Tuesday, August 5

We invited our realtor over this morning to take a look at all the work we've done on this house so far and give us her opinion on whether our potential kitchen plans are aligned with the house's value. Not that we're selling--we just wanted her thoughts about the project. When we told her the cost we were looking at, she said, "Are you sure that's all?", which obviously was not our reaction, but made us feel better about the numbers at hand. 

The girls came with me to work after that to help me with some orientation tasks involving stickers and notebooks. They set themselves up at a table in my office, in front of two big bags of Pittsburgh Popcorn left over from another department's event, and ate popcorn and stuck stickers and shared earbuds so they could watch a show on Lucia's phone. They of course managed to turn the work into a race, which was loud and silly enough to be annoying to other people in the office (eye roll). Then they walked home and went to a picnic table in Schenley to eat lunch. 

We all went to the XC practice tonight. Lucia and Greta both ran with their teams, Andrew ran, and I walked 2.6 miles. 

We came home to a familiar annoyance: some small moths flitting around near our pantry. They've been there since we got home from NH. This time, there seemed to be...more moths. Some poking around in the pantry revealed more and more moths, and it was clear they were LIVING in there, and BREEDING. I ran screaming from the kitchen. Lucia declared she was never eating any food from our house again. Greta googled around and read to us information about "pantry moths." We left Andrew to do the horror of tossing out all the open food and washing down the shelves. Shiver.

You know what this means--we're officially going to renovate our kitchen. We're going to say yes to the plans and move forward. If I hadn't been fully on board before, I am now--I want a new, clean, sparkling kitchen. New everything. New, clean, and, like I said, sparkling. Many years ago, when I was dragging my heels over a basement renovation in our old house in NJ, I was pushed into the "yes" camp in a similar fashion. One day, I was in our then-unfinished basement to do laundry, and I spotted what I was certain was a cockroach running across the floor. I screamed and blindly ran upstairs, sobbing and hyperventilating. (I have a true phobia, not just an 'ick, a bug,' which some of you may know dates back to a 'service trip' I took to Juarez when I was a sophomore in college, and I stayed for a night in a house where the walls were covered in cockroaches.) We confirmed the basement renovation the next day.

It was a busy and distracting enough day that I forgot all about tomorrow's labs until the very end of the evening.