Pigeon Legs

A hawk has moved into the Lincoln neighborhood. And his favorite food is pigeons! We have spotted the hawk on numerous occasions chomping on a pigeon--but something pretty funny happened the other day. The hawk had caught a pigeon, taken it up into a tree in front of the Dean House, eaten part of it, and left the rest there in the tree to snack on at a later time. There were pigeon feathers scattered all throughout the Dean House yard. That afternoon Ranger David had a group of cute little 4th grade girls at the Dean House waiting to head over to the Lincoln Home. When they went out the front door of the Dean House, one of the girls excitedly exclaimed, "Ooooh, look at all of the pretty feathers!" The other girls were delighted. Then one of them pointed up at the tree and said, "Oh, and look--there's the bird!" But then one of them looked more closely and screamed, "No, that's not a bird--that's a bird leg!" Needless to say there was quite a chorus of screams. Poor David ended up having to explain the whole circle of life to the girls. The pigeon leg really was just hanging there from the tree though. It was pretty gross.

This afternoon an unscheduled group of 30 Chinese students showed up, and since it was getting close to closing time, they weren't able to tour the Lincoln Home. So they decided to just walk around the neighborhood and take pictures of the house. A few minutes later we got a call at the Visitor Center saying that there were Chinese people climbing all over the front of the Lincoln Home. What the heck? So I had to run down to the neighborhood, and sure enough--they were everywhere. I told their leader that they needed to come out of the fenced-off area and back down to the sidewalk to take their pictures. But once those Chinese students spotted me in my ranger hat, I knew I was in trouble. They surrounded me, cameras ready, and all of them wanted their picture with me. For the next 20 minutes all I heard was, "Police lady! I take picture with you!" I know it's a stereotype that Asian people love to take pictures, but it is SO true!! :-) What do Chinese people do with all of their photos I wonder. Photo albums maybe? If that is the case, I must be in a lot of Chinese photo albums.

Adding Flair to the Stairs

Next in the "before-and-after" series is the stairway! Today's project included painting the banisters. We had taken the one banister down while we painted the walls and moved furniture upstairs, and we finally got it put back up the other day. As you can see, the stairway also looks a lot better with the new carpet and lighter paint. In these pictures our new carpet doesn't look a whole lot different than the original carpet, but it is MUCH better--it's a nice warm color and doesn't have stains everywhere. And it is SO soft.

I don't have a "before" picture of our coat closet, but basically it was just a square hole in the wall covered by a ghetto curtain. (The people who owned this condo before us used curtains as closet doors.) Greg did a great job putting in a real door on the coat closet, and my other project today was installing some decorative accent molding above the coat closet door, the linen closet door, and our bedroom closet door. There was a noticeable gap between the tops of all three of these doors and their doorways, so the molding gives them a nice finished look. So things are coming along here. We're still waiting for our couch to arrive, but hopefully it will come this week!

Clowns and Country Music

Today was a rather bizarre day at the Lincoln Home. I have given tours to a lot of class clowns, but never to a real clown--until today. Chatterbox, an official Shriner's clown (unfortunately not in costume), came to the Lincoln Home this afternoon. When he ran up to me, got right in my face, and said, "Hey, you're pretty!" I knew it was going to be an interesting tour. It would have kind of creeped me out except for the fact that he was an older gentleman who actually turned out to be really nice. In addition to Chatterbox, today's tours of the Lincoln Home included . . . country music! Nothing says Abraham Lincoln and 1860 like country music, right? The Lincolns are getting some new wallpaper in their front stairway, so that area of the home is closed off to visitors. While the plastic barriers put up by the wallpaper workers keeps the dust and steam out of the other rooms in the house, it doesn't exactly block out the sound of their radio. Maybe if they had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir "Songs of the Civil War" CD playing it would have been all right, but the country music kind of killed the ambiance.

Because of the wallpaper project, a top hat and walking stick that were originally displayed on a hall tree in the front entryway of the home are now sitting in a more prominent spot in the Lincoln's sitting room. The other day I had a tour group of 5th graders from inner-city St. Louis. They were mostly African American kids, and for 5th graders they were actually pretty well-behaved. Upon seeing the walking stick in the sitting room, one of the teachers asked if Lincoln had a walking problem or if the walking stick was more of an accessory. I explained that having a walking stick was stylish back then--it would have been part of Lincoln's look. A funny kid right in front of me said, "So, you mean Abraham Lincoln was pimpin'?" That made me laugh. All I could say was, "Yeah, I guess you could say that." According to the slang dictionary, "pimpin'" means "to make an accessory look good," so I guess you could say that was a legitimate question. The Lincoln Home is a strange and funny place.

The Master Bath

Here are some more results of our work here at the condo. The bathroom off of the master bedroom was pretty scary when we moved in, but removing the wallpaper border, painting it a nice shade of green, getting a new shower curtain, adding a medicine cabinet, installing a new towel rack, and hanging some pictures made a world of difference!

Here is the new-and-improved bathroom:

Slowly but Surely

Fixing up a house is a lot of work! But it is very rewarding, and it's fun to see it transform into your own place. Our condo is coming along slowly but surely. We have gotten most of our stuff put away, but we're still working on a few things. When Greg has a little break from school and work we'll try to get our downstairs bathroom finished--it needs new tile, a new toilet, and a new sink, but it's really nice to have two other bathrooms to use while we're waiting to finish that one. We are also waiting for our awesome new couch to arrive sometime next week--and then I think it will really feel like home. I'll post pictures as we finish up the different rooms in the house. Then once we're all done, Greg and I will walk through with the video camera so you can get a better view of the place. It is the perfect house for us.

Here are the before and after shots of the guest bathroom:













It looks much more inviting now, right? This is our farm-themed bathroom. I absolutely love the yellow paint in there--it really brightens it up and makes it feel nice and big. At some point we will get a new toilet in there, but the one we have is good for now.

Next we have the guest room (aka the sports room):

I didn't have any good pictures of this room from before we moved in, but it was pretty scary. The wall that now has the shelves on it was covered in some crazy wallpaper. As you can see, Lily has adopted the futon as her play area. We still have a bit of cleaning up to do in the guest room, but it's coming along nicely. It's great to have room to put all of our stuff around! So, the condo is keeping us busy, but we are making a lot of progress. Soon I will have pictures of the rest of the house.