10.30.2008

Update x 2

Update #1-Good News:
I have heat.
Yes, I have heat, which is fantastic for the nightly temps dipping into the 20s and 30s. Bad news: It only works when my neighbor, Mike, turns his on or off. So unfortunately for him, he's got an annoying girl knocking on his door every other day to tell him she's cold or she's hot. Really makes for community building though, if that's what Walt is going for.

Update #2-Bad News:
I can't control my heat.
Unfortunately, since I can't control the temp I can't adjust it based on my needs (i.e. waking, sleeping, running a marathon, Tae-Bo, etc. ). More bad news: I don't like it to be hot when I sleep. So, 6am I wake up, temperature is 73 (which, interestingly, feels cold in the summer as air, but hot as heat in the winter). I can't sleep it's too hot. And to make matters worse either my heat is on (creaky hot water baseboard heat) or the mice are competing in an Olympics. I cannot fall back asleep because I am certain that I hear the pitter patter of hundreds of hurdling mice scurrying all over my apartment. I hear "tap tap" in the wall and am further convinced that they are trying to eat through a floor board or dry wall to create another egress. Yes, you can say it, I'm paranoid. So, thanks to my brilliant decision to actively pursue looking for mice I am now terribly afraid that I have them and that they run around my apartment in the middle of the night. I even turned the light on thinking they may get scared and scatter like roaches, but I made sure to not look so I wouldn't actually see them! Baahhhh! Why did I open this can of worms?

10.29.2008

If tempted...DON'T DO IT!!

Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why? I asked myself a thousand times over and every time came up with the same resounding and emphatic, "I DON'T KNOW!!" Anytime you think twice to yourself and say, "I really shouldn't be doing this," listen and don't do it!

So, it all started harmlessly this weekend. I was pulling into the way-too-small-rear-parking-lot and my neighbor was standing out back smoking a cigarette. We small talked a little about the heat and other random apartment-related topics. I then complained about the smell of my rental car (Old Milly is sick in the shop and my Mom was coming in town for the weekend) and insisted that he check it out to confirm that I'm not being unreasonable by having them give me a different car. He suggested that I roll the windows down and let it air out.

After giving him a look of disdain and shock, I said, "No way. I don't want to get bugs in my car!"

He said, "I leave my windows down for weeks at a time and there are no bugs in my car."

"Ha! There are definitely bugs in your car. I get spider webs in my car and I leave the windows up! You're totally driving around with bugs!"

"Well, if you're worried about bugs I probably shouldn't........ha.......uh........Andy and I have both seen mice in our apartments," he revealed with hesitancy.

"What?!" Apparently the apartment below me and next to me have mice...one general conclusion can be made...I have mice! "No you do not!" I challenged him.

"Oh, but I do. I saw one run across my kitchen floor one night at about 2:30 am."

Naturally, I gave him a typical Mom Kim speech about how that wouldn't have happened if he had been sleeping like all the other good little boys and girls at that hour. And we left it at that.

I spent all weekend insisting that my mom was careful walking around eating because I didn't want her to drop any crumbs and feed the mice. Well tonight I was laying in my recliner reading for my Wednesday night book study at church and thought, "hmmmm, I wonder if I had mice where they would be...Don't do it Kim. Stop. Don't get up." Oh, I've done it now. I got up and walked into the "kitchen", with by the way, is connected to every other "room" in my studio apartment. I peeked behind the oven. I couldn't really see so I started turning on all the lights in that area--my bathroom lights, kitchen sink light, stove light--it was bright enough to start landing planes in here.

Lo and behold I see not one, but two little mice. A nice little pair--one brown one and one white one. What the heck am I supposed to do?! I can't see them very well, but can they see me? My initial reaction was to tap on the stove, which I did, and fortunately they didn't respond at all. "Ok. So they think they are sneaky and hiding.... Wait, what if they had run, where would they have gone? Bad idea, Kim." All tapping quickly ceased. At this point I realized my reading for the week was not going to get done because not only had I succeeded at ruining my dinner, robbing myself of peace in my own apartment, and assuring that I never get a sound night of sleep again, I could no longer concentrate on reading about the Wisdom of God. On top of all that, I could not longer convince myself that the noises I heard at night were the heating pipes or plumbing. No. Now I am confident that the noises I hear are little mice families feeding their little mice babies, taking them to mice school, and doing whatever else little mice villages do inside peoples' walls.

At this point it's time to leave for church. I go to the study, mildly distracted by my mice colony, and then arrive back at home. The first thing I did upon walking up the stairs was knock on my neighbor Mike's door. "Do you have a flashlight?" I asked. "Somewhere, what for?" he responded. "Oh, you know, I was just checking for mice and I think I saw some behind my stove." After a futile search for the flashlight he comes back with a class project that involved creating a circuit board and attaching Christmas lights and programming different rhythms/patterns of flashing. Great, so we can't see the mice, but we'll at least try to kill 'em by inducing a seizure with the psychedelic mini strobe lights. Perfect.

Well Mike squats down and stares for a good 10 seconds with no response. Panic is running through my blood. At what point do I jump on the couch or coffee table? Is this really happening to me? He looks at me and says, "You don't have a cat do you?"
"No, why?"
"Ha. I think these are cat toys."
"What? No! It's real. Maybe it's dead. Do I have dead mice back there?"
"It's got googly eyes. It's not real. I'll get it out and show you."

Sure enough there are two mice "cat toys" behind my oven. I insisted on leaving them there in case they are actually scarecrows of sort, kind of like hanging an owl, frightening mice to stay out of my apartment. So, to date, I have not witnessed first hand any mice in my apartment and I will hopefully stay mice-free with the help of my mice-deterrent mice couple. If you were planning on visiting me, please don't cancel your plans, yet.

10.23.2008

Panini Anyone?

Sometimes I feel more like a college student than a real adult.

Exhibit A. My makeshift panini press.















I was afraid my can of organic kidney beans would scratch my new Teflon pan, so I put a bowl in between and then realized how ridiculous, pathetic, and college-student-ish it looked.


Yet other times I feel like an old woman.














For example, when I'm in line at the grocery store and I bypass the People, Cosmo and US Weekly magazines and go straight for the latest Taste of Home magazine featuring festive recipes, I realize how old I am on the inside. The fact that I found "120 clip & keep recipe cards with photos" to be completely irresistible says something about me:)

Really, I think I'm just stuck in that transitioning phase. Kind of like Tom Hanks in Big...didn't he not belong with either age group or something like that? Little kid trapped in an adult's body? Wait, that's not really me either. Anyway, you get the point.

10.21.2008

Confession: I'm so un-urban sometimes

I must confess, I've embraced those dreaded Dwight D highways lately. I look forward to driving to meetings because I get to spend 20-50 minutes basking in nature's glory!

New England is BEAUTIFUL in the Fall.
















While I'm at it talking up the automobile...
I was at the gas station filling up for the first time in about a month (I drive very little) and I was stoked that gas was $2.73. I pulled into the station, got out of my car and started gearing up to fill my car up. I couldn't figure out why the button to select the fuel grade said: $3.23. "What? That's not what your sign says! Gas is under $3 nowadays!" I got into my car and then started to drive away when I looked at the pumps across from me and saw they advertised $2.73. I quickly turned and pulled into the pump, looking over my right shoulder I realized that I had been at the full service pump! I didn't even know that full service still existed besides in New Jersey and Oregon!

10.20.2008

Happy Birthday Dad!

Today my Pops turns the big 5-0!!

Happy birthday to a man that's smart, organized, a hard worker, an adventurer, a traveler and my dad!

It's your day today :)

Love you!












10.19.2008

How to Use a Drill 101

The things no one teaches you at school...well at least not if you've never had a shop class.

Emy and I were lounging around her apartment on Columbus Day trying to decide how to fill the time. Well Emy decides that we should consider hanging a shelf above her bed. We spend about 15 minutes deciding if it should be hung and where it should go in proximity to the two candelabra things hanging on the wall. We decide to just go for it, ignoring the advice of her roommate. We spend another 15 minutes trying to measure distances between candelabra, shelf width, ceiling to shelf, distance between nail slots on the back of the shelf, etc. Basically, we treat it as though we we're about to undertake a process more complicated than a root canal or open heart surgery. We figure out all these measurements and draw some dots and prepare for the "procedure." So I begin trying to decide which nail has a large enough head to fit into the slot on the back of the shelf and discover that none will work. "No problem," Emy assures me, "the shelf came with screws and anchors."

"No problem" those words will come to haunt us later. So we've got two anchors and two screws in our hands. "Hmmm...guess we need a drill," we decide. So Emy comes back with her roommate's drill and bits. We just kind of look at it not sure what to do next. There are gold ones and silver ones, Phillips heads and flats, swirly ones...basically it looks nothing like a girl's arts and crafts basket, so we're lost. Well, I have a little (we're talking microscopic) idea about what to do.

"Ok, lets find the drill bit that looks close in size to this anchor, but isn't larger. We'll drill a hole in the wall and then hammer the anchor in." We decide that it sounds like a legitimate plan (we have no idea what you're supposed to do with anchors). Now we've got the drill and a bit and realize we don't know how to put the two together. We try turning the head in different directions because I've seen Andrew do that before to load it. Nothing. So we decide to call Andrew, who is working on a take-home exam due in a few hours, to help us out. Obviously, this is more important. If you've read his blog comments, you know that most things I do make him nervous. This project was no exception. He explains how to turn the tip of the drill, load the drill bit, and lock it in. We succeed. Now we have the task of trying to figure out if in our massive button-pushing game with the drill we've changed it from drill mode to reverse mode. We manage to spin the drill slow enough to confirm it is going clockwise and should work as is expected.

Next, make a hole in the wall. This is where it all got interesting. It's Emy's wall, so she's putting the hole in it. She drills and then can't drill any further. Great. We're not sure how hard to push the drill in and we think we've hit a stud. We call Andrew to confirm. We check for "saw dust," which is apparently different then "ash" as I described it. Affirmative. We've hit a stud. We get off the phone without learning what this means.

What do we do now? Emy and I, knowing nothing about drilling decide that hitting a stud is the worst news in the world. People have stud finders just so they can avoid hitting studs (we're not the most handy if you haven't figured that out yet). We call Andrew again and he informs us that studs are good things and you can drill into them. So we do. Then we try to hammer the anchor into the stud and realize it won't go. We call him again (his take-home is going great I'm sure) and he informs us that you don't use both together. You have anchors for when you don't have studs. Hmmmm....something that could have been brought to our attention yesterday. So now we've got an anchor lodged in dry wall and a stud, but it's not in far enough to be usable. Emy starts to panic; I think it's kinda of humorous.

Ok, well, we'll just start over, but now we've got a hole the size of a dime in her dark gray wall exposing the white drywall. It's not exactly what you'd call discrete and it's not really useful for the screw. So we check for caulking. Sure enough we've got not one, but two options. We've got bath and kitchen caulking or window and door caulking. I say go for one of those and paint over it. We call handyman Andrew, Handy Andy, if you will, and he strongly urges against either option. We decide to just shift everything on the wall over about an inch and a half and just cover the hole with the shelf and deal with it when Emy moves out. Based on our previous hour of work and experience with the drill Emy decides to manually screw the two inch nails into the wall with a screwdriver, using no stud and no anchors. Patience wore thin. And that's where the story ends. The screws worked out. The shelf is up. Basically, we're just hoping for the best. No falling shelf. No tumbling picture frames. No broken noses.

10.18.2008

A Tribute to Best Friends

Some friends are the forever kind of friends. Months can pass without talking, but you can pick right up where you left off. Ask hard questions. Talk about important things. Talk about nothing. And leave knowing that you somehow feel as though you love this person more than the last time you saw them; and you're surprised that is even possible. They are the kind of friends who randomly drop you emails or cards or packages. The kind of friend every girl needs and the kind to aspire to be for others.

I am so blessed to have many friends like this and I cherish them (More shout outs to come, so don't feel left out. I'll start a weekly column or something honoring my friends and family!). One of them is Courtney. Courtney and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Seminole. We spent many summer days in middle school cooking Hamburger Helper and hanging out at the pool. We participated in all sorts of extracurricular activities together in high school. She went to UF for college and I went to Rollins. We ended up studying abroad in London the same semester in college and spent many Friday nights in my flat cooking dinner and eating incredibly oversized bowls of ice cream. She is currently in law school at Stetson and I'm a 1,000 miles away working at a non-profit in New England, but we make sure to meet up for a coffee at Starbucks whenever I come back into town.

I had gotten home last night from a long and draining day (and week) at work. I'm on a lull between projects, waiting for some decisions so I can move forward, and slow days make for very long days. Well I walk up the stairs and find an orange Nike shoe box on my door step with a note from my neighbor that says: "Kim, This was at the back door. -Mike" A package? YES! What a treat!

I hurried inside to open the box and found a present full of all my favorites: gummy bears, Alfredo pasta, hot chocolate, pink pens, adorable hair ties, chapstick, lip gloss, pink earrings, Ice Breakers Restore mints, nutrient enhanced drink mixes, an adorable Halloween cup, pictures, and an incredibly sweet card. My wonderful friend Courtney, whom I've known since 7th grade, sent me the package as a holiday treat just to remind me how much she loved me and valued our friendship. How thoughtful and amazing! The timing couldn't have been better either. It was the exact pick me up I needed after a long week. Also, ironically, I had been reminiscing about high school earlier that day at work. I had heard a lot of old school songs on my Pandora Radio and had been recalling the high school and early college years when everything was so easy, carefree, fun, and filled with many friends.

So here's to good friends, great memories, endless laughter, and a lifetime of companionship!

Courtney & I through the years:
High School Days















Sophomore Powder Puff















Scotland










Lion Bars-one of the greatest things the UK has to offer









Scottie Hotties

It's Time

Dear Mr. Landlord,

Please turn on the heat. It was 59 degrees in my apartment this morning when I woke up. I think it's time to light that boiler, flip that switch, do whatever you've got to do. I realize you don't live here and probably don't care, but let's get on it. I would like to spend some time outside of my bed and the 4 blankets I use.

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Polar in Providence


P.S. You are going to force me to switch out my fall fireplace decor for a real fire to keep warm, which, as we both know, is not technically permitted.

Fall Fireplace Candle Holder











(It sure is cute isn't it? It's currently burning Yankee Candle's Spiced Pumpkin tea lights. Oh autumn, you are divine.)

10.16.2008

The Day I Almost Lost My Job

I shall preface this story by telling you that my boss is a big classic Volvos guy. He has, I believe, 6 old Volvos that he maintains, polishes, and cherishes. He loves them. He and his Volvos were even featured in a newspaper article in the Providence Journal a few months ago.

Unlike the above picture there was nothing fun about my afternoon in the 1967 Volvo Amazon Kombi. My boss and I were on our way to Woonsocket for a meeting. I had been feeling sick all afternoon--kind of feverish and weak--so naturally I had difficulty opening the heavy car door (they made them out of real metal back then, none of that plastic crap we get today). I could barely get it unstuck to open it and, to my regret, struggled to shut it.

My boss and I start driving down the street and I get this feeling that my door isn't shut all the way. I look in the mirror and see that the door looks shut, but I'm pretty certain that it's not. Well we hit a bump and the door becomes ajar! I can see in the side mirror that the door was no longer flush with the side of the car.

"What do I do?! Stay calm. Play it cool," I tell myself. I have already learned the hard way that it's illegal to open a door in motion. [I was pouring an old coffee out of a friends car in high school, trying to help her clean up the car, and gather the mound of trash. Even though the car was rolling to a stop at a light, Mr. Officer didn't care]. So I realize that I can't open the door and re-shut it and we're about to merge onto the highway!! I decide that I have to tell my boss. I'm not sure how we're going to fix it, but the last thing I want to do is to cause his door to get ripped off on the highway.

He just laughs.

I try to tell him that I'm serious and this could be a grave matter, but he doesn't seem phased. The combination of more bumps and 70 mph has caused the door to be visibly opening!! He suggests opening the door and shutting, but that will be certain death for the door. I decide that the best option is to tighten my seat belt and hold the door handle. If worse comes to worse, I'm letting go. I'm not getting sucked out of the car! It looks flush once again so I decide to lock it and hope for the best. We hit a bump and it again is creeping open. The lock is obviously useless. The door is obviously not shut. Well the increasing speed forces me to switch my tactic from my right hand to the all out, across the body, left hand, using my body weight, grab.

He's still laughing at this point, mind you. I am not.

There is nothing funny about ripping the door off your boss' pride and joy. There is nothing funny about getting catapulted out of the car. As I'm holding this door for dear life I look at the door handle and realize they didn't make handles in the 60s like they do today. No, No, No. The car was made better, but the door handles were not. This thing is probably screwed on to the vinyl door liner and that's about it. It's probably been replaced 10 times by now. It's probably no stronger than Velcro. Great. Not only am I going to get his door ripped off on Route 146 and run over by a semi, but I'll have to turn to him afterwards and hand him his door handle as a consolation gift and tell him that I at least managed to salvage something. How's that for staff morale?

At this point I don't know what's going to fall off first, my arm or the door handle, so I change my strategy. I'm going to roll the window down and hold the door in by force. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Luckily it was an unusually warm day for fall. Desperate strategy works. Not only do I prevent pulling the handle off, but I manage to pull the door shut and hear a click. I again, locked the door, which worked so uselessly before, but was worth a second try. I sweated and hoped that it remained shut for the duration of the ride. Fortunately, it did. I didn't intend to be an awkward passenger, but let's just say my boss was not getting a shot at eye contact from me for the rest of the ride; I had a mission and it required complete focus on that side mirror.

10.14.2008

Fall Festivities

Fall has arrived! It's generally my favorite season of the year, but this year it has failed to capture my heart and steal my affection. My guess is that previously I was a student so I didn't mind it getting dark outside at 4:30 pm because I had been romping around outside all day between classes, but now that I'm working it means that the day is over by the time I get out of work! Boo:( [Ha. Nice pun, in light of the Halloween/Fall season] . Speaking of light, I should just get a summer home in Alaska, then it will be light out all day. I've always wanted to see the Northern lights. But wait, I guess to see the Northern lights it has to be dark out, so summer is probably not gonna work. Oh well. Plus to have a summer home that means you don't work, and let's be honest, urban planning is not exactly a field that's going to send me into early retirement.

Well, I love the changing of seasons so I won't let it get me down. I will continue to lounge on my couch  inhaling the sweet aroma of my Pumpkin Spice Yankee candle and bundle up like a blizzard just arrived. Also, I must apologize to my faithful readers for being MIA the past weeks, I was on an excursion of monumental proportions, but didn't forget about you. Where exactly have I been and what exactly have I been doing you wonder? Oh wait no longer!

I went to a wedding in Rockford, Illinois last weekend.

We watched the baseball playoffs. Bad news: Cubs lost. Good news: the Rays are holding strong and playing better than anyone could have imagined they ever would! I enjoyed a week of evenings filled with cable TV and nightly baseball games! But let's be honest, I couldn't stay awake to watch the ending to any of them. And to be more honest, I couldn't even keep myself awake for the debate, which started at 8pm in the central time zone! I make Mr. Bean in Rat Race look less narcoleptic I'm so pathetic.

I went to my first (and possibly last) corn maze!! For those of you who aren't familiar with this crazy autumn activity let me explain. Some entrepreneurial farmer out there decides to make a little dough by creating a maze out of their cornfield. Well, in this case it was a 10 acre corn field with a maze cut through it. The path is about 3 feet wide, the corn is about 8 feet tall and your goal is ...well there are many goals 1) Have fun roaming around in a maze of corn 2) Find the 8 checkpoints in the corn maze 3) Make it out of the corn maze alive and with all limbs. Option 3 was definitely my goal.

So Andrew and I had never been to a corn maze before, so we had this picture in our minds. We thought there would be kids, parents, strollers, clowns, balloons, baseball lights like in the Field of Dreams. Basically, we thought we were going to the county fair. Well to our surprise we pull up at 7 pm and no one is there. "Maybe it's closed. They said they were opened til 8 tonight, maybe they changed their mind," we discussed. Lo and behold, a guy walks out of his house towards his shop and flips on all the lights while we sit in the car wondering what we're thinking. Here's your visual: A house in the middle of the country, surrounded by cornfields, with a barn for his animals (reindeer of course), a Christmas tree farm, a banquet hall that is nothing short of Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede, and pitch blackness. Oh, and two people: me and Andrew.
"You open?" we asked.
"Oh yea, I've got a group of 45 coming out in about 20 minutes," he replies.
As we are paying he says, "Oh good, you brought your own flashlight" as he points to a lone flashlight on the counter.
"No we didn't, but can we borrow this?" Andrew asks, with the determination to accept nothing short of 'yes' from the man.
"Alright, here's an index card, there are 8 checkpoints hidden out there with different hole punches for each one so I'll know if you cheat. Good luck."
And that was it.
Andrew and I wandered out into the pitch blackness armed with a flashlight, map, and two index cards! Definitely not the kind of people that would survive Man vs. Wild. I'm not sure if you can imagine what it feels like to wander out into cornfields in pitch blackness on a windy night, but I'll sum it up with four words: Children of the Corn. There was no way we were making it out of there alive. Every wind that blew and crack of a cornstalk freaked us out. There are probably foxes or coyotes or wild raging deer! Are there snakes in cornfields? Probably. Who knows. All I knew was that I wasn't making it out alive.

Well about an hour into our carefully calculated excursion (as planners we used the map like a treasure map to ensure that we covered every square foot to get all 8 hidden posts) we heard voices. "Oh good, there are more people out here than just us now, this will feel safer" we thought...wrong! Imagine what it would be like to be in this already frightening situation with 45 college students now in the corn, probably intoxicated, and traveling in packs like sorority girls on their way to the bathroom. Well if the children of the corn weren't going to get us, a heart attack was. Around every corner was a college student, who in the pitch darkness didn't know that we weren't with their group. So, we now had to actually watch our backs and respond to cracking of corn because there were in fact real people hiding in the corn like a haunted house to grab us or frighten us. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs "We don't know you so don't mess with us--we're that pair of two random people in blue jump suuuuits!!!!" (Yea, that's right, we thought it was going to lack fun and we needed to help out a little bit by wearing all dark clothing and acting Mission Impossible in the maze). Wrong. In the words of my favorite Verizon commercial: We got hosed! Well, as you can predict, since I'm writing this post, we made it out alive. But not after the nice farmer family gave us a tour of the entire operation including the banquet hall and bringing out one of the reindeer to pet. In case you didn't know, there is apparently an actual species called Alaskan reindeer. They are very feisty and their antlers are so sharp they make the running of the bulls look like a safe operation. I was pretty sure little Elizabeth was going to gourd me. Luckily, she was on a leash. Well we left the ranch, went out for some ice cream and called it a night. We try to collect the mini baseball helmets (We've got 4. One from Yankee Stadium (fancy!) and the other 3 from ice cream dates).

Then I worked the rest of the week. Working "remotely" is not remotely fun. Your heart says your on vacation but your brain says you have to work and there is constant inner warfare until you cash in your vacation time.

Lots of baseball, lots of eating, lots of sleeping, lots of shopping. I had the most incredible beef tenderloin fondue and got a killer ski hat with tails!

I went to my first apple orchard and picked apples. I saw my first pumpkin patch and bought an overpriced pumpkin from the vine. We went on a Lake Geneva boat tour and saw the fall colors surrounding beautiful, historic homes. Kids in the tropic of Florida really miss out on this Fall business, this season of harvest, if you will. We do, however, not miss out on the art of pumpkin carving. We bought a pumpkin carving kit and made some pretty awesome pumpkins. Mine is the pirate ship on the far left, Andrew's the window (typical architect) on the far right, and Team Grandma with his sisters made the rockin' bat.

I concluded my trip with a stay at the Grand Emy Hotel in the heart of the University of Chicago campus. We enjoyed a dazzling double date with our men at the Med, a brief stroll through a park only blocks from Obama's house, and a night of random stories and laughs (to come in subsequent blogs). Well, this has turned into a really long blog...that's why I shouldn't allow too much time to pass between postings!

10.07.2008

Busy Bee

4 states in 4 weekends. Wow, what a fast paced and busy life lately, but I'm not complaining! It keeps me busy, on my toes, seeing the world (ok, U.S.) and prevents boredom!

New York City, NY (Sheep Meadow in Central Park)


















Providence, RI (Superior Court, Benefit Street)


















Seminole, FL (Indian Rocks Beach)


















Chicago, IL (View of Sears Tower from Millennium Park)
























Cities at night:
NY, NY (Radio City Music Hall)























Providence (WaterFire)























Chicago Theater on State Street

10.06.2008

Go Rays!

It's a great day to be a Tampa Bay Ray!!

10.02.2008

Fun Blog Backgrounds!

Great, the last thing I need: something else to waste my time on!

Well, I've done it now. I stumbled upon this site that has lots of fun, free backgrounds! It's super easy too.
You just go to the website: http://www.thecutestblogontheblock.com/
Pick a background and copy the CSS code
Add a new gadget to your page (The HTML/Java Script one)
Paste the code
and Voila!! It's there.

So feel free to spice up your blog with a fun, cute, maybe even seasonal background!