Mike and Music

Mike and Music’s Year in Review

1) We bought a house!  Now that we have a triplex near downtown San Diego with a guest bedroom, we’re looking forward to hosting friends and family.  Now if we could just finish renovating the place…
2) We got engaged!  Sparkling ring, custom-made doormat (to grace the floor of our new home)…  what else could a girl ask for?
3) We still have jobs!  Mike is creating promos and covering events in the community for the local CBS affiliate, bringing home an Emmy or two each year, and Music is doing whatever “assistant deputy chiefs of ethics and integrity” do.
4) We finished school!  Okay, so only Music (finally) finished grad school, but it’s a great relief for Mike, too.  The end of late night thesis-writing sessions is good for everyone.
5) We wish you and your family the very best this holiday season.  Hope to see you in 2008!

It is currently 5:13 pm, PST, on December 19, 2007. Mike’s mom, stepdad, maternal grandma and grandpa will be here around 3 or 4 pm on December 22. By my calculations (which may not be worth much, since I’m awful at math), we have 70 hours to prepare for their visit. That means painting two walls in the entertainment room, touching up trim and ceilings throughout the house, putting up window treatments, swapping out outlets and switches, having our couch delivered, buying and making food, cleaning the house, etc. Eek! My goal is that when they arrive, the house will look good and be clean, and while anything will be an improvement over the way it looked in September when Mike’s parents were here, I want everything to sparkle! I’ll try to post some pictures of the new and improved house soon.

The Jack in the Box focus group people called me this evening to see if I was available to do a tasting tomorrow afternoon.  The woman who called apologized profusely for the short notice and said they would pay me $75 for going to the Innovation Center to try some food.  Little do they know that I’d do it FOR FREE!

Mike and I spent this weekend working on our unit, as opposed to the rental units, and though it was a long weekend of a lot of hard work, the results are just fantastic.  We had our hardwood floors professionally refinished, and we’ve been enjoying the gleaming planks for a couple of weeks now, but there still was a ton to do.  This weekend, we began to tackle it.

I spent Saturday and part of Sunday painting the walls in the living room, dining room, and hallway.  We chose a light, olive-y green for three of the four walls in the living room, a darker green for the fourth wall in the living room, and a dark beige for the dining room and hallway.  As the paint dried, I fell in love with the place.  The walls look so good!  The living room feels sophisticated, and the color looks great with our new couch.  The dining room feels very Arts and Crafts-style to me, probably because of the Tiffany style pendant light fixture we put in above our dark cherry, bar-height table (with six tall chairs made of the same wood).

We left the trim around the windows white and bought white horizontal slat blinds for the windows, and the white just pops.  The outlet plate covers and switches are white, too, for another nice contrast (same with in the dining room, where we left the phone nook and its built-in shelf white).

As the weekend went on and things came together– the colors, the furniture– both Mike and I felt, “wow, buying this house wasn’t absolutely crazy!”  Looking around the rooms we’ve done, it’s very clear that our house is going to be a great home.

I saw an article a few days ago (maybe in The New York Times?) about two British reporters who decided to do the opposite of “Supersize Me.”  Rather than eating a terrible, high fat diet, they tested different diets over the course of a few weeks.  They ate only one colored food, drank only juice, fasted, did colonics, etc., including some diet Beyonce raved about on Oprah that allegedly allowed her to lose 20 pounds in a week or two.  As you might imagine, at the end of the week, the apparently average size women lost some weight but were losing their grip on reality.  One of the women said as her fat melted away, she wished for her hip bones to jut out more and more, even though she actually looked gaunt and unhealthy.

The interesting thing in the article was that even when the women went off their diets and began eating healthily, their mental state changed sufficiently that they began to develop eating disorder-type habits and attitudes, and the therapists who consulted on the project said that may just be a part of their personality from now on.

That story got me thinking about myself.  A few years ago, for some reason I lost a bunch of weight and my hip bones stuck out, too (think D’Angelo in that video, but not “cut” or “ripped”).  At the time, my mom told me I was too thin– gaunt and unhealthy, like the women in the article, in fact– but what a great high it was to be so skinny!  It’s sick, but when I look in the mirror now, I often find myself wishing those bones would just stick out again, that I’d just be so darn thin that you could see my skeleton through my skin.  In reading the article, I’ve begun to think that those thoughts may never go away.  What a sad commentary on our culture (and on me, I guess)!