Home Front

Can I just start off this post with something I just overheard at my neighbor’s house? In the midst of some argument about something with his mother, my neighbor’s son said, “I’m tired of being broke. I need to grow weed.” 

Right.

Anyway, what’s new! Lots. This last weekend we added two more states to the Bean’s map-o-places-I-been. Kansas and Missouri, so nothing super exciting, sorry Kansas and Missouri. We trucked off there last Thursday and stayed the weekend to go to a wedding and spend time with Cameron’s step-sister and her husband. Bean did pretty well all things considered, I mean, nobody loves being in the car for 9 hours, but she handled it better than I expected her to.

Back on the home front, fall is on the way! With the exception of today (with a high of like, 91), the temps are dipping down into the mid-70s and it’s been awesome. Cool at night, warm during the days, damn perfect. I put out my fall decor yesterday, and was super pleased (read: not pleased at all) to find that at some point between last Thanksgiving and yesterday, a mouse or some small rodent has taken up residence inside the tote where I keep the fall and Halloween decorations. I have no idea if it’s still in there or if it…starved to death…and I kind of abandoned the whole thing once I realized it was in there. Aside from the classic sign (droppings), it had clearly burrowed inside a hay bale and those fake spiderwebs and even ate the burlap wrapping off of my wedding bouquet, which I use as a centerpiece on our table every year. Anyway, I guess in the next few days I’ll don gloves and work up some courage and pull the whole thing outside and likely take the entire thing to the trash so I don’t have to go picking through it. Luckily it doesn’t seem that there was anything damaged, though I have yet to pull out the Halloween lights and see if those got chewed. 

What else. Work! Yes, work. Cameron started his new job this morning as a personal banker. Yahoo! I know I mentioned a little while back that he left Starbucks some time ago, and had an interim job for a short while, but when he got interviewed and hired on the spot to work at the bank, it was too good of a position to pass up. I mean, who wouldn’t want to work banker’s hours when you have a family at home? So, it took a little while for them to let him come on board because you have to get background checked and all that, so he’s been home for the better part of three weeks now, and I know he’s glad to be back to work and getting back to a routine. (And I’m happy to have some income coming in soon.) 

Also, I am going back to work too! Also at a bank! The same bank I used to work for in fact, though at a different location. It’s part time, more than likely 3 days a week plus the occasional Saturday morning. I thought it would be good for me to have a couple days a week when I could get out and talk to adults, plus make a little extra income to help cushion us (we really need to get back on track with our savings because unfortunately we got capital-F Fucked on our health insurance for the last two months)…and possibly help support my IKEA addiction. Anyway, I’m pretty excited. Bean will get to spend a few days a week with her Papi, and I know he’s pretty glad for that. I don’t start till the 22nd, but I’m excited. 

I also decided over the weekend it was high time for me to get my body back in shape and be nicer to it. I’m definitely carrying around a considerable amount of weight that I don’t want to be hauling around, and it’s becoming more and more obvious at least to me. I’ve never been really good at sticking to (or figuring out) diets, but we are making an effort to eat more cleanly and really stick to our meal plans instead of eating out or eating badly. I also plan to start going to the complex gym a few days a week (since it’s, you know, free) and get back to doing Pilates when the baby is sleeping. I need to be better about drinking water which I know is a key factor in good health and I am unbelievably bad at it. What are your tricks for keeping in shape and feeling healthy?

So yeah, lots going on here lately. I’ve been spending a lot of time devoting energy toward making our house more of a home, which has meant a few purchases of furniture to help store things and display family items, things like that. I’ve always felt like our house(s) has(have) not really been homey, more just…functional. But I want to enjoy where I live, I want to feel comfortable here, and I want to take pride in showing it off to friends and family. I am making an effort to find better ways to keep things organized because I feel like it is ALWAYS getting cluttered in here, way more than it should for only two and a half people living here. But it’s getting there for sure. 

One of our new setups in the living room…and the Bean trying to pull up on it.

Some Random…Ramblings

— Bean has been, fairly reliably, sleeping through the night for the better part of a month now, not including our trip to Maine. This means I’ve been getting away from my 8-month long mind fuck that said I had to go to bed as soon as she did because she was likely to be up a couple times during the night and I would need to get as much sleep as I could. Now that this has ended, I’ve thought about what a good opportunity it is to spend an hour or two working on the book (oh yeah, remember that?) before I come to bed. Have I done that yet? Noooooo….

— Speaking of Bean, she had her 9 month birthday when we were in Maine but we won’t have her checkup till next Monday. So I’ll update her new stats and what she’s been up to next week.

— My phone takes lousy panoramic pictures.

— I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to IKEA. When it first came to Denver and those massive blue walls went up and everyone essentially lost their minds over affordable Swedish furniture, I scoffed at the fad. Silly, I thought. Theeeen I moved back to Denver about 15 minutes away from those massive blue walls and basically I’m there every other weekend now. I would literally replace every piece of furniture and accessory in my house with IKEA stuff if I had the money. So, sorry IKEA. However, you still haven’t won me over with your meatballs.

— I read today that the Pumpkin Spice Latte launches on the 25th. I don’t have an in on Starbucks happenings anymore since Cameron left the company (I literally haven’t bought coffee in almost 5 years what am I going to DO) but it seems a little early to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as obsessed with pumpkin things as the next person, but everything in its due time. Summer is for lemon and caramel. Fall is for pumpkin. Okay and also caramel.

— Speaking of fall I had a moment of squee not too long ago when I realized we’d be able to take Bean to her first pumpkin patch soon! They also had costumes out at Costco today and I nearly died. SO EXCITED.

— Bean met a stuffed moose today. She was not impressed.

— I have been learning this summer, perhaps more than ever, that life is hard sometimes. Really hard. Sometimes life sucks and will hand you more than you think you can handle but somehow, the time passes, the sun goes down, and it comes up again the next morning just like it did the day before and will the day after that too. And sometimes it will rain, and thunder, and lightning will light up the sky and it will be scary for a while…but the storm always passes. It always does. And if you’re lucky, you get to see a rainbow when the clouds have lifted. And if you’re really lucky, it will look like this:

Some Changes

You might have noticed that this blog looks a little different…different theme, different title, different address! Well, it felt necessary to introduce some changes since this blog will, very soon, no longer be broadcast from High Elevation. (I mean, still pretty high elevation, all things considered, but not 7,522 feet.)

In a short while, I’m excited to say, Cameron and the Bean and I will be moving back down the hill to live closer to my parents. The time has come for us to depart Estes Park, and we’ll be moving somewhere into the north Denver suburbs hopefully near to where I lived since I was a kid. We are currently waiting to find out where Cameron will be transferring to, and when. It’s going to be a bit of a rocky transition at first, since I have no idea when we are going (it could be next week and it could be in 4 months) and where. The good thing about that area, though, is that it’s fairly well condensed and there are many Starbucks stores in a small area, so we can probably plan to move close to where my parents live and not have a huge commute for Cameron. Our original plan was to immediately buy another house and rent out our house in Estes, but since we are looking at such a short timeline, we are now anticipating renting an apartment for at least six months while we get settled and then buy a new house. We’re still renting out our place here, and are pretty sure we have a great set of tenants, it’s all about the timing now. I’m not really looking forward to making two moves in one year, but we’ll do what we have to do and it will all work out in the long run.

The truth of the matter is, I have been wanting to leave Estes for some time. I was excited when we got here over 2 years ago and I did feel lucky to be here. But as time went on it became clear that it wasn’t for me–and, now, isn’t for us. We had planned on being here for a good 5-10 years in the beginning, and that timeline got shorter and shorter the longer we were here. It never felt like home to me. I kept waiting for it, and it never happened. After the flood, I knew we couldn’t stay here much longer than another year or two. And after the Bean was born, I knew the time was up. I just couldn’t deal with having a new baby and postpartum depression and being so far away from anyone or anything. It used to be that an hour away from civilization wasn’t a big deal, but it is when you have a cranky baby who cries the whole time you’re in the car.

There are some things I will miss about Estes. I will miss the quiet, the clear starry night skies, the wildlife, the cool summer evenings, being close enough to the National Park to just go off on a hike whenever. I’ll miss the people. I met some great, kind, generous people here. But unfortunately there’s an even longer list of things I will not miss about Estes. The isolation, the tourists, the tourist traffic, the wind. The small-town politics and everyone knowing everyone’s business. There’s a lot of things. Estes is great as a place to visit, and for some people it’s a good place to call home, but we’re just not in that group. Frankly, I’m looking forward to coming back to visit and actually enjoy it the way it’s meant to be enjoyed, because right now I just resent it, and I hate that.

So that’s that. I am ready to embrace the new, and so far our new year is full of newness and change and I am trying my best to remain positive and present. So of course I will continue to update this blog with all things Bean-related! I am not really ready to start packing up this house and figuring out what to do with all of our crap, but the end result will be worth it. Estes Park will always be here (floods be damned) and once I don’t live here anymore I can actually enjoy it again. And who knows…maybe I will actually be able to find the television remote that has been missing since a week before Christmas….

Predict Our High Elevation Baby!

I loooove predicting baby birth dates, times, weights…I don’t know what it is about it but there’s just something so fun about the whole thing! At my baby shower last week, guests put down their predictions about the birth of baby Caroline. The (eventual) winner is slated to receive a gift card from my mom. When I mentioned this, Lindsay over at Solo Mama (I can’t get a link to work, arg!) wondered if I might extend the guessing game to my blog readers too and I thought, what a fun idea! So, we’re going to play a “guess Caroline’s details” here too! And yes, there will be a prize!

Comment below (you can just copy and paste) with your guesses for:

Birth Date:
Birth Time:
Birth Weight:
Birth Length:
Baby’s Hair Color:

Stuff you might want to know:
– My actual “due date” is November 21. The nearest full moon to that date is November 17.
– I have naturally dark brown hair.
– Cameron has dark blonde hair.
– I was born at 8lbs 2oz, 22″ long.
– Cameron is unsure of his exact measurements but knows he was “completely average” and thinks he was somewhere around 7 1/2 pounds.

The rules:
– The winner will be chosen by the guess that falls closest to the birth date. Tie breakers for guesses on the same date/same distance to the closest date (meaning, nobody guesses the actual date but two people are each 2 days away in either direction) will be chosen by time, then weight, and on down the list.
– Predictions must be posted no later than November 1.
– Predictions must be posted as a comment on this post. I will not accept predictions posted on links to this page (i.e via Facebook or Twitter).
– You do not have to be a blog follower or a WordPress blogger to play.
– The winner will be announced by future blog post, so if you want to see if you won, you have to come back and visit the blog! This also means if you are not a blog follower/do not have a WordPress blog, you have to be willing to leave some form of contact for me to be able to get in touch with you to send you your prize.
– The prize will be a Starbucks gift card. If the winner absolutely despises coffee, or does not have a Starbucks in his/her area, we can discuss it.

I think that’s it! Happy predicting!