Wow! It’s been a month since I’ve posted here. Jeez! Too long. But I’ll try to make up for it now. So what’s been going on during the last month? Well, a lot actually. Most importantly, Russ got a job! And not only a job, but a job at the University! Now we both have the same hours and vacations, and can drive into work together every day. It saves gas, but more importantly, it’s fun. We used to drive into work together all the time, and I missed that. But not anymore!
We are now both working towards retirement at the University, as well. Ten years from now, the extra check will be nothing to sneeze at! Oh! And our cost for two single coverage health insurance plans rather than one family plan saves us about $160 a month! 
Woo hoo! That’s a benefit we can feel right away. All around, it’s just a great deal.
In other news, our stove died a couple weeks ago, and we had to have the repairman come out to make sure it was truly dead, and while he was here, we had him install a new dining room chandelier, since we hated the old one. Also got some new lanterns on the outside of the garage.
So, making some home improvements, including the new stove from Sears. And the 
icing on the cake is that about five days after we purchased the stove, it went on sale, so today we went back to Sears where we had them apply a credit of $87 on the price of the stove! So yeah, it was expensive…but not as expensive as it could have been. All in all, I think we got a great deal. We’re starting to think about changing out the appliances in the kitchen from white to black, and this is the first step. The new stove even has this feature called a “warming burner” and double ring burners so you don’t have to run a huge burner for a little pot, if all the little burners are already busy.
By the way, we learned an important piece of information in all this, which I’ll pass on: apparently if you do a lot of long-term hot cooking on the back burners it can cause the control panel to overheat and potentially decrease its life expectancy. Do your big cooking jobs on the front burners, and only use the back burners for quick and/or low heat jobs, like heating a kettle. This could help extend the life of your control panel.
All this aside, also during the month of June I took a trip to Florida and got to see almost everybody I wanted to see. The best thing about this trip was seeing that Mom really seems to be bouncing back quite well from her recent surgery. I was also happy to see that Mary and Ken have moved into a very nice apartment.
Mary moved into her new apartment a few days before I got there.
Mary’s cats: Slayer & Karma
I tried the zimne nogi, but didn’t like it.
Mom & Terry
The worst thing about this trip was remembering how HOT and CROWDED all of South Florida is! Mary and I had to drive around quite a bit in her car with no air conditioning (Ugh!) and everywhere you go is traffic, traffic, traffic! We went to Ikea late on Friday night (which, by the way, Ikea is like the greatest store ever and I’m so jealous that we don’t have one in Tuscaloosa or even in Birmingham) and at 9:00 pm, the lines for trying to get OUT of Ikea looked like the lines for trying to get INTO Disneyworld! I’m not kidding.
One of the most fun things I did over vacation was to sit with Mom and watch several episodes of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I used to love that show! It was so much fun to see it again. I’m looking forward to having some time to fire up Netflix and continue watching some more episodes at home, but alas…time…not so much in abundance.
Being away for a week put us a little behind on the podcast, so been spending a good amount of spare time catching up with all that, and also working on the Marvel blog. I’d love to do the AugNoWriMo, but just not sure I’m really going to have enough time to be able to do all this. If I can get caught up with all these projects over the next few weeks, I’ll consider the AugNo.
Mr. Squee is Executive Producer of our podcast.
I was afraid being on vacation would destroy my healthy eating habits. I did fine until that Sunday when we had a giant Thanksgiving type feast. It was all delicious and a lot of fun, but it took me a little while to get back on track after that. I am back on track now, finally, and glad to report that I’ve actually not only got back to the 180 I was before vacation, but this morning on the scale I actually saw 177! Yes!! Back on track!
Oh yeah! And here’s some more exciting news: the post-tornado construction at McFarland & 15th Street is coming along so well. They’ve even got the “moon face” on the side of the Full Moon restaurant, which we are anticipating should be open by the time school starts up again in the Fall. In the picture below, the building on the right is the new Krispy Kreme, also under construction. When it’s done, it’s going to be enormous! Friday we saw the Taco Casa cactus being installed and the Big Lots has finally relocated. The town is coming back. It’s exciting to see!
Oh yes! And one more thing. Since getting back from vacation…we have hummingbirds! They were a little late in arriving this season, but I’ve got one or two regularly visiting at feeders in both the front and the back yard.
Well, right now I’ve got to start thinking about cooking up some dinner…on my NEW STOVE! Tomorrow is back to work. I’ll try to post more frequently, at least a few pictures now and then.
