big Box of Games.  These were games that we moved from IL and hadn’t unpacked.  We lost Risk, Clue, two versions of Trivial Pursuit, Star Wars Monopoly, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, a Dilbert card game, Scrabble, Scattergories (not one of my favorites anyways), and some others.  There were also some photos that got damaged although some precious memories were safe.

After I’m done with my Pepsi break, I’m diving back in to do some clean up before calling Phase I complete.

Oh, to accompany my work, I started listening to Amy Tan reading her latest novel Saving Fish from Drowning. Tan has a wonderful reading voice that makes just about anything she’s reading sound great.  It wasn’t until about the second disc in that I realized I had no idea what the story was about.  Went back a little and now seem to know what’s going on.  There is this nice little conceit of the narrator being a dead woman watching her friends go on a trip she had planned.  The narrator is definitely “limited omniscient” in the sense that she’s giving us all kinds of background on the characters that the others don’t know.  I’m not totally engaged yet, but I’m willing to go along.