A Year Ago Today

One year ago on this date the title of our blog entry was "Water is Free Again" since John was back in the US for business enjoying free water in restaurants. Erin was still in Amsterdam in our apartment on that day.

Now that we are back in a house, much time is spent fixing things and remodeling. This week we've discovered that, while water in restaurants may be free in this country, carpet is anything but. We just want one little living room worth of carpet. And since it's the only room in the house with carpet now, we'd like for it to be fairly decent carpet. Who knew it would be so expensive? Now, we are used to getting many things for free, but we knew free carpet would not be acceptable and had planned to pay the price this time. We don't want carpet that freshens the air and shields itself from even the toughest stains while cleaning itself and the rest of the house, backed by a 290 year warranty. We just want carpet that feels soft when you walk on it. At a decent price. So far, the search continues.

If we had concrete floors (which we do not owing to the fact that our house is too old to have a slab foundation), this whole thing would be easily settled by just doing something fancy to the concrete that's already there (that's the "in" thing to do, right?) and putting down a nice rug. Surely painting or staining concrete can't cost as much as carpet, can it?

For now, we will live with freshly painted gold walls and the old green carpet. Hmmm. Now that we think of it, these colors in our living room can kind of be a salute to our alma mater. Sic 'em bears!

Seriously, let us know if you happen to be getting rid of your carpet that's still in good shape and not green.

Lead

We have seen or read the news a few times this week, and in case you have been living in a cave, here's a summary of what must be the most important news item every single day: there are lots of children's toys that contain lead, and that's bad. Pretty much every toy containing any paint is on the banned list, we think. It's a miracle we all turned out OK considering there was probably lead in almost every single toy we owned in the '70s and '80s.

All this talk of lead paint inspired Erin to actually find and use the face mask we have in the garage while sanding the door frames and floorboards in our living room. Granted, this is the final room in the house to be painted and she has thus far sanded paint off of door frames and floorboards in the remainder of the house while simply trying not to breath too much. Our house was built in 1960, so it's possible there could be at least one layer of lead paint on the wood. With all the bad news about lead paint, Erin started wondering what might happen to her if she did ingest lead paint dust from, say, sanding five rooms in our house. Cancer? Brain damage? Hallucinations? John helpfully pointed out last night that we did indeed actually sign a waiver when we bought this house stating that we are aware that our house contains lead paint and will not sue the old lady who used to live here should anyone die from lead paint poisoning.

As it turns out, lead generally affects children, causing such things as ADD and learning disabilities, so we're in the clear. And now that we've sanded away and repainted all the other lead paint in the house, you can feel safe to bring your children here as well.

All this worry and time spent researching lead paint could have been avoided if we just didn't watch the news. Lessons learned: ignorance is bliss, and just buy your kids video games for Christmas...it's better for them.

My Mistake

Erin finally got a job several weeks ago after months of searching for a paid internship position in the Dallas area. She is now unemployed yet again. The story of what happened for the two weeks in-between is like a bad dream. In hindsight, an important lesson has been learned: intuition is not to be ignored.

When Erin interviewed for the position she got bad vibes about the owner of this practice, but after searching for months, any paid job that had an available opening looked great. After two weeks of living day by day to figure out whether she did or did not have clients to see, Erin found out that her suspicions about something being not quite right with her boss were confirmed. The practice Erin was working for received a subpoena with the promise of a subsequent investigation by the state board for unethical and illegal behavior. Erin decided the next day to quit while she was ahead: no regular clients yet, no need for anyone to know she had worked at this place for two weeks, no hours accrued toward licensure yet. It is also safe to say that the woman running this practice is a paranoid sociopath, literally.

After such a stressful re-introduction to working in America, Erin is now thinking much more carefully about where she takes an internship position. And for now, she is quite happy trying to get our house back in order because we are still in the process of remodeling and hope to have the house somewhat back to normal for the Christmas season. Plus, we have a preemie nephew who is now living at home with his parents but still needs lots of help. Actually, the help may be more for the benefit of his mommy than for him, but Erin is more than happy to drive down to be with them now that her schedule is flexible again.