Wring Out My Brain

It’s been raining for approximately 4,397 days in a row now. Rain makes me cranky, indecisive, unmotivated and unproductive. I moped around at work. (And now I am trying to decide if I just told you that I rode a moped at work, but I am too lazy to look it up.)

I got home and bummed around the house until Todd got home. The phrase “cannot be bothered” took on a whole new meaning. There’s plenty to do, just no motivation to do it.

Todd came home and asked, “What’s for dinner?” and I thought I would burst into tears. I stood in the kitchen and racked my brain trying to come up with something I would want to bother to eat for dinner. No ideas came. We stood in the kitchen tossing out ideas. Nothing appealed. The rain fell. My brain atrophied.

He grabbed his keys, “Come on, let’s go to the general store and see what we can come up with.” I drove his car, eyes glazed. We walked into the general, and I cluelessly roamed the aisles. He made suggestions, and I grunted in response, unable to form a complete sentence. I stared into the freezer case and said “Screw it, just get what you want. I am not hungry. I give up.” He plucked ingredients from the aisles, paid for them, carried them into the house, whipped up French toast and eggs and set them on a plate right in front of me.

I love this man.

Useless

It’s raining out. The sky has this color to it that can only be described as “blah.” The busy season, for me, has largely ended. I still have a few events coming up in the next 3 weeks that require my attention, but they are largely on auto pilot. This coming weekend is a 4-day weekend, and the anticipation of having 4 days off has sent my already narrow attention span to dangerously slim proportions. It also does not help that my excellent husband is working from home today. Let’s just slap a giant pair of air quotes around the word “working” and call it a day, shall we?

We are hosting Thanksgiving for the first time ever this weekend. Todd’s parents will come in from Vermont, and our friends John, Jen, Sean and Heidi are also coming over to celebrate with us. Todd will pick up our turkey from the farm a ½ mile down the road from our house this afternoon and begin the elaborate turkey preparation tomorrow which involves the word “brining.” I think that’s like marinating, but different. Good thing I am not the cook in this family. We’d all be making sculptures out of inedible mashed potatoes around the table while our guests casually checked their watches and exchanged glances that would only mean “When can we blow this popsicle stand and get a Big Mac?”

The Saturday before last we met our turkey. We arrived at the farm, and followed the farmer to the pens where gaggles of turkeys were housed. He vaguely pointed to a big one in the middle of the pack and told us it could be our turkey. We stood there, not knowing exactly what to do. I mean, there’s an animal that would soon be on the end of my fork happily gobbling away with its other pen-mates. I think we must have somehow complemented the farmer on his turkey growing prowess before we dodged the mud puddles and made our way back to the car.

But until I dangle the forkful of neighborhood turkey near my open mouth, I still have about 12 hours of work to go. And I swear the clock just ran backward a little bit.

All Moved Out, All Moved In

We're here at the new house! The move went well, though everything is still in boxes, and we are slowly tunneling our way out. We closed on the new house on Friday, then slept in the new house on Friday night. We bought an air mattress, packed up clothes for the weekend and made camp in the new place. As promised, here are the pictures.

This is our old house. Goodbye old house.


This is our new house. Hello new house. As you can see, we have a garage. I absolutely love having a garage, and we joke about how we got along without one for six years.

When we arrived at the new house we discovered that the seller left the house in a state that can only be described as just shy of being declared a federal Superfund site. It was filthy. There were piles of chocolate lab hair all over the floors, there was dirt on the floors. Obviously the first thing the man packed was his broom and vacuum. We spent the entire weekend cleaning the place, and it's actually still not completely done.

The first night we slept in the new house we slept in the family room, this room in the picture. The absence of furniture makes this room echo. Loudly. The filth collection in the baseboard heaters also makes it the loudest heater ever. For the entire night every time the heat kicked on the baseboards would make a loud snap, crackle and popping noise. We didn't sleep a wink, as the racket kept us up that Todd could only describe as "sleeping in a giant bowl of rice krispies." Despite the loud heater, this is our favorite room in the house.

This is the mirror mosiac I was describing in earlier posts, and the paint job in the radioactive orange room. See, it really is as awful as I had described. One of Todd's co-workers described it as "It's like being inside a giant Cheeto."

Here I am having fun with the awful mirror mosiac.

Todd on the hearth in our family room.

In addition to changing the locks and re-coding the garage door openers, Todd got the hot tub drained, refilled and up and running. We went for a soak on Sunday morning. I left my bathing suit on the deck railing, and it froze.

On Sunday as I was cleaning, Nemo found a new favorite place to sit.

This our future adventure staging area. All of our gear is now going to live in this spot in the basement. Picture racks of camping gear, 8 scuba tanks lined up against the wall, a rolling rack with wetsuits and drysuits hanging from it, pegs on the wall with life jackets and frame packs hanging off of them.

This is where the prior owners bred chocolate lab puppies. They just had a litter before the move, and this room smelled very badly. I have since bleached the hell out of this floor, and now it smells like the town pool

On Monday we moved the furniture in, and the boys finally feel at home. As I feared Griffen did pee in the house once, just after we arrived on Friday night. But now they have settled in somewhat.

May the Todd Be With You

Todd has this uncanny knack for getting people to do what he wants. (Which is probably how I ended up not only married to him, but also doing his laundry. He used his crazy voodoo and got me to up the altar and into the laundry room. I am telling you, the man is slick!) He can encounter the most strict rules, the odds stacked against him, the planets entirely unaligned for him and still get people to cooperate with him most of the time. I've told you his ability to get my car registered with the DMV, where I had failed the day before. He didn't do this with some magic document that made the DMV staffers swoon. He just went in there, gave them all the same pieces of paper I gave them the day before and managed to succeed where I failed. The man has a certain mystique about him, that manages to cut through all the red tape and get things done in short order.

On Tuesday night the realtor called us and said, "You're closing on the sale of your house on the 31st. You need to call the fire department and get them to inspect your house between now and the 31st." I called the fire inspector right away, and was informed by their voice mail greeting that they require two weeks notice for inspections. Two weeks that I didn't have. I had less time than that, something like six days.

"Todd! Crap! Whaddarewegonnado?" I blurted into the phone. "GAH!!!"

"Don't worry, let's just go down to the fire station in the morning and see what can be done. It'll be harder for them to turn us away if we go there."

The next morning we wandered into the fire station, and went to the administrative office. We (Todd) explained our situation, and then proceeded to charm the living hell out of the woman behind the counter.

Batting her eyes, "Why certainly, Todd. Your wish is my command" the woman behind the counter replied. With dazed eyes, she robotically ambled over to the appointment book, "Our next appointment is 9 AM tomorrow, master. Is this suitable for you, kind sir?" She blinked, snapped out of Todd's tractor beam of cooperation, and went back to her desk as if she was slightly confused as to what had just happened.

We met with the inspector, and asked him all about what we needed to do to prepare for the inspection--replace our ancient smoke detectors with smoke/carbon monoxide detectors. (Which ended up taking the Force of Todd roughly .35 seconds to complete.)

"OK, so we'll see you tomorrow at 9. I'll have some hot coffee on for you," Todd smiled.

"Uh, thanks, but I can't accept any gifts," the inspector replied.

So I guess the Force of Todd ends just short of bribing a city official.

:::

Radio silence for the next few days. We will be scrubbing, cleaning, sanding, painting, moving, arranging, rearranging, wiping the sweat off our foreheads, and then eventually kicking up our feet in our new house this weekend. I am not sure when I will post next, but you better believe it will be with pictures of the new joint.

Two More Days

We move into the new house in two more days, this coming Friday, and then we close on the old house on Monday. We’re almost done packing and now we need to do things like replace the smoke detectors, and get the house inspected by the fire inspector tomorrow.

We’re excited, but it’s also a bit emotional for us, as we’ve spent the last few days reminiscing about living here.

The day we moved in here, early December 2001, was a weirdly warm day for December. I think it was close to the 70’s for that week, which is very rare for December in Rhode Island, and I was walking around in a short sleeve shirt that whole time.

At the home inspection the inspector had pointed out that the latch on the guest bedroom door was installed backwards. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, and instantly forgot he pointed it out the moment he said it. The night we closed on the house we bought an air mattress and set it up in the vacant living room. We opened up every window in the house, because it was so warm out, and listened to the ducks and geese honking and quacking in the cove as we blissfully fell asleep.

Then in the middle of the night a door opened. We opened our eyes, and sat there silently listening.

“Are they back? Did they forget something?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Todd answered.

WHAM! The open door slammed shut. We sat bolt upright in bed, pulling the covers to our necks.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, go check it out!” I nudged him out of bed.

“Me?”

“Yes you! You’re the boy! It’s your job to check these things out!”

“Some feminist you turned out to be…”

“Just GO!”

We got up and turned on the lights, we walked through the house. Of course the prior owners didn’t come back to get something they’d forgotten. Nobody had entered the house. We wandered the house trying to figure out which of the locked external doors had opened, of course none of them had.

Then my mind wandered back to the home inspector, pointing out the latch on the guest bedroom door.

“Oh! I know what it is! Look!” I pointed to the latch on the door and remembered that the home inspector said that the door wouldn’t close properly because the latch was on backwards. Because we had every window open in the house, a draft must have come through the house and pushed the door open, then sucked it shut again.

I wonder what weird noises the new house will make. I can’t wait to find out.

Answering Phones, Dropping F Bombs and So Much More

Today I am working at Todd's office, covering the phones while his Administrative Assistant is out. While answering the phone is not the most difficult task I am in constant paranoia that I will either hang up on or drop an F bomb while one of his important clients is on the phone. I predict I will do this at least 359 times today. I think the worst part is having to tell people who's on the phone, because I always forget the name of the callers--despite the fact that they told me not .5 seconds before. Just now, I called one of the employees here and said "It's um... Shit! What was his name? Bill? Bob? From Something Telecom?" It's not my forte, but I am glad to help out for a day or two if it means making everyone else's job around here a bit easier.

Remember how I said we'd be closing on the new house on Friday? Remember how I said I was diligently packing the entire house? Well, on Tuesday--a scant 3 days before the closing--the seller requested an extension on the closing for another 2 weeks.

It's funny because just the other day I woke up and said to Todd, "I had the strangest dream last night. In the dream Mr. Seller Man wasn't ready to move and at the closing he told us how his house isn't ready yet. So we suggested that he live in our old, vacant house until we close on that one."

"That's funny," Todd said. "I dreamt almost the same thing. But in my dream he didn't live in our house. You're just weird for dreaming that."

"Uh yeah, that's where dream crosses over into nightmare," I said.

So, we're not moving this weekend. I will not spend next week scraping the bits of broken mirror off the walls in the radioactive orange room. But I have packed just about everything and left us with a week's worth of clothing. I have already scheduled the electricity and cable to be put into our names. So I have to go and reschedule all that.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I wonder if we'll ever get to move in at all.

45 T-Shirts. 1 Torso

We're moving in four days. Well, kind of. Most of our furniture will get moved next week, but we'll go and camp out in the new house and enjoy its new-to-us-housiness after we close on Friday. We'll live out of a suitcase for the first few days after the closing as we scrub the house from top to bottom and lament the fact that we didn't think to move something like the pots and pans and that we live too far in the blissful boonies for a pizza to be delivered.

Today I packed the coat closet and the board game shelf. Yesterday we packed up the tool bench, and the variety of crap in our laundry/work room. I am working on clothes right now, and am trying to reduce the weight of our shared armoire--one entire shelf of which houses Todd's collection of 45 T-shirts. I left a half dozen of his favorites on the shelf so he could wear them this week, and tossed 40 some odd T-shirts into a suitcase.

The man owns 45 T-shirts. 45 of them. He only has 1 torso on which to wear these 45 T-shirts. To be fair, I have no idea how many pairs of shoes I own, and I only have two feet on which to wear them. But that's different! I need all those shoes.

If I were a different kind of wife, I would have performed a T-shirtectomy just now--a complicated maneuver involving a large garbage bag and enabling gravity to ease the T-shirts into said garbage bag. But alas, I am a cool wife who doesn't go around throwing out her husband's stuff, and I expect the same in return.

But if we sewed all those T-shirts together we could probably make a sail for the boat.

Miss/Won't Miss

We are now T-minus 7 days to the closing on the new house. In addition to the packing, I've been reflecting on the things I'll miss and the things I won't miss about living in this house. It is very convenient--there's a branch of the library not even a half mile from here, and the post office is a half mile away. There's a Walgreens on the corner, within a quarter mile, and a Cumberland Farms convenience store and gas station 200 steps from this house. But it is also very noisy here. We're just off a main road, and the house is very close to the street. I am constantly afraid of the dogs getting hit by cars in the road, and the neighbors behind us are noisy.

One thing I will miss is the water. This is the view of Apponaug Cove, taken from my living room window:



These are the inhabitants of Apponaug Cove. We have ducks, geese and swans that make the Cove home all year round:


The geese occasionally cross the street to nibble the grass on our lawn:

Now onto the things I won't miss. This is the view from the side living room window. This is my neighbor's house, it is way too close:

This is the view from the kitchen window. In the spring/summer the trees are filled with bushy looking leaves. In the winter this is what it looks like. I am so thankful that I won't have this view anymore:

This is the view from the back door. Apparently this is where trucks go to die, as I've yet to see any of these trucks move:

This house is also three miles away from TF Green Airport. Sure, it's convenient when we are flying somewhere. But planes fly near hour house, and sometimes right over it. This was taken from my living room window:

Overall, good riddance. Out with the old and in with the new.

The Anatomy of a Move Part 2

It's happening. It's actually happening. We close on the new house on the 14th, and plan on moving our stuff in over the week after that. We're going to have some new carpet put down upstairs while the house is still vacant, then have the movers take our stuff over after that. I am also going to paint the bedroom that we will live in while we build a larger bathroom off of the master bedroom. At the moment the bathroom off the master is roughly the size of a phone booth. Scratch that, half a phone booth. So we're going to knock down this farging wall, and this farging wall...* The walls in the bedroom that we will be sleeping in are radioactive orange with a darker orange sponged over them. There is also a mosaic made of broken mirror shards swirled across one wall of the room. That should be a hoot to take down seeing as how they are pointy, jagged pieces of glass adhered to the wall with what probably is glue composed of a space age polymer that could stick a guy in a hard hat to a I-beam at a construction site. I see the need for a new box of band-aids in my future.

Today I just called and lined up the phone/cable/internet to get turned on for the 15th. I still need to do the power, and call the oil company to have the furnace serviced and stuff like that. I can't contain my excitement over finally getting into the house. I can't wait to start a fire in my new fireplace, and have a soak in my new hot tub, and park my car in a garage. (And throw a kickin' party once the boxes are unpacked!)

I've been trying to pack up things that we don't use all the time. It's kind of a challenge because there still is a lot to pack, but we're still trying to live here too. I know I should pack some of the clothing in the closet, but I can't bear to think of not having a choice every day when I get dressed. So instead I packed our ridiculous assortment of mugs:

I was enjoying the emptiness of that shelf, then Todd came home and moved some spices up there when he was cooking dinner. *sigh*

Then I tackled the cabinet above the stove. In this cabinet we keep wineglasses, shot glasses, cocktail shaker. Somehow I do not remember purchasing all those shot glasses, and wonder if I was already drunk when they were brought into the house--thus negating the need for the shot glasses to begin with, I guess. Who needs a glass when you can drink your booze straight out of the bottle anyway:

Empty! Looky looky!

And it all fit into two boxes, even after I went to Stop and Shop and swiped an entire stack of store circulars so I could use them to wrap all the glasses:

Next, I am packing the closet in the guest bedroom.

*Quote: Johnny Dangerously

Why Do People Hate Moving?

Call me weird, but I love moving. I find moving exciting. You get to stop living in one place and start living in another. You get to put all your stuff in a new space, and decide where it’s all going to go and how it’s all going to look. You get to go through your things and get rid of stuff that you never really used anyway. You get to wake up in a new bedroom, learn how the sun streams in across the walls, and walk along a new route to the kitchen sink for a morning glass of water. And then when you get into the new place, inevitably you need/want new furniture and get to go shopping. (I window shopped for a new couch last weekend and found a very nice couch. And for the small price of $7,000 it could be ours. Ha!)

I even like helping friends move. It’s fun to spend the day with all our friends helping the ones that are moving get their stuff into their new place. When you’re moving with a group of friends, you spend the day working together on getting all the boxes and all the furniture from one place to another. You end up joking around, secretly making fun of your friend’s stuff when they can’t hear you. You get fed pizza and beer, and at the end when the U-Haul is empty you inevitably have the first party in a friend’s new place. Overall, I find moves to be a lot of fun. Sure, moving all the stuff is exhausting, but it’s good exercise and it goes by quickly when you’re goofing off in the process.

There was one time when we helped a friend move when it wasn’t any fun at all. Just a few weeks before Todd and I got married some friends of ours were divorcing. We helped him move out of the place he shared with his wife. We rallied around our friend and helped him get his stuff out of the place and into the new one. It was a tense day because our friend was very sad at the prospect of his marriage ending. We were all very sad at the prospect of his marriage ending too. We silently formed a line of people from the door to the moving van, and we handed our friend’s boxes and belongings down the line, not really knowing what to say that would provide him with any comfort. We couldn’t exactly make fun of his stuff and crack jokes. We couldn’t exactly express excitement over his new apartment where he would unwillingly resume his bachelor life either.

We arrived at our friend’s new place, and began to haul his things up the winding staircase to the second floor. We couldn’t get the couches up the tight stairway, and took the landlord’s suggestion of bringing it through the window on the second floor. We backed the moving van to the side of the house, and used an elaborate pulley system that my MacGuyer-esque husband brought to haul the couch onto the roof of the van.

We tried stuffing the couch through the window and it wouldn’t fit.

We removed the window frame and tried to finagle it through the gaping hole in the side of the house to no avail.

Now what?

Our friend called his ex-wife to ask her if she wanted this couch, and she said no. We shoved the couch off the roof, and watched it fall to the ground. The wooden frame under the leather and the padding crumbled as the couch it the ground. With a dull thud the sofa collapsed into a pile of leather and cushions on the lawn. At the moment the couch hit the ground, the tension in the air dissipated. We stood on the roof of the moving van and doubled over with laughter. This was the first time we laughed all day long. We held our bellies, we wiped the tears off our cheeks, and we hooted and hollered over the broken couch. At the end of the day we left our friend with his boxes and his broken couch, trying to keep the tension in the air broken along with the sofa pieces on the grass.

Two years later we moved him into a new apartment with his girlfriend, another good friend of ours. We once again formed the line from the apartment door to the truck, and we passed our friends’ belongings to each other and filled the truck—laughing, joking, drinking beer and once again hopeful for our friend’s adventure in a new home with his new partner, and their new life together.

The Anatomy of a Move Part 1

Todd and I are moving into the new house in just two weeks. We have lived in our current house for just over 6 years, and it's amazing how stuff accumulates in every nook and cranny when you've lived somewhere that long. You don't even notice it until you have to put it all into boxes.

We have packed up about 70% of our stuff and put it into storage so the house would show better. Now we need to get down to business and pack up the rest--our clothes, our kitchen stuff, the crap we've jammed into closets, the laundry/workshop room. Etc.

Before I get into the guts of moving house. I had to show you this picture. Todd and I keep a dry erase marker in the bathroom, so we can write notes to each other on the mirror. I usually write reminders--like the one I wrote last Friday to remind him not to forget his sandwiches for his ski trip. He usually draws me funny pictures. Like this one:


Now, let's get into my new series, called "The Anatomy of a Move." On Sunday we went to the new house to do a walk through with the seller. We had a few unanswered questions, and we met with the seller to get some answers. I didn't take pics of the interior, because the seller still lives in the house and I didn't want to make him uncomfortable. So here are some pics of the outside.

This is our new street:

This is the front of our new house:

This is the deck on the back of the house:

And now we get to the actual guts of the move. This is the closet in our spare bedroom that needs to be packed. Believe it or not, this closet has been cleaned out, and unnecessary clothing has been donated:

This is our pantry. I imagine it'll take roughly 524 boxes to pack its contents. I don't think I'll be doing any grocery shopping until after we move. Canned peas and popcorn for dinner every night! YAY!

This is our spice/mug cabinet. That whole top shelf is all mugs. You know, for the time when I will have an entire army over for coffee:

This is our plate/glass cabinet. Our current kitchen only has 5 cabinets, and the others are being used for mixing bowls, pots and pans, and containers. So we only had 1 cabinet for our plates and glasses. I will be excited in the new house to have these in separate cabinets, and not have to move a bunch of glasses so I can get a plate. Oh, and looky here, more mugs:

This will be the hardest room to pack. The workshop room. Look at all this stuff that's hanging over the bench:

This is the toolbox. I think it weighs roughly a metric ton. It's on wheels so I am not sure we'll need to pack it all up. Still, lots of tools inside:

And then we have the random crap shelf. Believe it or not, this has been pared down quite a bit:

I think we're going to need more boxes.