Well, the new kitchen is done! It only took about a month, but what a transformation! Without changing the position of the walls (although some of the wall between the kitchen and dining room was removed), the kitchen feels about 3 feet wider and incredibly spacious!

Here’s the kitchen when we first bought the house. The oven and refrigerator are on the wall between the kitchen and dining room. The peninsula is on the opposite wall (the garage is on the other side of the kitchen). Over the peninsula are double-door cabinets that we took down almost immediately after we moved in, to open the space up a little.

This shot shows the oven and refrigerator. The house was built in 1962, and the kitchen is original. French provincial was very popular back then, but I can’t say that the turquoise counters went with the antique finish on the cabinets. Everything was very well made, and the kitchen had a couple neat features, including an electric warming drawer and a special cabinet to the right of the sink base that was ventilated and had wire drawers for storing vegetables. The cabinets have gone to a nice home where they will be enjoyed by someone else.

The new kitchen has two toned cabinets (“Merlot” on the bottom and “Taupe” on the top). The granite counters incorporate both colors, which ties the room together. The arrangement of the appliances has flipped; the fridge and oven are now on the wall next to the garage, and the cooktop is on the wall next to the dining room. Behind the cooktop is a pop-up, downdraft ventilating system, so there was no need for a range hood.

The wall between the kitchen and dining room was shortened about 3 feet, and a cutout in the middle opens up the space even more and connects the kitchen and dining room together beautifully. Granite tops the passthrough, giving the space an elegant feel. The recessed lights and pendant fixtures over the new peninsula adds drama. It is a perfect space to hang out, read the paper, and visit with friends while you’re cooking.

It’s hard to believe that this all happened so quickly, but the results are dazzling! We still have to pinch ourselves to believe that it really is the same kitchen space, but it’s definitely not the same kitchen!

We have moved! After some discussion and pro-con weighing, we decided to sell our house and move to something cheaper. We figured that we could save about $1000 on our mortgage payment with a cheaper house, and hopefully find one that didn’t have as many extra costs associated with it.

Well, we found a great house that has almost the same square footage as the old one (counting the finished basement, it’s actually bigger), and we will be settled in by Thanksgiving. There is much work to be done. We have started replacing the flooring, and will eventually completely redo the kitchen. It’s a work in progress, but it’s one we’re excited about!

Just a quick update to say that we’re doing great. We had an amazing vacation with nieces Sarah & Amie in June. We took a cruise around Italy, with stops in Barcelona, Cannes, and Dubrovnik, Croatia as well as Capri, Sorrento, Pompeii, Florence, Pisa, Venice, and Taormina, Sicily. Every port was incredible, and we have many memories and lots of photos to sort through!

We’re now in the heat of the summer, but we know that autumn is just around the corner. School starts here next week, so things will be busy at Target, and we’ll have to say goodbye to a few people as they leave for college.

We’re having dinner Wednesday night with friends who leave Saturday for an Alaskan cruise. We’re bringing our pictures from our trip in 2001, and we’ll be able to relive those memories and share them with friends. We’ll try to add some of those pictures and our pictures of the Mediterranean to Picasa in the coming weeks.

We got some complaints that the redesign got rid of our old photo albums. Well, there are much better ways of organizing photos online, so now we’ll post photos on PicasaWeb instead. There’s a permalink on the right side of the page, in case you ever want to see what’s new.

Samantha & Sherman both love Greenies. For the past couple years, we have bought them online. We buy an entire year’s worth of treats, because that way we are sure not to run out any time soon. We also get a better deal buying them in bulk, but they’re still quite expensive for what they are. But the dogs love them, and Greenies do help with their breath and the cleanliness of their teeth.

This year, we bought Greenies from Dog.com. Not only do they have free shipping, but they offer discounts when you buy 6 boxes or more. Well, we bought 12 boxes of the regular size for Samantha (30 per box) and 3 boxes of the Teenie Greenies (108 per box) for Sherman. According to the online shopping cart, we got the discount on Samantha’s order, but not on Sherman’s, even though they were together. I didn’t think it was that big a deal – it was only a savings of $2 per box anyway.

Two days later, the big box arrived with the invoice/packing list tucked inside. Someone there had discounted the price of all the boxes, so we saved an extra $6. They didn’t have to do it; nothing on the site would indicate that the discount applied to our particular situation. They did it anyway.

I just wanted to say, “Thanks, Dog.com!”

Greenies Pantry Treat-Pak 30 oz – Dog.com

It was time to update the website. It had been pretty stagnant for a long time, and it has been tough to keep it fresh. Hopefully, this new version will make it a little easier to add new content, and we’ll try a little harder to do so.

Have a wonderful Christmas (or whatever holiday you are celebrating), and many blessings in 2008!

We saw Brokeback Mountain right after it opened in Evansville on January 20th. It’s a painful, beautiful film that portrays the heartbreak when two people are prevented from being together by an untolerant society (even if that lack of tolerance is only in their minds). Even my parents can understand that basic fact.

The criticism of the film from the right is just what one would expect them to say. Some people complained about the graphic sex, even though there is only one “sex scene” (if you can call it that) between the two men, and it’s so brief and obscure that you’d miss it if you blink. Yes, they do kiss, but if a man and woman kissing isn’t a “sex scene,” then neither are those scenes in Brokeback.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle is one of my favorite movie writers and critics. He writes a weekly column in the Sunday Pink section called “Ask Mick LaSalle” where he responds to letters and comments from folks around the globe. Here’s what he wrote to one guy who took issue with Brokeback Mountain:

The question it poses to straight audiences is “How would you like it, to not be able to live with the person you love, to not be able to express your love publicly, to have to go through life pretending to be something you’re not?” Sure, in New York and San Francisco, we’re sort of past that question. But in much of the country people aren’t. So what better casting than to take a couple of young guys who seem about as gay as Gary Cooper and have them fall in love? What better way to accomplish this than to put the issue of sexuality off to the side and make the issue, instead, about love? And what better type of guys to place in this predicament than a pair of cowboys, cliches of American masculinity? The movie is telling audiences that Jack and Ennis’ situation is not about choice, but about identity, and it’s saying if you can’t be yourself in America it doesn’t make sense. What other country asserts that it’s everyone’s right to pursue happiness?

“Brokeback Mountain” ties gayness to the American dream in the most obvious way imaginable, in a way so obvious that it might be considered ridiculous in 20 years time. Or brilliant. I can’t tell. But for the time being, it’s effective and I have to consider it a very good movie.

You can read Mick’s entire column here. And be sure to go see Brokeback Mountain. It’s wonderful.

We adopted Sherman, a 9-pound chihuahua, in late January, 2006. He was about 15 months old. Sherman had travelled around a good part of the country before he came to us. From what we know of his story, he was born in Ohio and then was adopted by a family in Missouri.

Steve’s oldest brother Rod had been working down in New Orleans helping the rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina. He was renting a house with a few other guys who were also working down there. One of Rod’s housemates had bought a dog for his family in Missouri, and the family didn’t want him. So the dog ended up sharing the house with these four guys in Louisiana.

Steve and Rod’s mom had been saying for quite a while that she wanted another dog. So last Christmas Rod brought Sherman up to Kentucky from New Orleans for Mom. She had Sherman for about a month, but one day Sherman got loose and ran down the street, and at that point, Mom decided that Sherman was a bit too much for her to handle.

So now Sherman lives with us in Indiana. He seems to have adjusted to life here, and he and Samantha get along fantastically. They wrestle and chase each other. Sherman follows his big sister around everywhere. We hadn’t planned on getting another dog, but this just worked out, and now we can’t imagine it any other way.

One year ago today, we moved to Evansville, Indiana, from San Francisco. A lot has happened over the past twelve months, and it’s about time we provided an update.

We took our big vacation last August, with a 2-week cruise on Celebrity through the Baltic Sea, visiting Oslo, Norway; Stockholm, Sweden; Helsinki, Finland; St. Petersburg, Russia; Tallinn, Estonia; Warnemunde/Rostock, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Dover, England. The ports of call were all fantastic, but we especially loved Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Tallinn.

Steve W continued working for Wells Fargo in San Francisco, working from home in Evansville. He has obtained his Indiana Real Estate license, and hopes to begin work as a fulltime Realtor this fall.

Steve G entered the Associate Supervisor Training program for the US Postal Service in February and graduated the end of May. He is now a supervisor at the Lawndale Post Office, about half a mile from our house. Just last week he had an accident at work where the tip of his left thumb was severed by one of the safes, so he’s off work for a little bit while the injury heals.

Samantha has enjoyed the changes that Evansville offers. She has become good friends with Harley, a West Highland terrier, who lives next door. She is now obsessed with squirrels, and considers it her fulltime job to guard the premises from the furry-tailed invaders. She got very sick in January with Auto-Immune Hemolytic Anemia (AIHA), where her immune system was destroying her red blood cells. She is on the road to recovery with a daily drug regimen, and we’re very glad that she’s still with us, because we weren’t sure she would make it in the first few days. Right after her diagnosis, blood tests revealed that she had lost 80% of her red blood cells, which is often fatal. We are very glad that she’s still here. Samantha now has her own website too.

We survived our first winter in Indiana. We had nearly 2 feet of snow right before Christmas, but it was gone by New Year’s Eve. It was pretty cozy inside the house though, and we didn’t mind the cold weather as much as we thought we would. Evansville is in Southwestern Indiana, so the winters are milder than they are farther north. During the winter months was also when we had our swimming pool installed. Now that summer is here, we’ve been enjoying the pool a lot. We even had two pool parties over the July 4th holiday weekend.

Life in Evansville is a bit slower than San Francisco, but we don’t mind that a bit. We’re more relaxed, and that makes us very happy. We miss our friends in San Francisco, but with email and phone calls, we do our best to stay in touch. We hope you all do the same.

A lot has happened in the past few weeks. We went to Kentucky last month to visit with Steve G’s family, and while we were there, we both had job interviews and ended up buying a house. Yes, we’re moving to the Midwest.

Our house in San Francisco went up on the market last week. We’ve had our first open house on Sunday, and today was the “broker’s tour”. There’s another open house this coming Sunday, and we take offers next Tuesday. It’s been a whirlwind getting everything ready for the open houses, and we’ll be thrilled when the house here is finally sold.

The house in Indiana is wonderful. It is very different from the house in San Francisco, but we’re looking forward to the change in lifestyle.
Steve G’s job is already set, and Steve W will take it easy for couple months before searching for employment. We’ll miss our friends in SF, but we have a lot of friends and family in the Evansville metropolitan area.

Here’s a link to a video of our trek across country during our move.

Bon Voyage!