Hey folks. Thought we’d check in. We had the most delightful Valentines Day. The rainy winter weather broke just enough to create a gorgeous weekend and we took advantage of it on a whim. We went up to Mount Bonell and hiked around Laguna Gloria. Perfectly romantic…

… Then we got sick. Both of us are now pretty ill suffering from 2 completely different sicknesses. Jessie has Ancient Indian immunities that protect her from most sicknesses, but poor girl is being attacked by a virus. Since I work from home and typically don’t leave the premises but for 4 structured hours a week, I fall into the highly-susceptible-to-anything, hermit-me-away-from-small-children category. But by the power of NyQuil, we will get through this.

Maybe this decline in health will lead to a boon in blogging!

It seems everyone has been sick this winter at some point and we’re now just keeping up with the Joneses.

Other than that hrmmm…. I keep trying to convince Jessie to let me have people over so we can hang out in the garage and do stuff. Like a weekly Garage Hangout. A weekly CAR-nival. A BAY of Sunshine. I’ll win her over soon and one day you might find yourself hanging out in my garage.

jessie and i are back with another song that we recorded for her dad. it’s Crying by Roy Orbison. we hit a snafu with our digital recording interface so its not everything we want, but we like it enough to share. our intention was to record more, but alas, our destiny is determined by some outsourced software developer.

Download

We’ve got some Rupe&Conk tunes coming up for you all but first, hot off the press from christmas it’s our lil’ cousin, R-Dawg, bringing you some fresh R&B that you ain’t never heard! This is Hanna Montana meets T-Pain, ya dig?

Download

Well, we’re back and going to attempt blogging again. Hopefully we’ll get you some killer updates soon… in between episodes of Doctor Who, that is. so stay tuned.

Ah the joys of home ownership! Jess and I have really been enjoying our house. And so have other friends and guests! It’s actually been crazier than you can imagine. Our dance card has been pretty full and we calculated that we will have had only 4 weekends “free” (with no guests or trips planned) at home from the time we bought the house all the way through Thanksgiving. It’s all a joy, please don’t misinterpret, we’ve just been busy every weekend.

On separate weekends we had the Rices and the Von Kanels come visit with their kids and we forced them to sleep on our pull out sleeper sofa. We even forced a sleeper sofa on Jessie’s own mom! How tragic! No matter how great a couch is, a sleeper sofa still a thin 2″ mattress on a mess of metal.

This extreme guilt led us to make some changes for our future guests. We bought a mattress and after a couple trips to Ikea (our generation’s Sears), our guest room was complete. It now features a firm, but comfortable Queen-size bed and a gigantic, humongous, gargantuan desk.

The Office (aka “Paravel South”)

The room also doubles as my home office. This obviously isn’t ideal, even I know that. But until we have the time and money to build my modular MD100 Manchaca (pronounced “Man-Shack”) with solar panels and a heating/cooling wall A/C… it’ll have to do.

We buttressed together 2 Ikea Vika Byske table tops on some Vika Lerberg trestles. It creates a gigantic workspace that is definitely pleasing to me, and spacious enough when Paravel is in our 3-man formation and needs to meet down South.

There are more photos over on our flickr set.

Coming for a visit?

If you’re planning on visiting us just know that we’ve got a bed waiting for you now instead of a lumpy metal death trap. The door to the room doesn’t quite shut, and there’s no paint on the baseboards… but these are all improvements we’ll make in time. We’ve got to have something to keep you coming back…

And act quickly, because we might get a Japanese foreign exchange student! We hear they pay madd bank! So unless you got the benjis to subsidize our extravagant lifestyle, you just got usurped!

I kiiid, I kiiiiiid!

the other day our friend Kyle sent us this snapshot from his bible (a devotional one, the kind with all the little side stories and lessons).

The moral of the story is… “Don’t be tricked by Satan’s Ruperts”.  We’ll be back with more folks! Stay Tuned!

this post has had more than a few working titles: “life lessons from the kitchen”, “life lessons part 1″, “the contractor, the witch and the kitchen sink”, “uf! that’s smarts!”, and “d’oh: the chronicles of homeownership”.  but i chose this title to appeal to the internet meme audience.  the 1st lesson in this series of 2 lessons is really the only FAIL, the 2nd lesson is just a life lesson about spending money.

Before the floors went in, we scrambled to get 2 rooms of our house fully painted.  Thinking we were doing ourselves a favor by not priming the baseboards and trim.  ”We’re so fast!” we thought as we lied on the floor and sloshed on our semi-gloss ultra white.  Unfortunately, it dried as semi-transparent brush marks and scraped off at the slightest touch.  So instead of “Prime -> Paint”, we’re now now left with a “Paint -> Scrape -> Prime -> Paint” scenario.  Life Lesson #1 : Don’t take shortcuts.  It’s more work in the end.

2 weeks ago we had a neighbor, who is a contractor, and some of his guys come through and work on the house.  Before the contractors showed up, I attempted to follow the previous “amateur” plumber’s lead and added to a Frankenstein plumbing job that was a complete mess, a rat king of pipes and hoses.  Turns out it was leaking. The contractors came in told me my under-sink was pitiful, rearranged it, added new water lines, dropped power lines, and even added in the disposal (pronounced “dispose-all” by our neighbor).  I was extremely impressed by their work.  The underbelly of the sink is now one of my favorite places in the house because it’s so simple, beautiful and “done right”.  Life Lesson #2 : If you want a job done right, bring in the pros.

So those are the lessons so far.  I’ve now got to get back to salvaging a computer.  Wish me luck.

As Jessie mentioned in the last post, this move has been hardest on Moogs, our cat.  The ride over here was miserable for him, he meowed almost every 2 seconds for the first half of our 14 hour drive.  But he eventually broke and calmed down quite a bit.  We thought we had won.  But little did we know what the next week … nay, month! … would have in store for us.

The 1st week.

The first week in the new house Moogs was confused by the new space and spent most of his first day shivering away in the hall closet.  Then he started this new adorable behavior where he’d spend 14 hours a day burrowed under the covers.  It was a Cute Overload moment that could break the heart of Stalin himself…

Then came the nights.  Being completely nocturnal due to his 14 hours of mid-day slumber, Moogs was left to wander around the empty house alone at night meowing in fear, and then being scared by the echo of his own meow, only to run out of a room meowing, to find the same result in the next room.

He would try to use his cat instincts to stare out of the window, only to find the interested neighbor cats lazing in our yard looking back at him.  Causing him to meow… and freak out… and meow… and freak out… and … etc…

This kept Jessie and I awake all night as if we had a newborn.  Only, this newborn would resist cuddling & comfort.  And if held would spaz out and scratch the [cuss word] out of you with his razor-like claws -the killer extension to his advanced muscular system- which I assume most newborns lack.

The 2nd week.

Once it became “clear” that we were actually going to own the house (that’s another story!), we started demo’ing the kitchen because we had big plans to put new floors in our house.  We knocked out the 1960s era breakfast bar (sorry, Craig) as well as the noggin-offending cabinet above it leaving an knocked out portion of drywall where the cabinets were previously attached.

When Moogs first found this hideout, it was a blessing.  We had plans for workers coming in and out of the house over the next few days, and him being out of sight not running through glue was a great idea.

But what was first perceived as a blessing was really a curse.  His hideout enabled him to continue his 14hour+ sleeping schedule, and his incessant nocturnal bitching and moaning.

The 3rd week.

At the end of the 2nd week after the floors were finished being installed we had to go to Houston for a family emergency (another much sadder story). This put us out of the house for 10 days.  I can only assume it was filled with long hours spent above the cabinets, and meowing nights.

The 4th week.

We came home from Houston and just spent a few breaths in the house.  Moogs’ nocturnal nights turned into our nocturnal nights and we enacted an Anti-Hideout Family Policy.  We tried our darnedest to discourage his attempts by stuffing various articles in the hole, but to no avail.  He always broke through our defenses.

Before we left for our Burbank/Palm Spings/San Diego trip (that’s another story!) that Friday, we stuck a snare drum into the hole which prevented his attempts fairly well.

The 5th week.

I dunno.  I was in San Diego learning to boogie board.  (That’s another story!)

The 6th week.

We got back from San Diego only to find the snare drum on the ground.  On it’s 8ft plummet it gathered enough speed to put a sizable divot into the new hardwood floors.  Absolutely terrible and bothersome, but as we quickly learned, it’s the nature of hardwood floors to be scratched up and stuff.

The nights have been tedious, but we’ve chucked him in the garage a couple times.  We’ve tried various objects to sway Moogs away from the hideout, more boxes, old pieces of sheet rock, etc.  With only 1 break-in, we’re doing pretty good.  We’ve got a bucket and a box with one of those balance balls in it.

Moogs spent the first night yet outside last night, but has yet to return.  He’s either hiding somewhere and afraid to come in because of the neighbor dogs (likely) or he’s on his way back to California (hopefully not).  Hopefully we’ll hear a meow from him soon.  Otherwise we’ll have to canvas the neighborhood and bother our dear neighbors (that’s another story!) with a daily “Have you seen our cat?”  Hopefully he’s not getting himself into too much trouble.

PS

A special thanks to all our friends, The Rodens & Sean who took care of the hidden Moogs while we were out of town.

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!