house

A little change…

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We have begun painting the guest room (by “we”, I mean “John”), and if you open the door halfway and aim your gaze toward the northeast corner, you can pretend it’s done, and MAN I picked a good color.  It looks GREAT (and feels so refreshing to do something different in there), and it’s going to look even better when it’s done.  Here’s a link to the color.  It’s a dark-ish purple with some gray in it.  We’ll have white trim to brighten it up, plus the guest room gets ALL the sun in the house.  Next up: furniture.  White headboard, white dresser (small), white desk and chair (small).  The comforter needs to be white, maybe patterned, maybe white and silver, and I REALLY want to put a bench or trunk or something in that funny corner we have by the closet, in front of that window, so I can make it a cozy reading corner/window seat.  I have ALWAYS wanted a window seat.

Of course, it’s taking us WEEKS just to paint this one room. Before Jack, we’d have had it done in a single weekend (ceiling one day, walls and trim the next).  Now, only one of us can do any of the work, we can’t do it while he’s sleeping (night or day), and our weekends have been taken up with car shopping and other not-fun tasks.  So MAYBE we’re done with the walls next weekend and the trim the weekend after that, and who knows how long it’ll take me to find the furniture I want.  I’d like it used, but that requires actual in-person shopping, and, well, that’s not going to happen for a while.

It’s not like we’re going to have guests anytime soon, but it’s really unsettling to leave a project unfinished in such an open-ended way.

But until then, the half-finished walls look fantastic, and I will enjoy that.

Trying out curbside delivery

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We are going to paint soon (maybe next weekend?), but we can’t paint without supplies and we had NOTHING.  Well, we still had a couple of good paintbrushes and some dropcloths, but that’s it.  We needed rollers, the round brush thingies that go on rollers, tape, trays, an extension pole for the rollers, and, of course, paint.

We picked out the colors on Saturday, and I’ll order the paint soon.  We’re going the fancy route and using Sherwin-Williams.  I ordered the other supplies through Home Depot Saturday night, planning to pick them up via the curbside delivery Sunday.

Our day started crazy early because SOMEONE didn’t go back to sleep after waking up at 3:30 that morning, so by 6 or so, we were ready to leave the house.  However, since our first stop was to deliver a couple of hydrangeas to Emily and Sean and get our spackle back, we delayed leaving until the more civilized hour of 7:30.  Turns out they’d been up since shortly after midnight with one kid or the other, so we probably could have gone earlier, but we weren’t about to text them that early to find out.  After a good amount of time (and a good time) chatting with Emily, Sean, and the kids through the window while chasing Jack around the yard and driveway, we headed to Home Depot to pick up our order, which (aside from the somewhat convoluted parking lot) couldn’t have gone smoother.  We parked in the curbside pickup zone – which, incidentally, was not at the curb – and called the number on the sign (which I also had in the notifications I got when the order was ready).  Someone came out pretty quickly with a cart full of our stuff, handed me the receipt, and left.  I loaded the car, sanitized my hands, closed the trunk, returned the car, sanitized my hands, and we went home.  Super easy.

Sherwin-Williams is doing curbside pickup, too, so I’ll order the paint and pick it up sometime this week, and we’ll be ready to paint!

In the mail

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It’s funny what mundane things we get excited about and which ones are just…mundane.  We got two big boxes from Amazon the other day, both from ourselves, and neither of us could remember what we ordered.  Starting mood: excited. Yay forgotten packages!

John opened the first one: a silverware drawer organizer and a salad spinner.  Mood: still excited.  Our silverware has been sliding around and getting all messed up in a drawer too small for the organizer we had, and we’re both tired of washing lettuce piece by piece.

John opened the second one: a little storage ottoman and rocking chair cushions.  My mood: excited.  We don’t have the rocking chair yet, but when it gets here (Monday?), I’ll have cushions to sit on and an ottoman to put my feet on.   John’s mood: meh.  I guess he’s too tough for cushions.

So for future reference, John’s happy about kitchen organization and super-bored by cushions.  Noted.

Resist the urge

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With a new house comes new stuff, even when we’re trying to avoid buying stuff.  I mean, we’ve been buying (and receiving) PLENTY of baby stuff, but most of that is kind of necessary.  But then we bought a new stove because the existing one was a fire hazard (our new one is so pretty!), and then – THEN – I may have gone a little overboard.

I knew I didn’t need it.  I almost bought one months ago, but talked myself out of it.  Too frivolous.  I’ve lived without it for 39 years – I can live without it now.

Except, apparently, I can’t.  There’s a coffee shop nearby that makes a chai latte that is the closest I’ve tasted to the BEST one I’ve ever had (from Shoe’s Cup and Cork in Leesburg).  They specialize in coffee, not chai, so I asked them what mix they use for the chai and promptly ordered it.  But that’s not all.  Boiling water into a powdered chai mix doesn’t recreate the latte experience.

I ordered a milk frother.

I KNOW.  I’ve become one of THEM.  It makes my chai so good and frothy!  I’ve gone off the deep end.

But that’s not all.  You know what came yesterday?  THIS!

I can hardly contain my glee, I love it so much.  What’s next?  Well, I’m eyeing these super-cute rocket and robot nightlights from Uncommon Goods for the baby’s room, but NO.  THIS HAS TO STOP.  They’re expensive and fall exactly in the category of things a baby doesn’t need (certainly not for that much money), especially when my salary is about to be cut in half, and we’ve been trying so hard not to accumulate things after three years of living light and damn it, I’m not going to ruin our streak because of night lights!

But seriously, how cute are these?

Too lazy to take pictures

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This has been a busy week for contractors.  The painters were here Tuesday through today, painting the main living spaces downstairs (not the kitchen), our bedroom, and the baby’s room, a plumber came Tuesday to fix the leaking kitchen sink (and a few other things while he was here), and the yard people came today (just left), and WOW what a difference having work done makes.  I mean, hello, that’s obvious, but it’s so nice to see the changes.  We can walk out the back door without being attacked by bushes and trees, we can see whole flower beds we didn’t know we had, and we can see much of the low stone wall around the front of the house.  I can’t wait until those guys come back.  Too bad I don’t know when that will be – they have a couple of jobs to take care of next week, and everything else in the schedule is weather-dependent.  The guy in charge (Dana) definitely understands what we’re after, though, which means we are completely comfortable letting him loose.

I was not that comfortable with our lead painter after a day or two.  We had to ask for another coat of paint over the section of wall downstairs where the chalkboard paint had been because we could still the difference between that part of the wall and parts next to it, and then yesterday, he messed up one of the bedroom walls.  In the master, we wanted the two walls with windows to be dark blue and the two without windows to be a lighter blue.  I even diagrammed the room and included that, and he had that diagram on his phone.  So yesterday, I went in to take a look and I found that one wall of each color was the wrong color.  His excuse was that the day before, I had said I wanted to the two lighter walls (the room was already two colors) to be the darker blue and the two darker walls to be the light blue.  First of all, I said no such thing.  Second of all, when you come in to start painting and you realize that you have conflicting instructions from the homeowner, wouldn’t you check one more time to be sure?  Anyway, he fixed it, but he didn’t seem happy about it, which annoyed me even more.

What he’ll never know, because we’ll never tell him, is that now that we’ve had a day to live with the room in two colors, we think we like the darker color MUCH better, and we’ll probably make all four walls that color ourselves.  He doesn’t need to know that.   Besides, I got the impression that he’s as glad to be done with this job as we are to have him not in the house anymore.  Three and a half days of strangers in the house all the time was way too much.

Accomplishments

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Thursday:

  • Routine doctor’s visit, met a new doctor from the practice. Everything is fine, normal, healthy, and she landed the doppler-thingy right on the baby’s heartbeat today, first try, no searching or smearing goop around.  It was pretty impressive.  I really liked her, and it looks like I’ll see her again during on my September appointments.
  • We bought the stroller and carseat.  We originally decided on the Baby Jogger Summit X3 (and the compatible infant carseat), but we dawdled on the actual purchase and the price for both of those went up kind of a lot.  Brian has been talking up the BOB strollers (and they get very good reviews, too), so when we saw that the jogging stroller and the infant car seat were each about $70 less than the Baby Jogger equivalents, we snapped them up.  I’m pretty sure that price difference was the opposite when we first started looking.  Milestone complete!  They’ll be delivered on Monday.
  • We hired a plumber to fix the leak under the sink.  Tuesday morning, no more leak and we should have a working garbage disposal.
  • We finally got a schedule for getting the painting done (end of August, although they’ll move us sooner if they can).
  • We hired a yard guy!

Those of you who have seen the house (or who read my post from Wednesday) know that the lawn is overgrown, the flowerbeds are full of weeds, there’s poison ivy in too many places, vines are threatening to take over the wooded areas, and every plant/tree/bush near the house is practically (in many cases, actually) attached to the house.  And we have an acre, so it’s kind of overwhelming.  We knew going into this that we would be hiring help for the yard, so paying for a bunch of yard-related stuff is in the budget.  We just had to prioritize and pick someone.

The first place I called took down my notes about what we wanted and then sent someone out to look over the place WHILE WE WEREN’T THERE.  We never met the guy, never talked to him, never clarified what we might want or not want to do, and we ended up with a quote that didn’t meet what we wanted at all.  Surprise.  I eventually talked to him on the phone, and he quoted us an hourly rate to just have some guys come in and trim or clean up where we point for a set number of hours.  Still not really what we’re looking for.  We want advice, too.  Oh, yeah – this is the guy who basically told me I can’t pay him to remove the poison ivy.  So they’re a no.

For the second place I called, we met with the guy Friday afternoon a week ago.  Turns out his sister went to high school with John, and he (Anthony) was only three or so years behind.  Rhode Island is small and no one leaves.  We liked him, he helped us prioritize, understood what we’re after, WILL help kill and remove the poison ivy, and when his quote came in, it was about what we expected.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry.  It took him over a week to get us the quote, and he wants to do the work in October, and we just can’t wait that long to trim back the stuff that’s attacking the house.  We’re happy to break up the work, but that part needs to be done soon.

John found the third guy (Dana) via a card and write-up on a bulletin board in a local coffee shop.  His website sucks, but we called him Wednesday and he made the appointment to come out Thursday, and we liked him immediately.  He seems very practical, practices organic gardening/landscaping (no pesticides or herbicides), and understood our need to simplify.  He’s maybe a little odd – he’d wander off mid-sentence, get up really close to a tree branch, grab hold of it, and inspect it closely.  With nearly every tree.  He was happy to see that everything we have is native, and said it appears that our yard was designed by a professional, and he even thinks he knows which one (the timing matches up to that guy’s career in RI, although apparently he has moved on to landscaping in the Hamptons).  It is crazy to me that a landscaper could look at our overgrown yard and, based on the layout and the type of plants, be able to name the landscaper.  What was I saying about Rhode Island?  Also, hopefully that means he knows his industry.  Artists can do it – why can’t landscape architects?

After one circuit of the house, I left John and Dana to roaming the yard, and when John came in later, he said, “I hired him.”  I’m glad I’m not the only one who liked him.  Also, turns out his hourly rate is $30 less than the first group, AND he wants to come back in a week to get started.  Works for me!

Reading my mind

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John and I bought olive oil when we went to the store the other night, and I expressed regret that we can’t just buy Wegmans extra virgin olive oil like we used to.  We’ve been not so lucky at picking out other relatively inexpensive olive oils over the last few years.  (There are a lot of really boring olive oils out there, and some of the more exciting ones aren’t great for general use.  I feel like Goldilocks.)  We have a Wegmans within reach, if you consider an hour and 15 minutes one-way to be within reach.  I don’t.  I actually considered asking Emily to buy us some so John could bring it back this weekend when he drives up with our stuff from the storage unit.  We picked something since we’ll need it this week, I don’t remember which brand, and shortly after we got home, John said, “I think we owe my mom a really big thank you.”  Of course we do, for any number of things, so I asked for a few more details in my own articulate fashion. “Huh?”

She gave us a housewarming basket with a bunch of traditional housewarming gifts, all with their own meanings, and one of the items is olive oil (“May you be blessed with health and well-being”).  WEGMANS OLIVE OIL.

THANK YOU, PAT!

All is well with the world.

#Blessed

#snortgiggle

Moving happened!

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We have moved!  We live in this house now.  And while we are both occasionally overtaken by fits of holy-shit-what-have-we-done with regard to this stupid-big purchase and the baby coming and the changes all of this will mean to my job (and salary), it’s all under control and we’re very happy about it (after the fits pass).  And we have moments like last night when we went to our local grocery store and they played a Frank Turner song we love, or like today at lunch when we walked to the library (it took us four minutes) and found that our Providence library cards work in every library in the state because of course every library in the state is on the same system.  Also, our library has at least four of this year’s six Hugo nominees for best novel actually on the shelf, in the science fiction section (which I didn’t expect to find at all in a tiny town library), meaning they are keeping their collection pretty well up to date.  Yay for me!  And I picked up the new Cat Valente novel from the new releases shelf because I can’t go to the library and not check something out.  Anyway, those moments reinforce that we picked the right place (“It’s a sign.” “You don’t believe in signs.”).

We’re very slowly unpacking (the kitchen is finally a working kitchen again as of last night, although I guess Sunday night to Tuesday night isn’t so bad).  We’ve hired a guy to paint four rooms, and we’re working on scheduling that work, and we’re getting quotes to have someone come out and do some initial yard clean-up (including poison ivy, which we seem to have a lot of).  About three quarters of the outside of the house (first floor) is under attack by bushes and plants and vines of all kinds, and we want some help beating them back.  The poison ivy is all farther from the house, but I want to start killing and removing it as soon as possible.  One place I called says they don’t like to handle poison ivy removal because that can cause their guys to miss work, and I was like, I KNOW, OF COURSE IT’S DIFFICULT, WHY DO YOU THINK I’M WILLING TO PAY YOU TO DO IT.  So we’re probably not going with that guy.  We have a stone wall bordering most of the property that we can barely see through all the overgrown plants, but that’s next year’s problem.  (We have a stone wall!  Of all the things we wanted in a forever home, a stone wall was one we never thought we’d actually get.)

Want to know something REALLY weird?  There’s a CRIB upstairs.  Like, for a BABY to sleep in.  Because we’re going to have a BABY soon.  This kid is going to be 15 years old, and I’m still going to be surprised to see them come in to the kitchen.  I’m adjusting.  Slowly.

(The crib and dresser both got delivered yesterday – BIG thank you to both sets of parents for those and their accessories.  They look FANTASTIC, and they’ll look even better when they’re actually in the baby’s room after it gets painted.)

Things are coming together!

Moving is happening!

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This weekend, we are moving everything from the townhouse to the new house.  Well, everything that requires a truck.  Last week, we moved a bunch of little things, stuff that didn’t need to go in moving boxes and was small enough to fit in the car.  And we cleaned.  Tomorrow, we pick up a truck and we’ll make a trip with all the boxes.  I will do no more than supervise, I promise.  Tom is coming on Sunday, so he and John will move all the furniture then.  As long as the only things left by Sunday night fit in the car, we’ll be in good shape, but I have no doubt that we’ll have EVERYthing moved.  Then we’ll just have to do a quick clean of the townhouse, and we’ll be done there.

DONE.  Done with the ugly bathroom that never feels clean enough.  Done with the super-loud creaky floors and stairs.  Done with the nails popping out of the floor downstairs, hurting feet and ripping socks.  Done with the windows that look directly into our neighbors’ house.  Done with the stuffy, overly warm house that has forced us to flee to Starbucks to work for the last two days.  (I’ve been super-productive, though, so maybe working in Starbucks isn’t a terrible thing.)  We left one of the box fans at the new house, so the first level hasn’t had any way to move air for a week or so, and last night we were eating dinner and watching TV and I was SO HOT.  I was dripping sweat doing absolutely nothing.  John was not as uncomfortable as I was (and he’s usually more sensitive to the heat), so I can only assume baby Hugo was contributing to my issues.  It was not fun.  Also, my feet are swollen by the end of every day, and I HATE it.  That is NOT what my feet are supposed to look like.  Or feel like.  It kind of gives me the creeps.

Anyway, we’re ready to move.

The updates below are in order of importance

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The new toaster has arrived.  It’s cool-looking AND it makes toast.  I can’t really ask for more.

In other news, we made an offer on a house, it was accepted, the inspection was yesterday, and there is nothing major wrong with the house, so we’re expecting to close near the end of July.  Yay!  Like, so much yay.  All the yay.

YAY

Behind that big yay, I am doing a happy dance.  Can we move in tomorrow?

Well, I was doing a happy dance, but now I am thoroughly exhausted.  I just spent an hour on the phone with USAA talking about homeowner’s insurance, and it took my entire brain.  I have nothing left.  If you have a spare one, I would like to borrow it.

I need to be better about doing yoga by myself

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Ways that I am stressed, in no particular order:

  • We’re trying to find our forever home, extra stress (get it?) on the forever.  We’re tired of moving, and we’re ready to settle here and never move again, but only if we find the right house.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but if it’s not already perfect (or very close), it needs to be cheap enough to be made perfect.  And I REALLY want to do it in the next month, ESPECIALLY now that our landlord is being difficult.  Next bullet.
  • It’s time to leave this townhouse.  Our lease is up August 31st.  The landlord will let us extend, but every time we talk, he adds another month to the notice we have to give, which adds another month to the length of time we’d have to carry mortgage AND rent.  We were about to agree to 90 days’ notice, but then he said it’s actually 90 days plus to the end of whatever month that is.  So if we gave notice on Monday, June 4th, we’d owe rent through 9/30.  THAT’S NOT 90 DAYS.  So we’re super irritated and about to pull the plug.  If we give notice now, like today or tomorrow, we can probably still get out August 31st, but talk about adding pressure.  I’m due in the second half of September.  If we do this, and we’re probably going to do this, we have to find our house in the next two to three weeks and then hope everything goes smoothly with the inspection and closing.
  • Work is crazy busy right now and I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle it post-maternity leave because I’m not quitting my job and we’re not putting our infant in daycare.  I probably won’t work full-time, but I haven’t had that conversation with work yet, so that’ll be interesting and isn’t at all stressful, nope.
  • I am PREGNANT.  I’m not sleeping well, I don’t look like myself (I’m still surprised every time I look in the mirror), and holy crap I’m about to have a baby I didn’t think I was going to have.  I’m juggling pre-natal appointments with extra thyroid appointments (because oh, yeah, I’ve had a messed up thyroid for over 10 years, and pregnancy is known to mess up thyroids, so I have to have additional blood tests and more visits with an endocrinologist) and trying to see houses whenever possible, but don’t forget I still have to work full-time for now.  And I also have to eat right and exercise regularly and make sure I gain some weight but not too much weight.  And I’m TIRED.
  • I’m in a book funk.  I quit my last book, read a pretty good novella, and then started a really long book that’s okay enough that I’ll keep reading it, but I don’t love it.  That’s hardly a big thing, but it’s a small nagging thing, and you know what I don’t need right now?  Exactly.  The baby will fit that description soon enough, so how about we just avoid all small nagging things until then?  (That sounds negative – I don’t mean to imply I won’t LOVE that particular small nagging thing.)

Now pardon me while I go sit on the floor and cry.  Some more.

  • Right.  I cry.  A LOT.  Over both stupid things and not-stupid things.  Example of a stupid thing?  I cried at the end of the pilot episode of Hart of Dixie last night.  Guys, that is not a good show.  It’s not terrible, but it’s not good.  I cried anyway.  AND THEN I WATCHED THE SECOND EPISODE.  My judgment cannot be trusted.

Peace and quiet

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When we moved in to this house, it was still summer.  It was September, and it was hot, and we kept the windows open.  We used the portable AC in our bedroom at night.  Any noise from the AC or the fans we have was constant – white noise that masked traffic sounds and helped us sleep.

Then it got cold.  We turned on the heat.  The noise began.

That’s steam hammer.  We have steam heat, generated by a boiler in the basement, with radiators in every room.  That banging starts in the basement and echoes (loudly) through all four floors of the house every time the heat kicks on.  On top of that, high-pressure steam hisses out of each radiator’s vent periodically, also loudly.  Like, the hissing wakes us up at night.  We’ve taken to dropping the heat lower than we normally would at night so it won’t kick on and we don’t get scared out of bed thinking someone is coming after us with a pipewrench.

At first, we thought the banging and hissing might be happening because it was the first time the heat was running since last winter.  Maybe it would work itself out after a few days of keeping the heat on.  Maybe the water that is doing the actual banging would drain out on its own.  It didn’t.  The heat would kick on, the banging would start, and the people in my office, who could hear it clear as day on the other end of the conference line, wanted to know why I was working from a construction site.

We emailed our landlord on the 1st of November, and after 6, maybe 7, visits to the house by people with escalating levels of expertise, we THINK the problem has been resolved.  As of TODAY, the 30th of November.  Today, after several visits from the handyman and two different plumbers, they sent out an actual steam heating expert, who diagnosed the problem as bad return piping (which is what John diagnosed the problem to be a month ago after doing lots of internetting) and immediately fixed it.  And the crazy hissing?  It’s because all the high-pressure steam was only going to half the radiators, so they were getting twice the expected pressure and were attempting not to explode.  Since he fixed the piping, about 3 hours ago, we haven’t heard any banging.  Fingers crossed we can have quiet heat the rest of the winter.

It took a month to resolve, but ZERO DOLLARS from us.  Renting isn’t perfect, but this is a big perk.

Neighbors are doing it right

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I keep a list of things I like about houses and might consider for our forever home (like tile floors or hardwood floors, floor to ceiling windows, skylights, Olympic sized bathtubs, wraparound porches, a creek at the bottom of an expanse of lawn, plenty of trees, window seats, a library with a ladder, first floor laundry, a mudroom, etc.).  At this point, the list is full of contradictory things, and a house that had everything probably wouldn’t stay upright, but at least I have a list of things to refer to when we actually start looking.

Anyway, there’s a house a few blocks from us with pretty stone wall and steps and a vine-covered railing.  I like it.  I want it.

Added to the list.

Hangin’ stuff

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It’s time to hang pictures.  Some pictures.  Or at least we’ll start thinking about where pictures could go and we can lean them against the wall in the right room.  (Baby steps.)  Nearly everything we have (that we’re traveling with) is framed now, so we just have to make some decisions.  Except we’re likely to get more geeky art at the Rhode Island Comic Con this weekend (yay!), so maybe we don’t want to go poking holes in walls just yet.  We can wait another week, right?  And then another…while…before we get frames for the new stuff, and then some more time leaning pictures against walls while we work it out…  I’m sure we’ll have everything on the walls just in time for us to move again.

We’re rough.

Making progress

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We are down to minimal boxes, guys.  The first floor has zero boxes left.  On the second floor, the only boxes left are the two wardrobe size boxes from our closet.  In the basement, there are a couple of boxes, tools and things we don’t use much, and the third floor has zero boxes!

I was thisclose to suggesting we get rid of every item of clothing we didn’t travel across the country with – that’s all we had to wear for two and a half weeks, and we did fine – but then I remembered that it’s been summer and fall is starting and winter is coming and I’m not in the mood to buy a whole new wardrobe.  Some new clothes, sure, but I can’t handle starting from scratch.  Plus, I like a lot of my fall and winter clothes.

Next step for the house: unpack the rest of the clothes and sort out our closet situation.  We have plenty of closet space, but we’re not sure how to organize it yet.

Step after that: hang stuff on the walls!  We are actually going to hang our stuff up EARLY.  For real.  We totally are.  I’ll show you.  Trust me.

I might even eat off the floor. Well, I COULD. I probably won’t.

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John and I took Friday off work because we knew we’d be out really late Thursday night.  We ended up getting home around midnight, but until the Night Vale show ended, we didn’t know if we’d be spending the night in Portland or driving home.  Either way, work at 6am Friday morning would have been difficult.

You’d think, with a day off like that, that we’d spend it relaxing or doing something fun, but you’d be wrong.  We did sleep in a bit, and then we went to gym, but THEN, oh then – we cleaned.  We cleaned like our parents were coming to visit.  We started upstairs and worked our way down, room by room, windows, surfaces, floors, with a break from cleaning to hang a few pictures (the goat, the sign with our name on it, the comic book posters), and then back to cleaning.  We finished at 5pm, just in time to shower, have dinner, and then send John off to rehearsal tonight (8pm to 11pm – I will be sound asleep when he comes home).

Fun day off!  Still, the house looks great. I always forget how much easier it is for us to relax when everything is clean. I don’t notice the tension of the dirty house until it’s gone.

Gauntlets have been thrown

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I like to be outside.  I like the fresh air, I like the scenery, I love the sky.  I just don’t like it when outside touches me.  Personal space, man.  I need it.  You know I take allergy medicine all year, and it does a pretty good job, but I run into minor problems if my skin touches vegetation.  Not all of it, and not all the time, but enough of it and often enough.  I wear gloves and kneel on a towel when I’m weeding because my skin reacts when grass (cut or not) and weeds touch it.  It goes away quickly, and it’s localized (thank goodness it doesn’t spread), but it happens every time.

So aside from weeding being an annoying chore to begin with, I have that to be careful of.  Bugs are the other part I can’t deal with, as (again) you already know.  The outside of our house here is covered in ants.  So far, we don’t have an ant problem inside, but they’re all over outside, and when I was weeding the other day, they kept getting on me.  It’s not a HUGE deal (I was wearing gloves and long sleeves and they were just ants and not the biting kind (I assume because I didn’t get bitten)), but I came inside to shower and change and I found an ant ON MY HEAD, CRAWLING IN MY HAIR.

THAT IS UNFORGIVABLE AND I MUST NOW DECLARE WAR ON ALL ANTS.

Sorry, ants.  You started it.

Sitting in comfort

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We bought a couch (on Sunday)!  And it arrived today!  And it’s comfortable!  Technically, it’s a double chair (not even a loveseat), but it’s big and it’s cushy, and it’s chocolate brown and kind of stripey/soft corduroy.

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We thought about the couch (it was only $100 more), but it was enormous, even bigger than our old couch, and we are not making a purchase of that physical size again until we stop moving around.  This is plenty big enough for the two of us, even with those big cushions on it, and most importantly, it fit through the front door with no issues.

Proof we have furniture!

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For those of you who aren’t on Twitter or Instagram, here are some pictures of the house with our furniture in it.  It’s not as neat and clean as it was Tuesday night, so you’ll have to live with three-day-old pictures.  Once our offices look less like disaster areas, I might post those, too.

Bathroom!  Obviously.

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Living room!

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Bedroom!

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Kitchen alcove!

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Kitchen!

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This concludes the photographic tour of our new home.  Rooms not included have been cordoned off with a red velvet rope.  Even we are not allowed in them.

Good morning to me

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John had a call this morning at 8:30 eastern, so the alarm went off at 5:15.  It rained all night, and it was raining when we woke up and ALL I WANTED TO DO was stay in bed and listen to the rain (and go back to sleep), but no.  I mean, I stayed in bed until about 5:40, but that wasn’t enough.  Now I’m sitting at my desk, which I have placed by a window, and I can see into our pretty backyard, through the rain.

It’s a cozy day for staying inside, and the advantage of starting work so early is that we’ll be done with our work day by 2 or 3pm (our time), and then we have the WHOLE afternoon to do other stuff.  Today’s chore is unpacking.  I think we might finish today, actually.  Tuesday night, after the movers left, we unpacked the entire kitchen and part of the living room.  in the living room, I unpacked boxes while John set up the TV and all its associated pieces (he had the important job).  Last night, between work and dinner, we took about an hour to finish unpacking the living room.  Tonight, we’ll focus on unpacking our clothes (which I imagine we’ll finish), and then we’re pretty much done.  It’ll just be a matter of arranging things to our liking.  We don’t have a linen closet at all, so we may buy a set of cheap shelves or maybe just another tote-type container like what I’m using for sweaters and workout clothes.  The arranging is how we’ll figure out what else we don’t have, and then we’ll decide what we can do without (there’s a shelf in an alcove in the bedroom – maybe we can use that as a linen closet) and what we absolutely have to buy.  We’re putting off the couch purchase.  Let’s let the spending from the move die down a little first.

I want a nap.