Veg

I've had a few comments about "what do you eat, then?" recently.  This post is as much for my own menu planning help as it is for answering that question.
We've recently reduced the amount of meat we eat, substantially.  We've both read a few things from a variety of sources about diet and health and what the healthiest people eat.  Then I found a couple movies (available on Hulu), you could watch them too.  They are pretty convicting - "Forks over Knives" and "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead".  They are documentaries that fall into the same category as the famous "Super-size Me", but tell a useful story.
Anyhoo...  Brian reports sleeping better since this change and my digestive system seems to appreciate it.  It makes me feel better to think that I'm actively reducing my probability of having a serious medical issue like we've had a few friends deal with recently (at ages younger than us!).  25% of people with "heart disease" only find out they have it when they have a fatal heart attack - scary!
Now here's a list of main meals that we're cooking up:

• Chili - meatless, of course
• Stir-fry (with any variety of vegetables, "fried" in vegetable broth, served over brown rice, covered with our favorite sauce)
• Mexican or Tex-Mex if you prefer
• Tostadas (corn tortilla popped in the oven for 5 minutes) covered with refried beans and topped with lettuce and tomatoes
• Burritos filled with beans, rice, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.
• Sweet and Sour (you could almost put this with Stir-fry, but this time I build the sauce in with the meal and it has pineapple!)
• Stuffed baked potatoes - I'm working on figuring out what to stuff these with in place of butter, cheese, and bacon bits.  I've put on salsa, corn, and roasted red peppers.
• Pasta with marinara, here's where you can put chunks of zucchini in place of the meat
• Veggie soup - I haven't won the boys over yet on any of these recipes, good thing we usually have bread around.

I've found myself having headaches after eating "normal" food recently.  I guess when your body starts being fed "real" food for awhile, it screams out against processed foods.  The other interesting thing I've noticed is how un-appealing certain processed foods can become when you aren't regularly consuming them.  On the other hand, cheese is really, really hard to eliminate - all things Italian beg for it!  I've been putting it on much more sparsely and hope to find an organic source for cheese so I can feel better about it.  I'm not sure I'll be able to reduce Noah's cheese habit, it is a major part of his diet.

If you're interested in reading more, these are the recent books:
Mad Cowboy by Howard Lyman
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn
The China Study by T. Colin Campbell
Forks Over Knives (the companion book to the documentary)

Anyone else out there "rebelling" against the modern culture when it comes to health and diet??  Let's share!

Doing a little knitting business in the car, amigo

Last spring, my reading list included several Debbie Macomber books where the main characters were avid knitters.  The tales peaked my interest in giving this craft another try; I don't think I've touched knitting needles since I was a child trying to learn from Grandma and her dear friend Harriet.  I didn't even have knitting needles in my crafting stash, just one lonely crochet hook that I used a few times in college.

So, I checked out YouTube and bought some supplies.

I finished Noah's sweater shortly after Christmas.  He isn't very interested in wearing it because he claims it's too big.  I think he'll get some use out of it next winter, and he has wore it a few times so far.  It sure looks handsome on him!

Knitting projects to date
- Doll blankies for Hannah's birthday
- Infinity scarf for mom for Christmas
- Infinity scarf for Carla for Christmas
- Leg warmers for me :)
- Noah's sweater

I got a few more projects queued up now.  I have a whole collection of knitting supplies that came from Grandma, including a project that was started.

Back to the title of the post - when we make the long car trip from home to the Superior condo, I have a substantial amount of dedicated time to keep my hands busy knitting.  When it's an easy pattern to follow, I can keep conversation going with my sweet driver and just knit the miles away (minus the frequent interruptions from the back seat).

Wallpaper: the gift that keeps on giving

The room we're calling Noah's room came with a relatively nice, plain textured wallpaper, except that there were peeling edges, lots of holes to patch, and some globs of something on it.  With the peeling edges, I looked at it and thought it would pull down relatively easily.  You know, it's starting to fall of the walls in a few small places, it's prime to just come right off.  Ha ha.  Joke's on me.
I started the job inside the closet where the paper did peel right off - yay!  It left a yucky, yellowed glue texture all over the walls, but the paper itself just came right down.

It turns out, the inside of the closet is not built with sheetrock, it's built with melamine (that pre-finished white shelving material).  As soon as I turned the corner and made it around to a wall that's in the room, this happened...

Do you see the little bits of paper that I'm getting off?  I was working in square inches instead of square feet.  This was definitely not going to work for us.  I calculated the cost of panelling the rest of the room (one wall is panelled already), considered the time/mess/expense of pulling the walls completely down and putting up new sheetrock, and generally got grumpy about the fact that we were not going to be able to paint these walls on our next visit...

Enter new tools.  Brian bought all the best tools of the trade for me to conquer my wallpaper demons.  The other problem that we discovered very quickly into the process was that they wallpapered pre-trim.  We had to take all the trim off from around the doors and windows to get to the corners of the paper. Sigh.

Paper's down, now what about all that glue?!

Ugh, they applied the glue thick in some places and thin in others.  The drywall job behind the paper isn't the best, we're going to have to clean up that job quite a bit before we can declare the walls ready for paint.

Finally, I can see white walls!!  What started out as an expectation of a day or two turned into 3 visits to the condo, probably 40 hours all total and lots of aching arms and shoulders from scrubbing the glue off those walls.

In the meantime, Brian went to work on getting the bathroom next door ready to update.  It was fully panelled and a pretty small space.  After looking around at cabinets/sinks and styles that we want, we decided that the style we want doesn't go with panelling in the bathroom, too much competition.  So, the panelling came down...  And he found more wallpaper underneath!  It was obvious that the people who put the panelling up attempted to take down the wallpaper, realized that it wasn't going to just fall off the walls, and covered it.  Next visit - wallpaper removal in the bathroom.  I expect that we'll have a slightly easier time with this one because we learned a few techniques from our initial experience, the wallpaper is a different variety (not textured), the glossy surface of the wallpaper is mostly down already, we just have to pull the paper backing and glue, and we now have the tools/supplies ready to go!

Dorm-like fun

The last time we were up at the Superior Condo there was a lot of action going on in the building.  The immediate neighbors were "moving in".  The guy upstairs was working on his floors.  There were 2 other units occupied by owners.  We were, of course, bringing in lots of stuff and working on our place as well.  We haven't chatted with neighbors that much since college.
We were working on turning the brass accents on the door satin nickel, so we had the doors propped open all day long.

Mask around the metal and spray.

In order to avoid the runs, think fast and light while spraying.

Sorry about the bad pics, dark hallways plus clouds of spraypaint makes for lots of tricks on the camera.  For those of you who want to know what we used: Rustoleum Satin Nickel spraypaint.  The doorknobs are brushed nickel and they look great together.  The texture difference between satin and brushed is not enough to drive these perfectionists crazy in this application, especially when we were looking at $50-60 per door to buy new "armor" vs. $6 for the can of paint.

We got to check out the projects that the others were working on.  We shared tools, techniques, and inspirations.  The folks immediately next door have a fantastic backsplash that they tiled up in their kitchen over the weekend.  They also went out and copied our doorknobs and discussed our spraypaint experience.  The guy upstairs was doing a lot of work himself even though he hired a contractor - the contractors are all so busy this time of year when the tourist traffic is very low that they can't keep up.

The neighbors all seem to be a long ways ahead of us on the remodeling - they either had more time, more hands, or more money sunk into their projects.  They all had their ugly, dated flooring tore up by the time we left.  We're leaving ours until it's ready to be replaced, as in, we're ready to lay the new flooring and we need it out of the way.  The neighbors started with the mantra of "purging and painting" over the weekend, I was pretty impressed that they also tore out the carpet, tiled the backsplash, and changed up the locks (they had 5 capable people working).

The purging was extra fun with the crowd.  We laughed at the garbage that was left behind in each others respective units.  We watched how long the free items lasted up at the roadside.  It was amazing how quickly the junk just disappeared - during the most quite season of the year no less!

Anyone else out there laugh about the junk you find in a new-to-you property?  Anyone else using the roadside method of getting rid of unwanted furniture and stuff?  Anyone out there experiencing dorm-like fun with their neighbors?  If so, where?  I want to move in too!

Progress

Yes Mom, I know you're dying to see the "new" living room.  Here we go.  This is the full extent of progress that we've made so far.  It's finally at a share-worthy stage.

Brian got up early or stayed up late or otherwise snuck an hour a day for the past week to get the walls painted.  Bye bye pumpkin butter, hello cloud white.

We had a full window treatment plan purchased from Ikea that's been sitting in the closet waiting for the paint stage to be complete before getting on that.

Doing the detail work of getting the mounts up and level.

After only 6 years, we now have window covers on the east side.

The new chairs, side table, and lamp.

 The chairs and table were from HomeGoods.  The lamp is from Menards.  Eventually, we want to get a floor lamp for that corner (between the chairs and couch) and another end table to go next to the couch on the other end.  The table lamp would then move to the other end.

East end curtains all put up!

We even noticed that the main floor held more heat overnight with these up, so we can count this a one of our insulation initiatives.

We know what we want to do about art for the walls, just need to get on it.  We're taking it slow and easy, though (now that we have seating established again), so I don't expect it to be done by the end of the year.