visit to home depot + not being cautious = tetanus shot

I worry about all kinds of stuff, but Brandon is the one who worries about cuts and scrapes, always washing and cleaning and disinfecting whenever he gets one. Me, I'm more of the throw some alcohol or peroxide on it once and move on.

As much as I hate to admit it, perhaps Brandon's method is the smarter one. When we were looking at rugs at Home Depot the other day, I reached up to pull one out of the way and caught my knuckle against the metal bar that holds the rugs in. A tiny scrape, but it was bleeding a little, so I rubbed some hand sanitizer over it and forgot about it til later. Okay, so I totally forgot about it, until I kept hitting it on stuff at work--book bins, books, desks--until it was sore. When I finally took a good look at it again on Sunday (a week after the scrape itself), it was red and sore.

Once I finally reach the point where I realize something is wrong, then I go into semi-panic mode. I'm going to die, it's infected, what if it gets into my bloodstream, etc. So off I go to the doctor's office, where after an hour and a half of waiting, I am at least satisfied by her grateful attitude that I didn't try to fix it myself and that I came in quickly...she even tells me a story about a recent patient with an infected hand that had to be sent immediately to the hospital for surgery because she had let it go so long. Ugh.

Long story short (or short story long?), I ended up with a tetanus shot (tetanus shot, didn't we meet just seven short years ago?) and a prescription for antibiotics, which she left up to me whether or not I want to take them or wait it out another day and see how it goes.

The tetanus shot has left me tired and achey and I would really, really love to curl up on the floor of my office and go to sleep right now like George from "Seinfeld."

the tree looks normal from a distance!

fall cleanup

Green Lantern and his wheelbarrow.

The now bereft-of-bamboo back yard.

the fattest cat that ever lived

icicle lights

a little bit of christmas, home depot style

Apparently, ours is the kind of neighborhood that you get rocks thrown through your window at 1pm on a weekday, but leave your garage door open all day on a Saturday and no one comes near it. We also got a rebate from Home Depot for our insulation purchase, and it sat in the mailbox for an entire day (the same day, in fact, that we left the garage open by mistake) and no one bothered it.

The next day, Sunday, we decided to head to Home Depot to look for a Christmas tree. After debating which is better for the environment, fake or real tree (we never came a clear conclusion--we decided they are both bad), we decided to go with the real tree this year, simply because it's a heck of a lot cheaper...and it's our first year in the house, so a real tree would be nice.

While we were gathering other miscellaneous items, a lady rolled a buggy by..."Hey, I like that rug!" I told Brandon, and headed off to the rug department to find which rug she had
to get a closer look.

As you can see from the photos, we decided to get the rug, and another one as well. We moved the current living room rug to the den, and will try to sell the old rug (bicycle oil stain and all) at the next yard sale.

We managed to get a tree, too, but haven't gotten around to decorating yet.











Den, with rug from LR.


















Old den rug--not very comfy.












New bedroom rug...looks more blue in person. We bought a 5' x 8' size, but think we need to return it for a larger size. The bed swallows this one.

how to do eight open houses in less than an hour

Brandon and I noticed that the house next door was having an open house today from 2-5pm, so, curious as to what changes had been made since we viewed it months ago, we walked over to check it out. Turns out they had turned the laundry room into a half bath...a half bath with laundry hookups in it, that is. A half bath with laundry hookups, right off the dining room. Hmm. Well, it is an improvement over the way it was, with the laundry room open between the kitchen and dining room, but it's a little awkward to have your half bath off the dining room. It did save the one huge hall closet, though, so it's not a bad compromise.

While we were there, the agent told us that there were seven other open houses in the neighborhood, and if we visted all eight, we could enter a drawing to win a 27" flat screen tv. Well, who can turn that down? Only catch? The open houses ended in 20 minutes! Could we do it?

We jumped in the car (wishing we'd known sooner in order to make it a walking tour) and headed to the other end of our street. The first house we toured was one of our favorites--a remodeled bungalow with heart pine floors and an open floorplan. One of the next houses we vistited was a natural wood (cedar?) frame home that I'd been curious about ever since we moved to the neighborhood. There are a couple of homes like that in the neighborhood, and they are unlike any others here. We arrived a few minutes before official open house end time, but the agent was already packing up. We're not sure if she'd already turned the lights off, or if they were off during the whole open house. We were welcomed in, and she quickly showed us through the home. The weirdest thing was, there were people--the residents, I assume--asleep in all of the bedrooms! She quietly showed us around, and pointed out the bedrooms but explained that she could not show them because they were being slept in at the moment. Um...okay. There were clothes and belongings everywhere, and dirty pans on the stove. I was told that I could go up the metal circular staircase in the living room and check out the loft space above. Since we've considered doing something similar at our house (and making the attic an office/spare room), I climbed up, expecting to find an empty room. Instead, more belongings and clothing covered the room, and an unmade bed was on one side of the room. The room was dark and it was hard to see the stairs to come back down! This ranks as the strangest home tour we've ever gone on.

We thought we'd made the rounds and gotten to all the houses, but now we think we missed one on the street behind us. No tv for us, I guess :( Too bad, because there were just a handful of folks viewing the homes.

It was nice to see the neighborhood and several different types of homes nearby. We told everyone that we are encouraging our friends to move to East Point and this gives us a better idea of what's on the market in the neighborhood.

Here are links to some of our favorite houses, including two renovated homes and one new home that looked authentically original.

1359 St. Michael Ave., 1482 St. Joseph Ave., and 1530 St. Joseph Ave.