Pulled Pork and Beer

This weekend we hosted our very first house guest! My mom came out to see us to celebrate Mother's Day (seriously, how spoiled are we?). She drove the whole 5 hours to Pittsburgh with the top down. We had a great time sitting around the door table in the living-kitchen talking, driving around PGH eating pulled pork and beer, and ambling through the yard. I'm happy to say that she does not think that we're insane (though everything's relative - please see pictures of her little green mascot friend, OX).

So the biggest progress to report on the house itself is the preparation done in order to host someone! One of the rooms on the third floor has shaped up nicely into a very cozy guest room. It's a little warm during the day but absolutely heavenly at night. Ben was a total champ and unpacked almost all of our boxes - seriously, all that's left in the dining room are books and some knick-knacks. We still have to set up the office, but we both seem to prefer the dining room table for work-at-home anyway.

Other things of note:

• We think that the hideous stucco'ed cottage cheese walls might be sheetrock and not solid plaster. I'm not sure if that's good news or bad yet. As much as I dread the project of skim-coating allll those walls, we're not really up for completely replacing them, either.
  

• With her, my mom brought us a lawnmower. Though at the moment a machete and a blowtorch might be a more efficient way of clearing the backyard, we can't wait to use it. Neither of us has mown a lawn in ages - and never with such a pretty shiny machine!
  

• We made our first mortgage payment last night. Ah, adulthood.