And...Karin gets a new phone!

Last bit of news for the night: my new cell phone arrived today! It's a Motorola KRZR and it's pretty sweet. I'm still learning about all of its features, but it's fun to play with. Here are a couple of pictures to compare old and new:

Old and New together


Opening up to each other

For anyone who is interested, I did keep my old number so no switching anything to get ahold of me. And with that, it's off to bed. Good night!

Volleyball Success

Tonight we played the top-ranked volleyball team in our league for the third time (there are only 4 teams in the league so we repeat a lot) with some great results: we beat them the first time and were within 5 each of the other two games, not a bad night at all. In fact, it was good enough to warrant several All-Heart awards:

1. To Molly, our awesome sub, who encouraged us to try Bump, Set, Spike with moderate success in the third match.
2. To Dawn with her awesome digs that completely shocked the other team.
3. To all the Bacos for a consistent 99% serve rate (only 3 misses total over 3 games)!

Great job to all :)

Monster Truck Time

On Saturday night, Nick and I attended our second monster truck rally as a couple. It was just Karin hanging out with the boys again - we met Dave, Ed, Paul and Seth at Riverside and walked over to the 'Dome for Monster Jam 2007, featuring everybody's favorite monster truck: Gravedigger. Here's a shot of him in action:

Email me to see the full collection of Monster Jam photos. This unedited collection includes two shots of the people who were there and 120 shots of the Monster Trucks in action!

Unfortuanately, he would crash on his next jump and be unable to finish his freestyle event, leaving the ultimate tragedy in monster truck rallies: an uncrushed trailer.

Since he was the last truck, no one else got to crush it either. What a waste!

Superbowl Time!!

After an exciting end to the AFC Championship game, I finally know what is going to be written on my Superbowl party cake. Nick has been listening to the debate all day and I think he's glad that there is a definative solution. For anyone who didn't watch the playoffs today, the Bears won the game on the ground and the Colts scored a rushing TD to finally take the lead with 1:00 remaining, then intercepted Brady to seal the win. So the two teams I wanted to see got in - can't wait for the big game!!

Victory

A big "All-Heart" goes out to the entire Bacos team who played tonight - Bob, Dawn, Rob, Katie, Nick and Karin. Everyone played fantastic volleyball and we won 2 of the 3 games. The second game came down to the wire and we won two challenges by the other team. First that you can kick a ball and second that you have to win by 2. Our loss in game three was close too: 23-25. Most exciting for me was that I served the winning point in the first game (actually the last three) - very rarely do I get to do that :)

We followed volleyball up with a game of Beyond Balderdash, a game which hasn't been drug out since last year's cookie exchange. I narrowly beat Bob out for the win (he got second and Katie third). I love hearing what everyone comes up with (and writing out clues that everyone thinks are real!).

Hopefully I've got a little winning dust left over in my pocket so I can win at poker tomorrow as well.

American Idol in Minneapolis?

Big dud. I expected better!! I also think the format of the audition shows is getting a little too out of control. It's a lot better when they show more singing and a whole lot less of the back stage theatrics. And as long as I'm complaining, bring back the judge fights!! All this agreeing on the people is old after only one night. I want deadlock!!

Car Accident

Luckily we weren't in one, but we had a front row view of it. We were the only car waiting to turn right at an intersection. A lady in a blue car totally blew through the intersection long after her light had turned red and a guy who then had the green arrow turned into her. It was strange. I was thinking "he's going to hit her!" Then I realized I think that a lot and have never seen an accident. But there it was, a pop, and bam, and glass all over the street. Both cars were still driveable (they moved over and parked on the shoulder) and the drivers were out of their cars and talking to each other (there was only one person in each car) so we didn't hang around to see the police or be witnesses or anything. But it was a little scary and it definately spiced up our trip to the library.

Where Have We Been?

Nick and I had an interesting week - both volleyball and tennis were on a bye, which meant that we had a lot of free time for the first time in a while. Nick is making great progress on the bathroom. He painted the top half (the bottom is getting wainscoted) and is drilling the holes for the new plumbing as we speak:

No more sink! Unfortunately there wasn't any tile beneath it, adding another step onto the project.


No more grey!!

I have to say, I'm very happy with the progress. At this rate, it should be finished in far less than the two months we estimated - all those extra nights helped. Maybe tomorrow I'll get some better pictures - both of those were taken with just a floodlight on. That's the disadvantage to doing all this work in the evenings (lack of natural light).

Last Saturday Nick and I left our comfortable suburb and headed into the city. Which one? Both of them!! In the afternoon we visited Hamline College in St Paul and watched a concert by the Twin Cities Bronze, a local handbell choir that was raising money to go to Oberammergau of all places! We always had handbell choirs at church growing up, but this choir did a ton of fancy things that I've never seen before and sounded excellent. Saturday evening we headed into Minneapolis and saw We Became Actors play at a bar. Some of our friends are in the band and it was our first time seeing them play. A completely different kind of music, but still awesome.

Other than that, lots of watching Friends on DVD. Still on series one, but we're trying to get further. Dave won two games of Settlers and Sergei won poker. I almost beat Katie in the second game (I started off with a 4 of a kind and didn't get weak again until it was heads up) but couldn't hold on. Smeeta's in town now so we'll see what the weekend brings, although right now I'm just playing online Bunco- Katie keeps talking about it so I thought I'd try it out. Like most games I think it would be much more fun live with other people. Not quite as much fun as Pocket Farkel, but hey, we have to give the other dice games something to strive for!

Where Have You Been?

I found this "visited states" website today and it calculated what percentage of states I've been to. Including Arizona (where I am visiting at the end of this month) I have been to 17 states, or 37% of the U.S. I only counted states that I've done more than drive through and maybe stop for gas, if I add those in it jumps to 26 states, or 52%.

You know you want to try it. Post your numbers in the comments ;)

And It Begins

We are now officially a one-toilet home. Nick tore both out today and moved the downstairs one (it's nicer) upstairs and put the old upstairs one outside. It shouldn't be a big deal except when we have company, then the lines might just get longer. This part was relatively low-stress, hopefully the whole project goes this well!

Off We Go!

The Next Great Mess

Or is that "Project"? We have decided it's time to redo our downstairs bathroom ENTIRELY!! Everything except the tiled floor is getting switched out. Right now it all sounds pretty cool, but ask me in 2 months how I feel about it (hopefully it will be done by then)!

The Enemy. Who picked those colors? Who picked that mirror?


The tub that started it all

Cheers!

Cheers!!

I realize my last couple of entries were quite brief so, in an attempt to rectify that, I will give a further description of what New Year's Eve at Karin and Nick's is like. We originally made plans to go out to eat, but cancelled them when I learned that my Packers were playing a Sunday night game. That was good because I was beginning to feel slightly gypped by the NFL for not moving one of our games to the preferred primetime slot. This freed up the afternoon for Nancy, Nick and Jeff to tour Cabella's and Erin and I to look at old photographs at home, followed by the head-to-head Trains marathon that I soundly beat Erin at.

At 6:45, Nancy and I prepared platters of food and carried them down to the basement to eat during the game. Everyone was primed and ready for the game to start. To my immense satisfaction, it was a great game for the Packers - they held Grossman to 2 completions and 3 interceptions (2 returned for TDs ) in the first half and Lovie pulled poor Rex in the second half. The Packers ended up winning the battle (as was previously posted) and then we got down to the meat of the evening: playing Cranium Pop 5 while waiting for midnight.

Waiting for midnight

Erin wisely split the teams up into boys against girls and off we went. Pop 5 is an interesting type of Cranium. The non-guessing team assigns points to each of the things you can do (sculpting, drawing, acting, etc just like the regular game) and then the other team must pick one to do before they look at what the answer was. The funniest was when Nick picked "Humdinger" for fad and had to do "Kool-Aid Man". The ladies were about falling out of their chairs laughing because he did hum "Oh, yeah!" perfectly but alas the guys never got it and the girls managed to win all three, guessing such things as "ShrinkyDinks" (charades), "Pet Rock" (drawing), "Wonderbra" (sculpting), "Tickle Me Elmo" (charades), "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (drawing) and "Seinfeld" (charades) within the allotted time (note the absence of humdingers in there. Not really a coincidence). In all three, the guys were ahead until the end, when the ladies suddenly jumped in and beat them!

In between the second and third games, we took a break to watch the replay of the ball drop on TV and toast in the new year. We also discovered that our basement carpet is stain-guarded - the red wine came right up! After the third game, we played a game of Captain Insano Monopoly before deciding to call it a year and going to bed.

New Year's Eve was also memorable because we got the first significant snowfall of the year, making everyone glad we had cancelled our dinner plans and could sit at home comfortably eating leftovers. It nicely stopped around 7 pm however, so that everyone could get home safely on the first, freeing up Karin and Nick to drag the dead tree to the curb and then collapse in exhaustion. Happy New Year 2007!!

Happy New Year 2007!

The Packers won!