DONE

Had the check out at the apartment at 6:30 this afternoon, breezed through, and it looks like we should make out OK. AND WE'RE OUT!!!!!!

big sigh.

I feel sort of like i can relax a bit now, though not really, but its nice to know that all my stress/activities from here on out or for the benefit of my wife, child, and building equity in our new home. whew.

So, Andrea and Glen went to an art show that she does the materials for and then they are going to see The Devil Wears Prada, leaving me and the dog home alone for our first boys night home in a long time (and possibly the last in a long time too. So, I tossed the ribs in the oven to heat up and did a couple quick things on my list (all these lists...) then I decided it was play time. Started some laundry then hooked up the speakers for the computer in the basement. It is truly awesome. I'm trying to make the most of them right now because I know that once Andrea comes home, and definitely once the baby is here, it will be headphones only for m and my computer. :(

You never know, maybe I will get a couch down here and turn this into the movie watching center, at which point the speakers will get some actual use. That'd be nice. Right now I'm streaming music from my stations on Pandora and it sounds amazing.

consumer safety

Just FYI, if you follow the "Quick Clean" instructions on the EasyOff oven cleaner, you are almost guaranteed to kill yourself. Nothing clears a room like the fumes of flash steamed lye.

cleaning house

I am having our checkout from the old apartment on Friday. Handing over the keys and doing the old damage-deposit (a.k.a. here's a month's worth of rent for you because I never took pictures of this shithole when we moved in to prove that this WAS the condition it was in when we moved in...) dance.

So, that means I have been heading over to the old apartment to try to clean up as much as possible and reclaim as much damage deposit as possible. I don't know why but when I look at the cleaning list it doesn't look so formidable, but every night when I head over there I seem to be faced by a mountain of cleaning that never seems to get smaller. Granted, I spent the first two days scouring the refrigerator and stove inside an out and scraping up mouse poop from behind them both, and then giving evetrything the primary once-over to remove to top layer of filth so that the real cleaning can begin.

I think what I neally need is a solid plan. Right now i am easily distracted or diverted and distracted. I will start cleaning one thing and then in mid-stride switch to somethign else...so I end up cleaning bits and pieces of everything but not necessarily completing cleaning anything and at the end of the day it feels like I've barely made a dent when in fact I have made several dents.

Of course...I'm not sure what I am so worried about. It's not like I'm counting on that money to pay for my first month's rent at the new place (though it definitely would help!) and I don't have to worry about getting a good rental reference (not any time soon anyway!). I guess I've just never liked dealing with landlords about anything. Something about every interaction that seems so clearly defined in terms of the power dynamic. I don't like dealing with people who are holding something (like fiduciary responsibility) over me. I don't like feeling like i can't tell someone to go screw themselves if I really feel that they should, you know, go screw themselves.

No, i don't think we'll get nailed so much for the standard stuff. It's probably going to come down to stuff like pet damage they'll dig up. All I can really say is that regardless of getting done in time or not at all, come Friday I will be cutting the final strings between Will & Andrea renters and Will & Andrea homeowners. It feelsl ike after the checkout is behind me, my new life can really begin.

Actually, it's probably just that I want to get this very time consuming anf money related project and milestone behind me. sigh. I haven't had to move out of anywhere in 3+ years. This is just another thing I absiolutely hate about moving. The place is freakin falling apart anyway, so they'll have to in the least repaint, so whats the point in me putting a ton of effort into cleaning everything if they're going to have to do it anyway? Yeah, I know, that argument won't fly with them.
Lemme tell ya, 3 years of Will & Andrea puts a hell of a lot of wear and tear on anything.

BTW: Andrea has finally started seeing a chiropractor that I was referred to by a coworker and her back is getting better. This woman specializes in prenatal chiropractitioning(?).

handy crap

Today I got a couple very minor house projects. By minor I mean low complexity, short execution time (hah! riiiiight), little skill involved.

Project #1 Install brass slide latch on the basement door so it can be securely latched closed once the dog is trained to stay down there while we are gone.

Project #2 Install door stops for the side door and back door.

Project #3 Clean up/organize the basement a little bit.

Project #1 was by far the least minor. It took about 45 minutes, required the use of an electric drill/driver, pencil, and a small wood carving chisel blade. Well, to start out with I broke all four different blade I attempted to use to chisel out the catch in the door frame for the bolt. I was able to do it, though, and these blades were all from one of those 30 piece wood craft hobby kits, so no big losses there. The main frustration came when the screws that came with the latch all broke 3/4 of the way in to the pilot hole i had drilled. Yeah. Turns out my new Ryobi cordless drill works pretty well as a broken off screw extractor too, so long as there is enough of the shaft sticking out to get the bit gripped secured down on it. Anyway, I just so happened to have a packet of smaller (but much more sturdy) wood screws that looked like they would fit the holes in the strike plate. Voila. I think my "after market" screws heads stick out a little farther because the latch tends to stick on the bolting action. I think that will change with time as that head gets ground down a little (or a gouge gets run through the bolt).

Projects 2 and 3 were piece of cake compared to #1.

Oh, and last night I reassembled all fo the orchid shelves. Soon we'll probably have to take up the carpet in the porch and put down some of that IKEA laminate. $1.50 a square foot or something like that. Supposed to be click and lock.

We'll see.

And my mom probably isn't going to hell. Not permanently, at least.

handbasket

Even though I am an atheist, my parents are both staunch Catholics, which is why I'm confident in saying that my mother is most likely going to spend some time in the firey nether regions of her unlikely afterlife. She's up here helping Andrea do stuff today, which is a wonderful saintly mother-in-law act of kindness, but when I called to ask her to take Andrea to the grocery store she told me that they were at the hospital because Andrea was in labor. Ha ha! Just kidding! she says.

Straight to hell.
Glad I don't believe in that stuff or else I'd probably be depressed about the state of my own eternal soul.

domestic law

When you rent, you often put into place a set of "house rules" for guests to help minimize your damage liability to your landlord when you move out and the keep on the good side of your neighbors. Really, these are just "apartment rules" because they are in place primarily for the sake of others. You may be the one making the rules for your apartment guests, but really you are just dressing down (or up as the case may be) a subset of your rental agreement and letting your guests know that it extends to them as well.

When you own a house, you really do get to set the rules. This is why the common term is "house rules" for the body of law governing a small informal locality (usually smaller than 1 city block unless the house is actually a casino) under a single governing body(homeowner/s). So, now that we own a house and we are about to start entertaining guests (ie: baby shower), we have opportunity and jurisdiction to enact our own set of house rules. It is good to be the king.

I thought I would post the house rules i have created in lieu of the forthcoming baby shower:

Kids and adults of all ages are welcome!
House rules are as follow:
No jumping on the mommy
No running around the mommy
No jumping on the dog
No running around the dog
No jumping on the furniture
No running in the house
No throwing things (unless previously approved by Will or Andrea)
No eating away from the table (or other approved areas)
No chewing on the furniture
No chewing on the dog
No dirty shoes in the house
No playing in the attic
Do not let the dog out of the house.
Do not take the dog out of the house without permission.
No going to the park without adult supervision (or if you ARE an adult, please make sure someone knows you are going)
No hanging or swinging from anything (especially from the mommy)
No playing in the basement unless supervised
No playing outside unless supervised
No anything unless supervised = Children must always be supervised.
No screaming or shouting unless that is the extent of your language skills AND you are less than 2 years old
No writing on the walls
No writing on the floor
No writing on furniture
All of the above also goes for drawing
No playing in traffic
No playing in the alley
No jumping off of the front steps
No jumping onto the front steps
No jumping or swinging from or to the porch railings
No slamming doors
No kicking
No hitting
Whatever it is you are doing the answer is no
No causing a neighborhood disturbance, we will call the cops on you
No Calvinball in the house
No steel reinforced footwear
No steel reinforced clothing
No nothing that might damage the wood floors, woodwork, or walls.
No laughing at our paper shades
No pulling on our paper shades
No drawing or writing on our paper shades
No playing with the lawn mower
Under no circumstances are yo uto play with any electrical outlets, equipment, or computers without prior approval and subsequent supervision.

Time outs will be executed in the dryer (set to fluff), so be sure you do not need to take one.

necessity is the mother of getting stuff set up

So, tonight there was a need for Andrea to burn her project to DVD, which meant that I had a reason to set up my main computer (the tower). Granted, I have not put the whole nine yards up, but I have the most essential parts up and runing and my handyman room is already miles past my geek-lair in terms of readiness. So, I was able to catch up muy geek lair, which is handy since it takes a hell of a lot longer to do laundry when you only have one washer and one dryer, and both of them are consumer grade, not the big commercial monsters I've been spoiled on.

But the geek lair has started to germinate and take form. Muwahahahahaah!

feels like a first

We went and ordered shades for the downstairs yesterday. While at Home Depot I said, "Can't wait for them to come." and the helper person (they're not really sales people, you know) says, "You know, you can get temporary shades," and I said "yeah, *I* wanted to do something like that but somebody was against the whole plan..."(nudging and hinting with my eyebrows towards Andrea). Of course, the plan I was talking about was buying cheapo blinds or shades to just hang until we could slowly get the real-deal ordered and set up, even piecemeal if necessary (that shit is expensive, yo!).

Well, of course, that was a bit of a bonehead plan on my part and Andrea put the kybosh on it post-haste. But what the home-depotee was talking about was just these pleated paper shades that have a post-it like adhesive on one end and hang down. Sure, they look like party decorations and they block like only 5% of the light, but you can't see through them and they only take 1 minute to install (2 minutes if you need to cut them down to size with a craft knife). So we bought those and I put them up and suddenly the non-stop parade of pedestrians on our sidewalk (and the razzmatazz of the wandering crackies and crackettes across the street) was instantly muted from our lives. I kinda missed it. But the privacy was nice. Especially up in our room. We can now change our clothes with the lights on! And I think I did sleep a little better without the sun light crashing into our room in the morning, but instead slowly oozing in through the white paper shades.
Yes, it looks low-rent on the inside, but it is such an improvement.
The guy across the street (where the crackies are always going) has a quilt pinned up over his window. Hello, welcome to the trailer park.

f-day

Now I remember why I stopped blogging...I got to a point where I just couldn't put time aside to actually write and complete an entry. And I still have the same problem. I have like three of four posts sitting in draft form, waiting to be finished and posted.

Well, father's day is here and I guess I get grandfathered in a little bit? Maybe, i dunno. I don't really expect to do the father's day thing until I actually have a little guy on the outside who can put me through my paces and earn the "perks" of fathers day. I think all I qualify for right now is "procreator day" or maybe "pregnant woman's spouse day" or something like that.

Yesterday mom dropped by with our neice on their way down to Rochester. She took Andrea and I out to lunch. It was the first time we have left Ash alone at the house. We put him in the basement, where he promptly wigged out, peed and pooped on the floorm, and was a b asketcase when we got home. So, he's not quite ready for us to be gone for that long. Just more stress for me brought to the forefront. What to do with the dog when we're gone.

Sigh...

aw crap.

Welcome to homeownership is what they say...

This morning I noticed that the drip drip drip of the tub faucet had started to be a dribble dribble dribble coming out of the hot-water tap. I sent Andrea an email from work letting her to know about it so she didn't turn the hot water on too much to let it start leaking again. Well....I received a hysterical phone call from her screaming about "The water! The water! How do I turn the water off???!!!!" and everything else was pretty unintelligible. Digital cell phones use something called a vocoder. What it does is convert the analog sound wave into digital information, and in the process reduces the size of the information packet by both stripping out the higher and lower frequencies and also by sort of not playing back entire sounds, but more like playing back the differences in the sounds from one "frame" to the next. This is pretty advanced stuff. Well, see, they also do something where they transmit at different baud rates when they detect different levels of sound. That's why when someone stops talking, sometimes you may think the call has dropped (because of the sudden silence) but they are actually still there (and in danger of entering a "Hello?" loop when you say hello then they say hello, and you say hello again because you don't know if they are responding to your hello or are saying hello spontaneousely because they suddenly can't hear you either...). The vocoder drops anything below a certain sound level to avoid taking up precious network bandwidth with the sounds of passing cars or the wind blowing, or light breathing, or has stopped transmitting completely. That's also why if someone is talking to you on a cellphone and there is loud music in the background they will break up or become unintelligible as the vocoder is essentially sending the changes between previous frame and current frame, which are chock full of sound information. It all compresses into a solid chunk with the wrong parts stripped out, and all you hear is junk, or possibly nothing at all as the vocoder may be set to toss out frames that are obviously full of audio noise which takes up network bandwidth and conveys no useful info. Anyway, thats why when a hysterical person screaming into a cellphone might as well be using sign language in the dark - frustrating and inneffectual. And telling that person, "Calm down, I can't understand anything you are saying" automatically translates into "Please scream louder, I can't under stand you. If you scream loud enough maybe I can hear you without a phone."

Long story short, the hot water knob had literally shot of of the shower and doused Andrea with nearly scalding hot water (luckily I had the water heater set on the recommended energy-saving middle-of-the-dial temp). She instinctively tried to hold the water back with her hands, which probably helped some of the water force its way backwards and down behind the wall.

So she got the water turned off and then was faced with 2 issues: She now had absolutely no water in the whole house, and she has to pee every 15 minutes because she's pregnant. And she's worried that her new house may have been flooded.

There seemed to be a bit of a runaround with the home warranty people not being able to pull up our contract, etc etc and everyone wanted to make sure we got taken care of. 24 hours later we had a wonderfully helpful plumber who told Andrea that there was nothing actually wrong with our shower except that when the hot tap valve, which was newly replaced, had been installed it was not fastened correctly and was slowly working its way loose. This was inevitable, which means that it was guaranteed to happen while I was at work.

We had some minimal water leak down through the ceiling into the kitchen, which in my mind was the most disturbing and upsetting part of the whole ordeal. But it was a very little amount and its probably already dried up completely (fingers crossed). So we got the shower fixed and to top it off the plumber also caulked around the fixtures (which he said had not been done either) with silicone.

Sigh. Learning experiences suck.

transience

Well, yesterday people showed up in droves to help me move. We got all of the furniture and a lot of the other stuff moved in prety good time. Andrea sequestered herself at the tea shop so she could work, which is just as well since I don't think it could have gone any more smoothly with her here.

And, though not really the true finish line, it is surely a major normalcy milestone, we have our cable internet service hooked up at the new house. You never realy realize how big a part something plays in your everyday life until it is gone. too true.

So, very slowly unpacking. I spent the past 45 minutes or so re-hanging the closet doors (removed for painting the room).

There's still some stuff, like getting our public utilities and recycling set up. Until then we have a teensy tiny baby solid waste can that is already filled up with my used up painting stuff.

Sigh.

Last night was our first night in the new house. This morning was the first morning in about 3 years that I have woken up and taken a shower in my own shower. Yes, we now have a shower. Living the high life now! Sure I could continue to take baths, but the tub here is not an old clawfoot like we had at the apartment. I doubt I would enjoy a bath quite the same in our new tub.

Ah, homeownership...

and now I need ot go rescue Andrea from the coffeeshop where she is working on borrowed internet.