I’m on TV [sets]!

This entire summer is going to be crazy, isn’t it?

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my office, calmly working on the mass amounts of things I have to get ready for the upcoming school year, and the Athletic Assistant came into my office and asked me I wanted to meet Ty Pennington. I used to be a huge Ty fan (when he was on “Trading Spaces”), but not so much anymore. Still, I was intrigued, so I asked what she had up her sleeve. Apparently our school was asked to provide a meal to the workers, producers, and security guards at the newest “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” which is about 45 minutes outside of Superior, Wisconsin, near where I live (although I’m in Minnesota. Yes, I’m enough of a Minnesotan now to actually want to make that distinction.) Although I must admit that no one knew where this home would be until the day of filming. Yes, it really is a surprise. No, the shots you see may not be the first shots of the family coming out of the house. (According to my sources, they filmed the “surprise” about 16 times, although the first one really WAS a surprise.)

According to sources at the site, this is supposed to be the season premier home, which means the episode will be two hours long. We went to the school and made up a bunch of hot dogs, pasta salad, cookies, and a bunch of other things, and then a bunch of us piled into cars and drove out to the middle of nowhere. It was a blast, though, to see the site before it had been deconstructed. This build will be an entirely green build, which is wonderful. We were privy to a bunch of good info, since people in our party tended to know EVERYONE they met at the site. (Okay, I’m exaggerating, but certain people knew a ton of those out there.) One of the construction guys tried to sneak us around to the house site, so we could see all the before stuff, but we got caught and had to go back. On the way around, though, we were asked to pitch in and help move the trampoline and swing set to get them out of the camera’s view. (They were pretty beat up.)

I saw enough to know that this family desperately did need a new home, though. The interesting part is that they raise their own chickens and 4-H rabbits, and they also had a pretty large garden. They were really trying to help themselves as much as possible, but it wasn’t enough. (Side story: the family really wanted to save their garden, so the show agreed to dig the entire thing up, one scoop at a time, and re-deposit it into a new garden site. Isn’t that great!) The house was almost literally falling around down their heads, and it was in eminent danger of actually burning to the ground (and the dad is a firefighter, so he was pretty distraught about this).

Reading the local newspaper info online, though, I was sickened by people’s responses to this happy occasion for this family. Many were saying, “Weren’t there more deserving families out there?” I mean, what the heck? What constitutes a “deserving family”? I’m pretty sure that this family counts. “But what about those families that needed it more!” others cried. Yes, what about them. There will ALWAYS be less fortunate, no matter who you are. You can be in dire straights, and someone else will have less and need more. If that is the case, we shouldn’t do this show in the U.S. at all, especially since there are entire COUNTRIES that more desperately need homes for their citizens.

Anyway, the negativity aside, I’m so glad that we could provide any small bit of help to these people who are providing their time and supplies for free. It’s amazing how much can get done (and how fast) when people of all walks of life (union, non-union, employed, unemployed, etc.) get together to help someone else. A few of the teachers and administrators are going back out on Thursday to help wherever they can. I’ll, unfortunately, be working my tail off getting things ready for the school year, and I won’t be able to take the time off work. It was still a great chance to see how things work there (and hear some interesting stories from those behind the scenes, such as this one: This is the first show ever where the construction company owners went up with Ty and the designers to surprise the homeowners!) and to help in some small way.

Oh, and Ty wasn’t there that late at night. He was apparently sleeping at a local inn. *grins*

Updates!

Busy, busy! We’ve had a lot to do this summer, and I’m still working through the summer as well. In addition, we’re FINALLY moving from the pit-of-hell apartment (okay, it’s not a drug den — that I know of — but the management and quite a few other renters still suck for a variety of reasons). Our new apartment is closer to where I work (as in walk/bike to work close), we have a garage, a storage area, and a bigger apartment in general with a balcony to sit out on. There are tons of other perks, but those are the biggies for us (in addition to actually good managerial staff).

Antiques Roadshow went extremely well. I’ve never been in such a humongous yet well-organized event before. We found out that the lithograph we took (in addition to two smaller things) is indeed real and from the 1890s. We were super excited to hear that, obviously, since it’s such a wonderful lithograph and we LOVE it. Nicholas Lowry appraised it for us, as we had hoped during our time in the queue. We’d seen him on the show before, and we knew he’d be fun to talk to. He gave us a hard time for appraising a wedding gift (insurance purposes! We have a rider on our insurance, and we wanted to be sure the lithograph was actually real before continuing to pay that) and also quite a scare.

NL: Tell me about this.

Us: blah blah wedding gift

NL: *raises eyebrows and strokes his chin* You’re appraising a wedding gift?

Us: *babbling* Yes, we wanted to know more about the artist. Also, insurance purposes!

NL: *laughs and then sobers up* It looks really new.

Us: Uh. *can’t think of anything to say* We just wanted to know more about it.

NL: Good news, though. It’s not! It’s a well-known lithographer, although this is not his most famous piece, which is …. Yours is from the 1890s…

[just writing the important stuff here]

Us: Yay!

And so on.

We also took Neal’s grandfather’s (whom Neal has never known, as he died tragically when Neal’s dad was a child) Japanese katana from WWII and a metronome of Neal’s that he received from his grandmother when he was learning how to play the violin. The metronone is from the 1920s, which was exciting to know, and was made in Paris, France.

Anyway, good stuff. The producers and staff of AR are amazingly friendly and helpful. We saw one producer come over give his headphones to the girl behind us in line, so she could listen in on the appraiser and guest about the guitar they were then filming. Her boyfriend collects guitars, and she had been trying to get closer, but was told to get back. She asked a volunteer about it, but he couldn’t hear either, so he asked a producer who handed over the headphones (a Martin worth $5000 that was kept in a basement closet). The volunteer also gave us some info on other things around the place, such as a huge Japanese-made table that was worth $25,000 to $30,000 and the even bigger wardrobe that the owner thought was from the 1800s — but it was actually a fake.

We entered and exited almost exactly three hours apart, and this included standing in a huge line (that kept moving pretty quickly; I don’t think I stood in one place for more than five minutes the entire time), getting the general appraisal information (where we needed to go to have our items actually appraised), finding the first two lines (arms, to talk to this guy, and music, to talk to this guy, which were luckily both short lines), standing for a bit in the prints line for the lithograph, walking around to check out the scene (and look for the Kenos, whom we did not see), and then give our couple bucks at the Feedback Booth (the girls in front of us will probably be on television: They had prepared a song!) All in all, a wonderful time, and I would recommend it to anyone!

In other news, our saga with Qwest continues. We are STILL getting billed for our old service (yes, folks, we have actually passed the year mark as of a month ago) and we just found out we can’t get the same level of service at the new place. I’ve luckily found Qwest’s twitter (no, I don’t have a twitter account, but they have an email and will help you if you email them), which has been more helpful than my “executive customer service” representative from the BBB case. If you need to contact them, I suggest emailing the address on their twitter (or @talktoqwest on twitter) and talking to Steph. She’s been helping us with both the move (and she got us a GREAT price on the service, which was much less than we have been quoted by several other people, which made me happy, since it’s a slower speed than we currently have at this apartment) and with trying to figure out the continual billing at our old address. So far, no one has been able to actually stop the statements, but I’m hoping Steph can get behind the issue.

Our big move date (i.e., moving the furniture, since we’ll have all the smaller stuff over there already) is this Saturday. I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet of our new home! Picnics and grilling out! Riding my bike! (We can’t have bikes at this current apartment at all, even outside, and we aren’t allowed to use any grills anywhere on the premises. Work is going well for me, and Neal has the summer off (forcibly, since he didn’t get a contract for the summer, but I think it’s been good for him to have a break). His contract for next year is only for the first semester so far, at 75%, but I’m hoping he’ll get picked up for the spring semester, too. We’re keeping that in our prayers, along with a few other personal things, but otherwise life is pretty good today.

(We’ll see what happens tomorrow, now that I’ve actually written that out.)

Random thought

If you feel the need to preface a thought spoken aloud with, “With all due respect…,” then I’ll assume no respect is actually being given to the person you’re speaking to/about.

Supermen

It’s official: I’m married to Clark Kent. I mean, I knew Neal was super, but someone he works with today said that he had a very calming, mild, Clark-Kent atmosphere about him that made her feel comfortable. That’s a good quality for such a big guy to have on those around him, I’d say.

On the other side of super and men, we just finished watching “The Hulk” and I realized that with the RTN now locally available, Neal and I now tend to watch more shows from our childhood (and earlier) than we do shows that are currently on. The only show that I actually try to watch with regularity is “Lie To Me,” but other than that? We don’t really remember to watch much T.V. How sad is that?

Heck yeah!

Look what I just got in the mail:

“Congratulations! You have been selected to receive two tickets to the ANTIQUES ROADSHOW event in Madison, WI, on Saturday, July 11, 2009 at the Alliant Energy Center.”

Whoo!

Yes, Neal and I ARE nerds, thank you very much. (Well, I’d say I’m about 1/2 geek and 1/2 nerd, while he’s 1/4 nerd and 3/4 geek.)

We’re also pretty darn excited because this is very near his paternal grandmother, which means we’ll get to see her again! We haven’t seen her in quite a while and have been trying to figure out how to get out there to see her, but this makes the decision easy. We can definitely take time to do both and give ourselves some extra time to spend with Grandma.

Yay!

Yay! Fresh food!

Our local farmers’ market is open once again, and this means that we can get fresh meat, veggies, and fruit as it comes in season. Oh, and cheese. We can’t forget the fresh cheeses. And maybe chocolates again this spring and fall (since it gets too hot and melts in the summer). I’m so excited to see what all there is to buy again. Yum…

Stigma

Someone I have regular (almost daily) contact with was recently admitted to the local psychiatric unit for a couple days. We weren’t sure if this person would be there two or three days, but we were glad this person was getting the help they needed.

Today, the person came back and was talking to me as we normally do when suddenly they asked, “Do you know where I was?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you think differently of me because of it?”

“Nope!” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Let me tell you something about me: My mom is bipolar. I grew up with this and with her being tight-lipped because of the stigma attached to mental illness. One day, she realized the stigma was stupid and she started talking about it. I started talking about it. I think that when a person realizes that they need to talk to someone for their mental health it’s just plain smart to do what you need to do to be healthy. I’ve lived with mental illness in my family almost my entire life, and the thing I’ve realized is this: People can be stupid. Those are the people you don’t listen to and the people that you don’t spend your brainpower worrying about.”

The person was silent for a while and then said they were off to their next stop.

There’s one thing I want everyone who’s dealt with mental illness (whether they have one or they have a loved one who does) to fully realize: You are you and you are loved. Sure, some people may feel awkward around you and may think ignorant thoughts about your illness, but if they make you feel bad about yourself? Then you don’t need them in your life.

Landlords can be evil

Or should I say that property management companies can be evil? Our apartment is owned by a similar company as this, and I’m sure ours would also be more than happy to go after a murdered person’s family for rent “owed” and an ETF for leaving the apartment early (even if the person was killed). Our management apparently was refusing to let a member of the military out of his contract when he was called to Iraq a few months ago (which, in case you’re wondering, isn’t legal).

After all our interaction with such companies, Neal and I are loathe to move into an apartment owned by these types of companies. Here’s hoping we like the house that we’ll soon be checking out to rent this summer: same price as this crappy apartment but we won’t have to deal with imbeciles who don’t know how to keep their TVs, music, and “visitors” at a respectable sound level AND we’ll be getting hardwood floors, a fireplace, and a one-car garage as part of the deal. No more idiots parking half in our space because they were too lazy to back out and actually park correctly.

Well, here’s hoping…

Whoa.

I’m just sitting here watching random people bake cakes on t.v. (it must be cake-baking day on PBS’s Create channel here), when I hear tires screeching. We hear this a lot since we live on a very busy intersection in town and never in the two years that we’ve lived here have we heard what sometimes comes after:

CRASH!

This time I did. In fact, I heard two metallic crashes, so I ran to the window and looked out. A huge fir tree stands on the corner of our building, so I could see nothing of the crash, but I inadvertently witnessed the “run” part of a hit-and-run accident. A smallish car with the passenger side front smashed all to hell squealed its tires again and peeled out, across three lanes of traffic, roaring off past our apartment and dropping pieces of itself here and there.

I rush into our office and tell Neal I’m going to make sure everyone’s okay (I know the person didn’t hit a tree from the sound), so we don shoes and jackets and head off down the hill of our driveway. About halfway down, I see a white SUV on its top in the parking lot of gas station on the corner and hear the sounds of sirens coming nearer. I’ll admit, this freaks me out, and I run the rest of the way down the hill and ask the first person I saw if everyone was okay. She was apparently the person on duty in the gas station, and she let me know everyone was fine. How, I don’t know, but I’m so glad.

The owner of the SUV (not the driver, however) came up to us and said, “That’s my car. He just called me and told me what happened!” He was amazed the side airbags didn’t deploy, but I was amazed that no one was hurt after looking at the SUV (seatbelts, seatbelts, seatbelts!) I overheard the driver talking to the cops: “The next thing I knew I was upside down in the car, hanging by the damn seatbelt.”

Another cop car drove up to the scene and almost immediately took off in the direction of the runaway driver (apparently a lady). It’ll be pretty easy to spot her with half of the front end of her car up about two extra feet in the air.

I hope they catch her, but if they do so tonight, my bet is that she’ll be completely drunk. What is wrong with people?

Why, people? Why?

I just don’t understand what people gain by being nasty and rude to people they don’t even know. Even more so, what gains do people get from being nasty and rude to people (behind their backs) that they don’t even see EVER? I guess I just don’t get why someone would say awful things about someone behind their back when they have no reason to ever interact with that person and have no clue what that person does at any minute of his/her life.

What’s the point?

Yes, it got back to me. The sad part? Your opinion means nothing to me, because I never see you and I don’t even know you!