About a week ago we moved out of our charming little 1920s bungalow located in the heart of Historical Highland Park, Los Angeles, California.  We sent our stuff away with Jessie’s parents - they are completely the best to us, piled the car full with left over odds and ends and drove over to our temporary residence with our friends, The Gladdens.

We’re calling it “Camp Gladden” because we have campfires and sing-a-longs every night.  Actually, instead of doing all that whenever we’re all home we sit around the TV and watch the first season Battlestar Galactica… which is AWESOME.

Camp Gladden has been wonderful.  It’s been more than ideal for the 2 of us as we stay and finish up Jessie’s school year.  Kyle & Char have been the easiest people in the world to be around.  We’re going to miss them a lot, but are already planning bi-annual family vacations… you know, the usual “Let’s go to Tahoe!” and “We’ve got a timeshare in Acapulco”.

Unfortunately, not everyone seems to be adjusting.  Moogs, who meowed at a 2-second interval the whole drive over, is freaked out by Francine, Kyle & Char’s awesome cat-dog (cat-like, not actually feline).  Moogs meows which causes Francine to bark, which causes Moogs to hiss, which causes Francine to bark, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  Oh well.  You can yell at a cat, but it’ll just face the other way and ignore you.  Francine just wants to play with her new friend, but Moogs is a little emo right now.

We officially start heading East on June 15th, our 1 Year Anniversary.  T-minus 5 days until we leave.  It’s going to be bittersweet leaving the town where we fell in love and so many dear friends, but we’re headed the right direction for us.  We’ll stay with Patty & Henry for almost a week, pack up a truck and drive out our closing on June 22nd.  This is outrageously soon!

Tomorrow Jessie and I will head to Austin, TX for a 6-day exploratory trip where we’ll look for a house to buy with our pre-approved home loan.  Here is a map I snapshotted from Trulia (where we spend most of our evenings) with 928 homes in our search area.  Home buying in an exploded housing market inspired recession has created a plethora of options inside Jessie and I’s price range.  And thanks to the Internet, we can see every single one and make rash judgments based on terrible realtor photos and wide-angle lenses.  All these options are making the decision extremely hard.

Nostalgia wants me to think that it was easier “back then”.  My ill-conceived version what buying a house in the 80s was like goes like this:
COUPLE: We want a house.
REALTOR: Well, we have these 4 available.
COUPLE: We’ll take that one.
REALTOR: Congratulations!  Here’s a key!  And a fence!  And a dog!

Actually, I bet most people in the 80s were forced with a “BUY or BUILD” dilemma.  I know my family did one of each.  Jessie and I have thought about getting a lot and putting a prefab “ultra-green, made of compost and recycled diapers” house on it, but even that fancy double wide trailer home costs you half-a-freaking-million dollars.  So that’s holding us back.  That and cursed indian burial grounds.

So, it’s shaping up to be an exciting week of looking at zillions of houses that we’ve only seen through wide-angle lens photos.  Will the Ruperts find the house of their dreams? Will they be close to or far away from Dave’s work at Paravel Design in Marble Falls?  Will they brave the gentrified ghettos and settle East?  Will they have  the chutzpah to negotiate?  Wait and see!  It could all happen this week!  Stay tuned!

If this were an Onion article it’d be titled “SPOILED YUPPIE HAS SO MUCH MONEY HE CAN’T DECIDE WHICH HOUSE TO BUY”.  Dang.  That’s some humility right there, son!

Well, its that time again, Jessie and I are releasing another track. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoy making these songs.  We’re on a mission to do this quarterly, if not more often.

The song we chose to record is “Once A Day” by Connie Smith. We decided to do this song while driving home from Bakersfield, California. The song came across the ol’ XM radio and it reminded Jessie of her family there and she said “We’ve got to do it!”.  It reminded me of Texas. Bakersfield, if I dare say, is like the Texas of the West.  And being a sucker for country music and steel guitar, we gave it a go.

So enjoy!  We’re going to start recording another one in about 15 minutes! Yee Haw. I love listening to my wife sing.  Again, enjoy.

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Download: Once a Day

Requests and dedications can be filed in the comments section.

real quick, wanted to let everyone know you’re at the right website. I freshened up this blog for the spring time. i’m actually not quite done yet but i wanted to push this out the door anyways so i could maintain it rather than have it loom over me. so if you notice anything shifting around, don’t worry about it.

but welcome. and to celebrate the redesign, you can have this cheesy rupeandconk wallpaper!

Well ladies and gentlemen, it’s officially official.  The Ruperts are making the move to Austin.  To some this may come as a shocking surprise, to some a mournful dirge, but maybe there’s one person out there who is saying “That’s great! Here’s a thing of Jell-o!”

But this isn’t the sappy post where we ball our eyes out and profess our love of each and every Los Angelino - I’m talking about you “Next Door Neighbor Fletch House of Cholos”.  This is just the beginning of a long process of getting us (and our stuff) out East.  We’ll save all the weeping and gnashing of teeth for anther day.

Our trip got broken up into 2 parts.  A trip to Phoenix, then to Austin.

In Phoenix, We saw Jessie’s little brother Tim marry his girlfriend-since-college, Jen.  It was a gorgeous wedding and a charming event.  On a personal level, it really redeemed the city of Phoenix for me.  Who knew there were really cool and beautiful places in Phoenix!?  But seriously, we’re really happy for them and wish them the best and can’t wait to hang out with The Conklins.

The next part of our trip was a long 16 hour drive to Texas. We loaded up the Scion full of boxes and things from our garage and now it’s here safe and sound.  The drive was long and grueling and can be summarized in 3 bullet points:

• From Phoenix, AZ to Las Cruces, NM there was a constant 30mph headwind.
• Pep Boys at Exit 28A in El Paso, TX is worthless.
• We almost hit a deer near Fredericksburg, TX at 3am.  Missed by inches.  Scary.

But we finally arrived at 4am to the Walton residence and passed out soon thereafter.   Last night, I disavowed all my hippy PETA-based “Animals should be allowed to roam free” theories in a single second.  Other than that, it was a pretty eventless trip across America.

We’ll be back in LA on Sunday.  Leaving my Scion in Austin, we’ll be a one-car-family until we move all of our stuff out to Texas later this summer.  We know, we know, “moving to Texas in the Summer?!? bad idea!” - but sometimes you gotta play the cards you’re dealt.  Until then, we’re looking forward to packing things and hanging out with our friends.

Currently, Dave and I are desperately trying to use up the rest of our “card” at Pilates Eagle Rock.  A “card” is one of those deals when you pay for 20 classes up front and have one year to use it up.  The mentality behind these cards is something like, ” That means, let’s see, three classes a week, 4 weeks in a month, Dave and I are splitting the classes, so they’ll get used up faster, but still i won’t have to buy another 20 sessions for at least a month!” 11 months later, we still have 14 of our original 20 classes left and the card expires at the end of April.  So Saturday, Monday and Wednesdays you will be able to find us down at the studio engaging our cores.

Tonight’s episode at pilates started by placing a small ball under your sacrum.  It may sound relaxing, but all I can think of is, ‘What if I pop it?.  How shameful would i feel!  I would be so embarrassed!’.  This evening as my mind is racing with these insecurities I hear a long “pshftssssssshhhh”.  Bless Dave’s heart.  Being the loving wife I am I pretty much lose it and everyone else is trying sustain from laughing knowing they themselves where just running through the horrors of popping their ball in their mind.  Our instructor, who is so cool, quickly calmed Dave’s mind, saying it happens from time to time.  It was a short lived event, but a lasting memory.  How sweet.

I hope there are more pilates stories to come, because that means we are using up the classes we already paid for.

last night i had this weird dream where jessie bought me a shirt from some upscale department store (*ahem* H&M *ahem*) and either the size wasn’t right or something so I went back to return it and maybe see if a few other things fit my fancy.

I shopped around for a long time amassing a huge heap of clothes. Which is weird because I don’t buy many clothes* and the clothes I do have are not very fancy either.

* I talked with laaazlo yesterday and we both reminisced of our years of cargo short abuse. From 1999-2003 I probably wore cargo shorts every day of my life, yet only owned approximately 3 pairs of shorts over that 4 year span. They were extremely utilitarian pants. I never knew if a CD was going to be dropped into my full hands, but I was always prepared with a CD-sized pocket on my thigh. Or maybe I wasn’t quite ready to put away that book I was reading; the pocketed pants quickly became a useful “holster of knowledge” with just enough book showing so that people would think I was super smart.  Those were the glory days.

Back to my dream.

I go to check out with my assortment of t-shirts and pants and the total comes up to $2800!  Whaaa!?  The panic that can only be felt in dreams starts to set in:  ”She’s already rung it up!  The price is fixed! I have to pay!”  Then a moment of bravery strikes and I gently ask the cashier to take an item away.  It knocks about $300 off the total.  Relieved, but afraid Jessie would be angry that I spent that much on clothes, I took a deeper look at the collection of clothes I had decided to buy.  Most of them were terrible t-shirts with terrible innuendos on them (i.e. one of them had the name of a popular Eagle Rock restaurant that is 2 doors West of the Coffee Table).  Still in panic of making a misrepresented purchase, I was able to make quick judgements and my pile of clothes had diminished to nothing.  It turns out I didn’t want any of those clothes.

Fin.

So I leave it to you, Daniel called Belteshazzar, to interpret my dream.  I have a few thoughts but I don’t want to interfere with your psychoanalysis of me.  If it helps, my current outfit is a pair of jeans my wonderful mother-in-law got me for christmas, a well worn hoodie (you know when the wrist cuffs get kindof rigid with snot), and a $5 Minnesota North Stars t-shirt I got from the MightyFine Sample Sale.  I’m going to just leave it at that and see what happens.

This weekend we’re going to Bakersfield.  Vroom Vroom.

just a quick note from as i sit in the airport alone. my grandmother passed away this weekend and both jessie and i are headed up to Nebraska for the funeral. we are however on separate flights due to a disgruntling snafu with the Southwest.com website and flight registration system. we’re about to board, but i wanted to let you our dear loyal readers know…

there will be no pictures of me in my underwear this week.

also, we want to send a couple of special happy birthday wishes because we’ll be missing some festivities.

To Dave Lockett who is having a very big birthday this week. His band http://www.myspace.com/swordfightsrock is playing on Wednesday night (his REAL birthday) and you should go see them.

I love that there are real birthdays and fake birthdays.

And to Cara Snyder who is also having a birthday this week. Her party sounds totally outrageous. Sad we’re not joining in the fun.

We’re saddened we can’t celebrate with the two of you who bring our lives so much joy. Please! Let us take you out to dinner sometime!

That is all i can afford to say. I have to get on a plane now. Omaha, Nebraska… Cow Tipping, USA!

On Feb. 14th, Valentine’s Day, we went to Nina Lucas Presents Winter Ball 2009.  It was put on by Char’s hairdresser, Nina, to raise money for 826 a non-profit organization that Dave Eggers helped get started.  I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in college and LOVED it.  It was maybe the thickest book I read until Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix.  Needless to say I loved A.H.W.O.S.G so I love Dave Eggers, so I love 826, so  I loved going to a Ball that raised money for the organization.  

As if the cause wasn’t motivating enough, you get to dress up!  Adult prom, full on!  Dave put on his charcoal suit (very Mad Men-esque), too handsome. . . barf if you want, he looked good!  Fun friends, open bar, music, dancing, and so on.  It really was a treat to do it up.  Pictures are worth 1000 words, so I will spare you.