"Daniel-san! Sell House!"

Todd and I have just put our house on the market. I have spent the last week painting every room in the house, and Todd has packed up all of our extra stuff and moved it into storage. It’s been a lot of work, and we’re finally to the point where we’re ready for the masses to come look at our house. The house is now so devoid of stuff that there is a slight echo in most of the rooms.

Last week I was almost done painting the house, and Todd was almost done packing up our stuff. We were exhausted so we stopped one night and watched The Karate Kid on TV. We were joking about how psyched Mr. Miyagi must have been to have all his chores done by some kid all in the name of teaching him karate.

Then Todd had a brilliant idea, “Hey, let’s put a sign out in front of the house that says ‘Free karate lessons inside.’ Then we can put on a phony Japanese accent and say things like ‘Pack box! Breathe in nose, breathe out mouth! Paint wall! Up! Down! Breathe in nose, breathe out mouth!’ We could totally get this house packed up in no time!”

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House hunting has been an adventure. We found a house that we like and we’re still ironing out the deal with the sellers. But going into houses and looking at them has been a lot of fun. It’s always fun to see the way other people decorate their homes, and to say “Oh good God what where they thinking?” when we see something particularly awful in a home. There was a log cabin that we looked at that was very nice. The seller removed the stove from the kitchen along with the woodstove from the living room. When we asked the agent where the stoves were he explained that the seller was afraid of the stoves getting stolen so he took them out of the house. In the kitchen there was a space where the stove clearly belongs, and the seller put a stool in that spot. Todd sat down on the stool, rested his elbow on the counter and said “So, is this where we sit and wait for the pizza to come?”

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On another mission in Operation Sell House, I have removed our patio doors to get the glass replaced. The seals on the edges of the glass were blown and the windows got cloudy. They were like that when we moved in and we never bothered to do anything about it. Now that we’re trying to sell, we decided to finally do something about it. This morning we took the doors out and I took them to a window factory right around the corner from our house. They called at noon and said that they were ready, and they are still sitting in the truck because I cannot lift them by myself. As a result I’ve had a gaping hole in my house all day long. Bees, flies and other flying vermin have since decided to make my house their new home. I am hoping that Todd will be home from work soon so bats won’t come in when it gets dark.

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This weekend summer officially ended. We put the hard top on the Jeep. Another summer has passed.

Broken Laptops and 3 Day Weekends

Our trusty IBM Thinkpad broke down about 2 weeks ago. Todd’s been busy and hasn’t had a chance to move all the stuff from that hard drive onto our new trusty Sony Vaio. Todd has the mad computer skillz, and could migrate the hard drive in his sleep. But I think he’s been too busy to sleep lately too.

Do you know what that means?

That means I will either have to make the time to recreate the next installment of the canoe trip story from memory, or wait until Todd migrates that hard drive to the new computer—on which I have the story all written out already.

So now you’re thinking “Beej, you were on that trip. Surely you remember what happened next.” But life has been crazy. Work has been nuts, and the last thing I’ve felt like doing lately is to look at another computer when I get home from work, because I spend all day at a computer at work. Lately I’ve been wanting a bit of a break from spending that much time in front of a computer because the weather has been so nice lately. The idea of copying and pasting an entry is a lot more appealing lately, than actually sitting down at a computer to write one. I am a crappy blogger.

Last weekend my in-laws came into town. My in-laws are very fun people, and always up for a good adventure. They came down for a 3 day weekend, and Todd and I took Monday off from work. This time their visit was a bit different. In the summer when they visit we usually will go somewhere like Block Island for the weekend. But my father in law was suffering from bronchitis on this visit, and didn’t feel like he’d get good rest sleeping in the v-berth of the boat.

Friday night they arrived precisely at the moment Todd and I were installing a brand new stove in our kitchen. (OK, so the laptop broke, and the stove too? Oh, and the washer bailed on me this morning too. How psyched do you think I am right now? Not very, actually.)

Saturday we sailed the boat back to our home mooring from Jamestown. Our brief (one night) living aboard stint has ended, for now. But we had a beautiful sail all the way back. Uneventful, which is exactly the kind of sail we were hoping for. For once in our sailing career we weren’t sailing directly into the wind, and managed to actually sail most of the way. The dogs basked in the sun, the people drank beer, ate sandwiches and laughed all afternoon.

Sunday we headed to Newport to fly kites at Brenton Point. Todd has a collection of 2 line and 4 line kites that he can do tricks with. He also has tons on single line kites, and windsocks that he’ll fly as well. When we go to the beach he’ll drag all these kites out and throw them up to the sky with every single windsock he owns. I swear you can see our spot on the beach from satellites. It is for this reason that our friends call Todd “Toddicus Kiticus.”
Monday we went to the beach. And not just any old beach. We took the boat over to an island in the middle of Narragansett Bay called Prudence Island. There are residents on Prudence, and the only way to get there is by a ferry that runs to the eastern side of the island. We anchored the boat just north of Prudence, and dinghied at least a mile over to the beach on the island.

Just by our anchorage was a man quahogging. What exactly is quahogging? Well, it’s the fancy Rhode Island way of saying clamming. The man was raking for clams, so Todd took the dinghy over and bought 100 clams off of this man for $20. It’s good to live in the Ocean State for all the fresh seafood that’s so easily accessible to us. Now, if only there were shrimpers. Or Quaimpers?

We had the beach to ourselves. The dogs ran and swam all day. Todd and my mother in law snorkeled and watched the blue crabs crawl around underwater. Quite possibly the perfect day.

Hopefully this weekend Todd will have the time to migrate that laptop so I can continue the story. But then, we’ll probably be doing things like going to the kite festival in Newport, going sailing and maybe taking in a dive.