Dan and I made it back from our whirlwind trip to Ohio. 1200ish miles, 2 families, 6 days. ::collapse:: We got to spend two days with each family but it was nice to get some quality family time in before the semester starts. We won't be back until December (boo). The kitties stayed home because they like the car even less than I do. They were very glad to have us home and showed their affection by climbing all over us as we tried to sleep and rubbing cat hair (and allergens) all over our faces. It's good to be loved.
I still haven't uploaded pictures from the camera yet, mostly because I'm not positive where the cord ended up. Probably in a box somewhere. Unpacking obviously got put on hold while we went to Ohio, and has been further delayed by my getting sick almost as soon as we got back to CT. We had to be at school early so that Jamie and I could work on recruiting for our study about graduate student parenting, so I made myself some Chai tea because no sleep=cranky Corinne. However, it also equaled a very sick Corinne about 25 minutes after getting to work. And I've been feeling awful all day which means it probably wasn't just the tea, I probably have some sort of bug. I'm sorry if I've infected anyone else.
Despite this setback, I am going to have everything unpacked by the time the semester starts!
Not much going on in the Tagliarina household right now. Dan finished his first class and is finalizing his syllabus for his fall class. My dad got me Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog for my birthday and the soundtrack, which Dan and I have been listening to almost constantly since I opened it. That's been a lot of fun. My mom got me a bunch of new clothes for school for my birthday, which are super cute and also professional. My favorite is a gray and purple argyle sweater that I am totally in love with.
Dan and I discovered PriceChopper (and by discovered I mean finally decided to check it out when we saw that grapes were a dollar cheaper a lb than Big Y this week). They are open 24 hours. They have a fuel rewards program. It's like Krogers! (except I do not know the quality of their store brand items yet). However, the store did have a funky smell, but our weekly shopping was about $30 less than normal (including coupons), so I almost don't care.
Well, I've officially become one of "those" people who blogs about saving at the grocery store, so I'm going to head to bed and hope I feel better in the morning.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Birthday Present
So I got the last part of my birthday present from my husband last night. We had tickets to see Mike Birbiglia in Newport, RI. So we made the 2 hour drive over from Manchester to Newport and spent the afternoon walking around downtown. I thought that there were supposed to be mansions everywhere, but apparently not where we were, because we didn't see any. But we did have a really amazing dinner. I had lobster mac and cheese, which had penne pasta and asiago cheese and soooooooooooo much lobster. It was insanely good and totally worth breaking my diet for. I've decided it was okay because we walked for like three hours yesterday. And then we got to the show, which was in a tent.
...
So, yeah, this was at the Newport Yachting Center, and whenever I think "yacht" I naturally think rich people, swanky place. Instead, we find a tent. Which Mike Birbiglia made so much fun of, appropriately so. The show was so hilarious. It was a great mix of stuff that I've heard before, and stuff that was new (at least to me). This was the first stop on his new tour, so if you think you might be interested in him, check him out. He's been on NPR's This American Life several times. For anyone who already loves him, get tickets if you don't have them already, it's a great show!! And also, I'm the hulk, I'm the hulk, I'm the hulk. :) Dan and I got to meet him after the show, and we got a CD signed, which was awesome. I got all tongue tied and stupid, as usual. What I should have said was that we also have an unpronounceable Italian name (Tagliarina). What I actually said was some sort of babbling about how great he is (which is true), and how much I loved him on TAL and The Moth.
The surprise of the evening was MC Mr. Napkins, the opening act. He was funny enough to be the main act of a show (although not funnier than birbigs, because, let's face it, there are few things funnier in this world than Mike Birbiglia). However, he was significantly funnier than the comedian headlining at a major comedy club in Cleveland I saw at a bachelorette party who seemed drunk or high and mostly made jokes about Michael Jackson (I wonder if he's changed his act). Mr. Napkins is a jewish guy with super curly hair who raps (not too badly actually, and he was pretty good on the CD). His lyrics are hilarious though, full of lots of word play, which I love. Dan and I also got to meet Mr. Napkins after the show, and I was able to behave like a more reasonable human being and hold an actual conversation. But yeah, he's really hilarous, and we got his CD, so if you want to listen, let me know.
All in all, it was a pretty awesome birthday present!
...
So, yeah, this was at the Newport Yachting Center, and whenever I think "yacht" I naturally think rich people, swanky place. Instead, we find a tent. Which Mike Birbiglia made so much fun of, appropriately so. The show was so hilarious. It was a great mix of stuff that I've heard before, and stuff that was new (at least to me). This was the first stop on his new tour, so if you think you might be interested in him, check him out. He's been on NPR's This American Life several times. For anyone who already loves him, get tickets if you don't have them already, it's a great show!! And also, I'm the hulk, I'm the hulk, I'm the hulk. :) Dan and I got to meet him after the show, and we got a CD signed, which was awesome. I got all tongue tied and stupid, as usual. What I should have said was that we also have an unpronounceable Italian name (Tagliarina). What I actually said was some sort of babbling about how great he is (which is true), and how much I loved him on TAL and The Moth.
The surprise of the evening was MC Mr. Napkins, the opening act. He was funny enough to be the main act of a show (although not funnier than birbigs, because, let's face it, there are few things funnier in this world than Mike Birbiglia). However, he was significantly funnier than the comedian headlining at a major comedy club in Cleveland I saw at a bachelorette party who seemed drunk or high and mostly made jokes about Michael Jackson (I wonder if he's changed his act). Mr. Napkins is a jewish guy with super curly hair who raps (not too badly actually, and he was pretty good on the CD). His lyrics are hilarious though, full of lots of word play, which I love. Dan and I also got to meet Mr. Napkins after the show, and I was able to behave like a more reasonable human being and hold an actual conversation. But yeah, he's really hilarous, and we got his CD, so if you want to listen, let me know.
All in all, it was a pretty awesome birthday present!
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Still unpacking...
Oh my goodness how do we have so much stuff? We are still unpacking boxes full of papers and notebooks and crap from the last four or 5 years of our lives that we have just accumulated. And I'd just toss it all except I'll be going through a box and then go, oh, I wondered where my birth certificate/high school diploma/other important document was. Glad I found that.
We had been having problems with our Cox internet service, and so we were going to switch to AT&T. Long story short, after spending a lot of time trying to get all of that taken care of, it turns out that getting a sattelite won't work unless we're willing to leave two windows open all the time to run cords through (Um no), and we spent over a week waiting for our DSL to work and Dan had to stay home for three days. By this point, all of the problems with Cox had been worked out, so AT&T - you lose! DSL was less expensive, and Satellite was only slightly more expensive than what we pay now for limited basic cable and waaaaaaaaaay less expensive than extended basic, or digital cable, and we would have gotten 200 channels and a DVR, but I guess it was not to be. Le sigh.
We had some people over, our friends Rob and Shaz to watch Hot Fuzz, which was really really funny. The cats were actually sociable.
Speaking of the cats, they have been insane about wanting to play lately. Any time they see us they want to play and they look at a toy, then at us, then at the toy, as if to say "why isn't this in your hand being swung in front of my face for me to bat at?" It's pretty funny. Lenin has also developed a special meow for saying he wants to play.
Living in Manchester is great, we've gone on a lot of walks lately. Yesterday we didn't feel like working so we went on a 2 hour walk and then came back and Dan fixed my car. Last week, when we had no money, my check engine light came on and the car made funny noises as I was driving to work. I hadn't gotten to the freeway yet, so I turned around and took Dan's car. My car sat in the parking lot, waiting for us to get money in case it was something very bad. I had been noticing some problems accelerating at times, but we were hoping to get it through the summer before something actually went wrong because we already spent like $800 on car repairs for Dan's car this summer and had no savings left.
Then, this week, we got our security deposit back from our old apartment. We had money to get my car repaired!!! So we took it to autozone to get the code checked and got the readings. Cylinder 2 misfire. So then Dan called his Dad who can do almost anything on cars and he suggested some things to try. After a couple calls back and forth after doing various things, he figured it was probably a bad spark plug wire. So we went off to autozone to buy new wires. My role in all of this: I watched, I described the problems with driving that I had noticed, and Dan taught me how to remove, adjust, and put back my spark plugs. Yay for having a working car again (and for under $50).
Dan and I are going back to Ohio for a short visit at the end of August (2 days with each family), which will be nice.
Dan's class is going really well, he only has three students right now but they're really good. He's busy preparing for his fall class, which he's pretty excited about. I'm doing advising again in the fall, which will be nice, and I'm also going to try to take four classes instead of three, because I like to make things difficult for myself. We're both trying to get stuff done before the school year starts.
We had been having problems with our Cox internet service, and so we were going to switch to AT&T. Long story short, after spending a lot of time trying to get all of that taken care of, it turns out that getting a sattelite won't work unless we're willing to leave two windows open all the time to run cords through (Um no), and we spent over a week waiting for our DSL to work and Dan had to stay home for three days. By this point, all of the problems with Cox had been worked out, so AT&T - you lose! DSL was less expensive, and Satellite was only slightly more expensive than what we pay now for limited basic cable and waaaaaaaaaay less expensive than extended basic, or digital cable, and we would have gotten 200 channels and a DVR, but I guess it was not to be. Le sigh.
We had some people over, our friends Rob and Shaz to watch Hot Fuzz, which was really really funny. The cats were actually sociable.
Speaking of the cats, they have been insane about wanting to play lately. Any time they see us they want to play and they look at a toy, then at us, then at the toy, as if to say "why isn't this in your hand being swung in front of my face for me to bat at?" It's pretty funny. Lenin has also developed a special meow for saying he wants to play.
Living in Manchester is great, we've gone on a lot of walks lately. Yesterday we didn't feel like working so we went on a 2 hour walk and then came back and Dan fixed my car. Last week, when we had no money, my check engine light came on and the car made funny noises as I was driving to work. I hadn't gotten to the freeway yet, so I turned around and took Dan's car. My car sat in the parking lot, waiting for us to get money in case it was something very bad. I had been noticing some problems accelerating at times, but we were hoping to get it through the summer before something actually went wrong because we already spent like $800 on car repairs for Dan's car this summer and had no savings left.
Then, this week, we got our security deposit back from our old apartment. We had money to get my car repaired!!! So we took it to autozone to get the code checked and got the readings. Cylinder 2 misfire. So then Dan called his Dad who can do almost anything on cars and he suggested some things to try. After a couple calls back and forth after doing various things, he figured it was probably a bad spark plug wire. So we went off to autozone to buy new wires. My role in all of this: I watched, I described the problems with driving that I had noticed, and Dan taught me how to remove, adjust, and put back my spark plugs. Yay for having a working car again (and for under $50).
Dan and I are going back to Ohio for a short visit at the end of August (2 days with each family), which will be nice.
Dan's class is going really well, he only has three students right now but they're really good. He's busy preparing for his fall class, which he's pretty excited about. I'm doing advising again in the fall, which will be nice, and I'm also going to try to take four classes instead of three, because I like to make things difficult for myself. We're both trying to get stuff done before the school year starts.
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