BrianandLibby.com

Just in case you haven’t been keeping track…

http://the-office-tv-show.com/the-office-pranks.asp

When I got home from church yesterday I asked Libby what was on the agenda for the rest of the day. She replied quite matter of factly -  Nothing.

In usual Brian fashion I started to think of how I could replace the nothing with something…the mall, maybe a movie, go out to eat, hang with friends…however the mall closes early on Sundays, there weren’t any movies playing we wanted to see, we had gone out to eat Saturday night, and all of our of friends had something going on.

Libby and I spent the day watching movies, taking naps, and just hanging out. It made me remember back to the days when we would hang out on Sundays while we were dating. Yesterday I was reminded that doing nothing is something.

Hope you all like our new look. Well, our site’s new look (we still look the same). This almost finalizes the look of the new site.

I am so excited right now. Brian and I were leaving the house tonight and we noticed that when the garage door closed the top panel was slightly misaligned and not resting on the one below it. The garage door is original to the house and I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones in the neighborhood that haven’t replaced it yet. So it’s kind of inevitable that we’ll have to replace it soon. Tonight I feared that the day was drawing closer…fast.

So when I got home I looked at it and the littly “thingy” that held that panel and the one below it together was no longer holding it together. But it was there, and the screws were still there, but those thingy’s that keep the screws on (I now know these are called nuts) were not there. So I was just going to walk away and show Brian when he got home, but suddenly I felt empowered. I examined the other metal thingy’s (not the screws or nuts, the big metal thingy that holds the panels together) and they were all intact. If only I had two more of the exact same nuts that were still in place.

And the light bulb went on. There’s a hardware store across the street, I know what I need, I can even bring one to show them. I was truly empowered. I could do this…all by myself! So I took off one of the nuts and brought it to the hardware store. I was going to just walk up to the counter and ask for help but they all seemed busy. So I kept walking, and found the aisle with the things that looked like what was in my hand. There were about 100 different varieties of them.

So after a couple of minutes I found one that looked like the one in my hand, but shinier. I brought two to the counter, and fully aware of my inexperience (and unwillingness to drive back to the hardware store if I was wrong) I checked with the guy behind the counter and he tried my hex-nut (oh yea, I know what that is) and the two I’d picked up on the same screw…and they all worked! He said I was lucky - but we know the truth. I am a genius.  And tonight, I fixed the garage.

1. I hate public “mass crowd-ish” places.
   The more public and crowded, the more I hate it (examples: Target = fine, Mall = not a fan, Concerts = I can tolerate, Great Escape = sheer hatred)
2. I love Microsoft Excel.
   Automatically solved formulas + Neatly formatted spreadsheets = True Love 
3. I am a geek
   Don’t let my affinity for social interaction fool you - I am very geeky. I love being in school, even though I complain about it. I love to figure things out…like when I rewired our HDTV perfectly on my own - Dave Bookhout is my witness, although I am sad to say, he was shocked (they were color-coded, but he was still shocked, so I am still proud). I also love a challenge, and yes, I am satisfied with nothing less than an A.
4. I love to do mundane manual labor
   I get excited when I get to shovel the driveway or reorganize the garage. As a kid, I loved mowing the lawn (b/c I had a sweet walkman :)). So far I like all of our home improvement projects, including the really obnoxious, tedious ones. I have no explanation for this.
5. Olives are the only food I don’t like
   I do like every single food out there, unless there’s something that I haven’t come across yet, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t get myself to like olives. Wierd.

In an effort to live up to the identity of this blog, I, Brian Howe will now be entering the blogging world full time. I understand that I enter this blog not as an equal. Here we go…

From green army men to my pound puppy named Henry, as a child I always knew where I stood with my toys. I was in control. There was nothing to figure out about Henry, he was made of foam, plastic, and cotton. Henry was unable to make sounds, he did not move on his own, and for all intents and purposes (minus the brilliant marketing behind him and his pound friends) there would be no reason to have ever bought him. Henry however fit very nicely into my controlled world of toys. He often played a role designed for him in my imagination…I didnt have to figure him out.

Last weekend was a holiday in the Howe home. Saturday was “New Cell Phone Day” (NCPD). Two years ago I got my first camera phone. It was amazing…photos, video, texting - I was opened up to a whole new world of oppurtunity. With NCPD quickly approaching I did some research and decided that I was going to go with the Motorola Q. The Q is a smart phone yet it is stylish…very thin and light weight. I noticed online that they now offered them in black and decided I had to have it. I am proud to announce I bought the first black Q from the Wilton Verizon store.

So there I was on NCPD with my beautiful black Q…this thing is like having a personal assistant with you at all times…at least it looked that way. After playing with it for a while, I successfully logged onto the internet, sent and received a text message, and took a picture. But believe it or not I could not figure out how to make a phone call. All this to say, as much as I love my new grown up toy, sometimes I wish Henry was around.

Oftentimes during my ever-invigorating workday I get a call from my sister with the latest on my neices. You know, Isabella likes ham now, Alessandra used the potty, the girls had their first day at preschool…etc. Today’s call was especially exciting, it went a little something like this: “Alessandra gave Isabella a haircut.” Oh yes, today we discovered that Ale has no future whatsoever in cosmetology. And her poor unsuspecting accomplice (or should I say victim) thought she was a pro. Unfortunately I don’t think the rest of us can even pretend to agree.

Bye bye innocent youthful curls. Hello scholarly bob and awkward collick.

Before:

After:

Here we are! We are still working with the template and stuff but everything will be on the new site from this point forward. We are going to customize the header, and we are well aware that comments aren’t working, but that should all be resolved soon (thanks Jon)!

I am convinced that this blog will be significantly better than the last, for numerous reasons:

1. I like WordPress better than Blogger, so far.
2. I feel much cooler not having blogspot in the web address anymore.
3. Brian Howe PROMISES that he will be a regular contributer to the site.
4. I am excited about the new blog, so I will probably write more often.
5. I think we’re going to use flickr to post photo updates and house albums, which is always fun.

That’s all for now, oh I forgot one really cool reason:

    6.  Brian got a new phone and we can BLOG FROM IT.

What more can I ask? When he first the phone it I had no interest in its 327 functions (except for the fact that you can play solitaire on it) but once I heard that, he had to pry it out of my hands. Blogging in the car, blogging on vacation, blogging anywhere Verizon Wireless offers service…should I be excited or embarassed?

Wow, this has never happened. I am having a total blogfreeze. Sometimes things happen and I think to myself “This is definitely going on the blog.” Sometimes I realize I haven’t blogged in a few days and I think back on what might have happened that’s blogworthy. Sometimes I can’t think of anything (like today) so I just log in and by the time the post editor comes up, the words just start flowing. Well, this morning, I’ve got nothing. This post editor has been open for a full 5 minutes now, and I hadn’t put any words into it yet.

I mean, there’s a lot I could write about but I guess that on certain days it just doesn’t really seem like it will be entertaining for me to write about. If I don’t enjoy writing it, I certainly don’t want to subject anyone to read it.

Well, I’ll settle for a quick update. I’m almost ready to launch the all new brianandlibby.com. I’m trying to spruce up the look of the site…limiting since I have to use a WordPress template. And frustrating because photoshop is freezing every 23 seconds. But hopefully that will be ready to go by the end of the week. The biggest news is that Brian Howe himself PROMISES that he’s going to start blogging once the new site is up. In fact, he already knows what his first post will be about (and if I didn’t know he’d be mad at me for writing it when he already “claimed” the topic, I wouldn’t have had a blogfreeze today). Hmmm…family blogwar dynamics. This might get interesting!

So, like most of America I’ve made vows to resolution-ize some things this year. I have conveniently waited until 19 days into the new year to make these goals public…just to make sure I am serious about them…and so if they’re sure-thing failures I can weed them out instead of publicizing my defeat. But so far I think I’m off to a good start. I’ve been learning that if you have a vision but don’t specify what benchmarks let you know you’re on your way to accomplishing the goal, you probably won’t get there. Furthermore, if you don’t specify the daily steps you’ll take to accomplish those goals, you’ll never get there. So, I tried to do both.

I basically took a mental inventory of the things that bother and distract me every day. The things I want to change but look back on every year and have remained pretty much the same. So, like a large percentage of the world, one of my goals involves health and wellness. Specifically, I want to get back to what I weighed in high school (as if I’ll publicize what that number is, or what I have to lose to get there). I also want to start running again. Running the 5k was a huge accomplishment for me. My whole life I’ve told myself I’m “not a runner” and guess what, I never was! So for me to run 3 consecutive miles without walking at all (or falling flat on my face for that matter) was pretty much equivalent to walking on the moon. Now that I know I can, in fact, run, I want to run run more. A 10k…this October. That’s the goal; a quite reasonable one considering that I “trained” for the 5k in 11 days (not a recommended training regimen by the way, hence the 2 months my knees punished me for the abuse) and now I have 10 months.

One of my other goals is just to get some control back in the day-to-day stuff. It seems like I’m always “too busy” lately, and as a result, all I want is downtime. Always tripping over laundry, grabbing fast food, racing from one place to the next, and stressed out in the process. And if I cut out anything to allow for a little margin in my schedule, I feel guilty for it. Skip out on an obligation, feel guilty. Cancel on friends, feel guilty. Cut out my workout, feel guilty. Leave work on time even though things aren’t done, feel guilty. Can I get a witness? So, I’ve made a daily change that will help with this AND miraculously help me achieve my first goal too. I, the girl who barely gets out of bed by 7 (embarassing, I know) and is always rushing to work, was going to go to the gym BEFORE work and still get there at 8. Estimated wake up time = 5:30am. Yikes. It is still dark at 5:30. So I started last week, and guess what? I loved it. I was at work on time, raaaarrrring to go (spelling?), and all day, I knew that even if I didn’t leave right on time, it was ok, because I didn’t have to rush to the gym before going wherever I needed to go that night. And, as a result, I have two, sometimes three, weeknights totally free. And on those nights, I can actually go home and take some time making a healthful dinner, something that relaxes me and I truly enjoy, and then do all those things I never get to on normal days. So far so good…it’s been great. I’m not going to lie…today I wasn’t up until 6:20 but I managed to rip myself out of bed and still get a workout in and get to work at a decent time. And after work…the evening is all mine!

So anyways, I’ve obviously made a conscious decision to make these resolutions public, and I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t considered the repurcusions of slacking off and, perish the thought, failing. So I consider it all of your responsibility to check up on me from time to time and make sure I’m taking steps towards accomplishing my 2007 goals!