It turns out *we* are the terrible neighbors

When the Pretend Husband went to empty the ashes out of our pellet stove yesterday, the tray was still too hot and burned a hole through the oven mitt he tried to use to carry it outside. I opened the door to find him bent down next to the tiny garden pond by our front steps, trying to break the layer of ice on top and dip the oven mitt into the water.

As he came inside, the PH threw the oven mitt onto a pizza box sitting on the front steps (I think he was going to hold it under the ash tray to make sure ashes didn't fall onto the floor as he walked?) and I warned him to make sure the oven mitt wasn't still burning because it could start a fire.

An hour later, the doorbell rang, I heard the PH yell, "Fire!" as he walked into the hallway and I immediately began filling a bowl with water. As the PH took over that job, I opened our front door to find our neighbor pouring his beer onto the charred remains of the oven mitt and pizza box.

Our neighbor, while working in his garage and trying to enjoy a beer, had noticed huge clouds of smoke drifting over from our property. From his house, it looked like the smoke was coming from the bedroom windows of our house and so he hustled over to investigate. As he was arriving on our doorstep, intending to find out if we were home, he came upon the actual fire that was creating all that smoke and, as I mentioned, wasted a perfectly good beer putting it out for us.

All I can say it, thank goodness our neighbor is the type of guy who investigates first and calls the fire department second. And you had better believe I made the PH tell me I was right about not leaving the oven mitt sitting on cardboard.

Don't let SJ fool you. She didn't get pregnant for the blog-- she did it for me.

So, exciting times around here, huh? Although that's about all the excitement I can take until the funny kids arrive in the fall. So don't expect any more big announcements from us, unless SJ finds out she's having twins (ha! I love the look on her face when I say that!)

If you've come to know me at all through this blog, you know that I am not capable of-- say-- calling kat's lil sis and simply announcing, "SJ is pregnant too!" Nope. Instead, I called lil sis and said, "So I take it you're not going to be pregnant with me."

And she FREAKED OUT. "KAT, are you kidding? I had a baby three months ago!"

I replied, "I just thought it would be nice to be pregnant with someone."

She continued yelling, "Did you really think I was going to get pregnant so soon. Are you crazy?"

I think she would have kept going, but I interrupted and said, "I wanted someone to be pregnant with. Lucky for you, I convinced SJ to do it instead."

Silence. Then, "SJ is pregnant?" and all sorts of celebration on the other end of the phone (I'm guessing it was part excitement for SJ and part relief that I didn't seriously expect her to be pregnant again).

As I said in the comments (and have said to SJ in person a bunch of times), Congratulations! I'm excited to have someone to go through all of this pregnancy craziness with, I think it will be cool to have our kids so close in age (we joke that they are destined to be best friends or future spouses) and, on behalf of little sis, thanks for getting pregnant so she didn't have to.

Does "flying by the seat of my pants" count as a plan?

Ok, now that I feel like a complete pervert after my last post (although I'm willing to bet some of you would have made the same mistake!)

Anyway, I was just heating up my lunch (leftover homemade macaroni and cheese) and I mentioned to my co-worker that I had accidentally made it, but it had turned out pretty well.

"What did you mean to make?" she asked.

"Chicken," I replied.

See, this is how it is when you live 4.2 miles from your best friends. You get home from work with no plans for the evening and begin staring at the contents of the refrigerator and pantry to try and figure out what to make for dinner. Your husband (or, in this case, Pretend Husband) calls and asks you to start thawing chicken and he'll make something out of it when he gets home (sometimes you go ahead and make it so you don't starve and sometimes you let him come home and cook for you like the queen that you are).

Then you get an email from your BFF describing how she made the best chocolate cake ever and it's at her house right now and seriously, best.chocolate.cake.ever. Oh, want to come over and try it? And we can give you dinner too. We'll have, uh, boxed macaroni and cheese and leftover meatloaf.

Which is how I came to not make the chicken the PH was planning on, but instead made homemade macaroni and cheese to contribute to the neighborhood revitalization dinner at SJ's. But let's be real, the mac and cheese was just a warm-up for the best chocolate cake ever (which I can totally vouch for-- it was delicious!)

I highly recommend convincing your best friends to move as close to you as you can stand it because sometimes the best times together are the accidental ones.

My dreams are now sound tracked by the Super Mario Brothers music....

SJ and I consider ourselves to be fairly classy, mature women. Uproariously funny sometimes, but still, we try to stay classy. And mature. And I think we succeeded...

...until SJ and her husband, J, got a Wii for Christmas. On Sunday, after holiday festivities, too many work hours for yours truly and waaaaaaay too many Christmas cookies, the Pretend Husband and I decided the day was ours to do whatever we wanted. After breakfast with friends, it turned out we wanted to stop by SJ and J's house, rouse SJ out of bed, make fun of her bedhead and mock her as she played some game on Wii (I remember the phrase, "This is a game for 5-year-olds and you're losing" being uttered somewhere in there...)

Then, since we are the proud owners of two Wii controllers while SJ and J are still trying to find a second one, we invited them over to play Super Mario Brothers. Which, oddly enough, SJ and I started playing while the guys watched football in the other room. But the men (10-year-old boys at heart, those two) couldn't resist for long and our game turned into an eight-hour Super Mario Brothers marathon that included SJ's character going through 95 lives (she'll tell you the guys played her character part of the time...), me taking a break to bake cookies, the PH taking a break to make dinner and a short break for all of us to eat dinner before we played one last hour of the game.

We can make fun of the guys all we want for being immature, video game-addicted children, but it turns out that if you give us a chilly Sunday with nothing to do, you're likely to find these two classy, mature ladies right there on the couch next to them.

Happy ThanksChristmasGiving, everyone!

So, I hope you're not really jealous, Internet, that KAT and I now live within a really long and exhausting but not so far that it's not doable walking distance from each other.

How amazing is that, right? And only slightly further from us is the lovely and amazing home improvement mistress of all that is power tool related: SRG.

It's fabulous, I tell you. Every day I come home from work and am struck a) by how freaking dark it is and b) by the fact that I have a coat closet.

And, as of Saturday, a WASHER AND DRYER that SING TO ME. Oh yes.

It's the little things, folks. I've been forbidden from doing all of the updating I really want to do - which is mainly, things like paint, new light fixtures and carpet. It's not like I'm knocking down walls like we did last time. And I'm totally on board with taking our time re: furniture and such.

But don't make a girl stare at ugly brass fixtures for too long. Or this:

Ugliest crown molding you ever did see. I am itching to paint, but I'm forbidden until we can fully agree on.. everything.

Which is sad for me, because it obviously means I'm never going to paint. Woe to me.

But not really sad woe. Because I still have room to put up three Christmas trees during this week of ThanksChristmasgiving. And for that, and a thousand other things that have to do with my new house, my awesome friends and family that helped me unpack, I am eternally grateful.

And for those of you that are wondering, the dinner count stands at:
me and J over KAT's house the night before closing
KAT and the PH coming over Friday to help us unpack and celebrate
dinner with the KAT and PH on Sunday
and then dinner at their house again on Wednesday (we didn't get our new oven yet, and KAT obviously missed us)
KAT and the PH over our house yesterday to celebrate the new oven.
And we have plans for going over there on Wednesday.

Also, we may or may not have met them at Target and we may or may not have also had ice cream with them on Saturday night. For dinner.

With all of this increase in the social calendar, our neighborhood shall be revitalized in no time. Although, since I have yet to see a neighbor, I wonder if they realize that they're in need of revitalization?

Just you wait, B-town. KAT and sj are coming with crockpots to a neighborhood near you.