Reverting back to a College Freshman

Grad school starts in less than a week, but does that mean I need to revert back to my college freshman days? Other people my age have kids and are doing adult activities, I on the other hand am reverting back to my 19 year old self...

Case in point. Last weekend we go to the Folk Festival. Am I excited about seeing the performers and hearing new music. Yeah, not so much. My first stop, the beer tent. I have a very low tolerance for alcohol. I really don't drink that often and I'm not a huge person, so any minor amount of alcohol will have an effect on me, especially if it is hard liquor. So, what does any normal girl do while she's drinking? That's right, smoke the cloves.

This very similar to my college freshman year. Every weekend was a beer fest and along with the beer fest came the cloves. Granted I'm not drinking nearly as much as I did in college, but what are other people my age doing? They are having kids. We are one of the few couples I know that don't have children.

So, the question that begs to be answered...am I reverting back to a 19 year old? Should I be growing up and doing the "grown up things?" And more importantly, can you still live my current drinking/smoking/traveling lifestyle and have kids. And if you can't, does having a baby somehow trump all of the other things that I so look forward to doing now? Answers....please!

Swift Progress!

More progress on the home front...We are now minus one ceiling in our hallway. This is in preparation for the framing that is going to happen this weekend. Still more work to be done, the floors will be coming out this week as well, but things are going quickly...which is very good news to me.

On another front...Matt signed up for two new media classes today. Very excited about that. He is now on his way to a BA in new media. SWEET!! I found out the books that I need to buy today as well and learned, which I already kinda knew before, that the University likes to gouge its students with book prices. I can buy my books on amazon for like $50 bucks or something like that. Guess we know where I'll be buying our books!!

The Renovation Has BEGUN!!

Nothing is more satisfying than seeing a part of your house that you hate slowly go away! This weekend we started the process of destroying the bathroom. My father came over and helped with the deconstruction. The wall abutting the bathroom has lost all of its plaster and we've figured out how the fixtures are going to sit in the room. Plus we now have a good idea of how we are going to have to attached the new floor. We were hoping that the beams went a different way than they did and we were going to extend the floors that way, but it never works as you had planned once you get things torn apart, so, we had to come up with an alternate plan, and I think that its going to work just fine...


I was a little unsure of how it would look in the hallway, and one of my favorite things about our house is the open staircase, but I know that I'll have to sacrifice something to have a decent bathroom. So, I guess I'm willing to give up the openness of the hallway. Plus, it looks like we may be able to make a closet out of some of the extra space, which would actually be really nice seeing as how I have NO storage in this house. But, we'll see. A closet would obscure the window in the hallway even more, and I want to keep it nice and light in there, so we'll see. That will probably be something that we'll tackle more when the bathroom is completely done.

The picture to the right shows what the hallway is going to look like after it is all finished. This weekend we hope to have the door all framed up and hopefully the plumber will be able to come over before my birthday on August 2nd. That would be a wonderful birthday present!!

Once the plumber gets here we'll be able to start with the tiling and everything. VERY exciting. I've been waiting five years for a decent bathroom. Until you've lived with a bathroom with a sink that has a seperate spout for hot and cold water (so you can never really get luke warm water) you couldn't understand. Not to mention the fact that the faucets drip. Our shower is new, however, it was never fully level so when I use my scrubbies to clean my face, they build up in the corner of the shower. And the aweful wallpaper with some warped paisley pattern...and the dust and general grossness of it all!! I can't even describe it!!

To your left is an actual representation of the bathroom. The door to the right of the room wil have to stay because it leads up to the attic, but we're thinking that we'll do another hidden door like we did in the kitchen (a built in book case that opens like a door). We have to keep that door there unless we wanted to use a bedroom to convert to the bath, but I don't want to loose a bedroom for resale value. We don't use the attic that much, so I'm good with having to go through the bathroom to get to it...kinda weird, I know. But you do what you've gotta do!! It will be well worth the wierdness price to have something useable.

On an unrealted note, Matt is still trying to get into one of his classes. His advisor is on vacation, but he talked to a woman in the New Media department who said that one of the classes that he was going to take in Belfast because it was at night, won't count. Which doesn'tmake sense to me because it comes up in the University of Maine's listings as a place he can take it. Sometimes I think that UMaine is just so warped and are just trying to make it difficult for people. We'll see what happen tomorrow though, he's supposed to talk to his advisor then. I suspect that this woman isn't quite sure what she's talking about....I signed up for my classes though and will be entering the world of graduate school. Now all I've got to do is pay for it. Thank you TJL for tuition reimbursement!! Now I just have to submit my tuition reimbursement paperwork!!

Happy Days Are Here Again!!

Matt has talked with his advisor at the University and it looks like it will still take him 4 years, however, he will be able to take some classes at UMaine Augusta or Eastern Maine Community College. It looks like he's going to take a majority of his gen ed classes at one of those two places and they will transfer over. So, it looks like we could potentially save a good chunk of money by doing that, which makes me much more comfortable than spending all that money at UMaine, especially for the same class. Things are looking up at the Green-Hamann's, that's for sure!! Hip Hip...Hip Hip!!

Plus, we are only around 3 weeks away from going down to Massachusetts to see my aunt who is coming up from Florida. I haven't seen her since my wedding last October, and I haven't seen Mickey since I don't know, maybe since my grandfather died and that was maybe 7 years ago. So, it is going to be so great to see him again, especially since he's had a rough time of it with the cancer (hense the reason he wasn't at our wedding).

Additionally, we had another plumbing guy come over today and he gave us a quote of $1,000 to do the plumbing in the bathroom!!! This is fabulous news, considering the other guy wanted to charge us $4,500. Granted this new guy isn't going to take out the cast iron pipe (unless needed). Plus he also said that he only needs like a week's notice and he'd be able to come in and do the plumbing, which means that it is very possible that we might have the bathroom complete before we start school back up, which would take a load off of both of our shoulders! He also did some heating work at my parents house so he is a known quantity. Very, VERY exciting!!

Good News Turns Ugly

So, all of the good news that we got yesterday, IE Matt being accepted to the University of Maine has gone bad...

We find out today that NONE of his classes from his associates degree will transfer over to UMaine because the University says that it isn't a Regionally Accredited School. So, the two years that we had anticipated him being in school has now turned into four and will cost a total of $40,000!! Insaneness!! How people afford to go to college I don't know. It's so frustrating, he finally gets accepted and now I don't know how to pay for it.

Now we are faced with a dilema, do we spend the money and hope that it will lead to him getting a better job...or do we say screw it and not do the college thing at all.

On top of all this goodness, we get a sorta quote from a plumber who says that he wouldn't feel comfortable redoing our bathroom because he thinks that it would probably not make code. Lovely. Now that leads to another question, do we spend a lot of money and make the bathroom larger and add a tub, or, do we leave the layout of the bathroom as it is, a 3/4 bath and just update the fixtures. This would leave us with only the one bathroom and no tub in our house at all. Later we could always convert our porch into a bathroom, but that is going to require the big bucks...!! I'm not sure what the decision is going to be, but the whole school thing is definately going to come into play.

I want both...

Is it selfish of me to want it all and be angry that I can't? I don't have a horrible life. We both have decent paying jobs and have had the ability to travel. We lead decent lives, but yet I'm still not satisfied. I want a new bathroom with an actual bath tub, I want Matt to go back to school full time, and I want to be able to go on atleast one vacation where I leave the country a year. Is that too much to ask?? Really??