May 2009 Archives

Updates and pictures tomorrow when my body isn't screaming so loudly at me. Why the hell don't we do this stuff when we're younger?

...tired of it. Boxes... ...tired of them. Servants bringing the hubby and me silver trays loaded with fruits, veggies, cheese, fine wines, and gift certificates for unlimited visits to the Hot Springs spas... ...nowhere to be found. Life can be so cruel. ________________ At least the husband has his own personal massage therapist on staff.  Me? I have a cat who kneads my back for attention.  I guess whatever works.

So, the moving continues.  We moved all the big stuff we wanted to move over the weekend, got most of the painting done, and started the long process of unpacking and reassembling that which we disassembled.  There is still stuff at the townhouse, but it's making its way here one carload at a time.  This weekend will be all about cleaning said townhouse, which I'm absolutely not looking forward to.  (Ya'll, don't ever look under your clothes washers.  Ever.  Trust me on this.) I have pictures of the ongoing chaos, but while the wireless is up, the computers are not.  My little netbook is an awesome thing, but compatible with our camera it ain't.  So, the pictures will have to wait.  Which is a shame since some of them include pictures of the wild bunnies that visit our yard. As many of you know, amongst the hair-pulling stress of the move is the time you spend bonding with your new home.  Touching its various surfaces in a friendly yet not molesting kind of way.  Filling it with laughter.  Giving it a good cleaning.  Finding all the strange ass quirks leftover by the previous resident. The guy who lived here before was probably a perfectly nice guy, but he sucked at DIY.  Massively.  I mean, seriously, caulking a bathtub is practically foolproof these days with all the various little tools and stuff you can get to make it smooth and pretty.  Our bathrooms look like he gave the caulking gun to a three-year-old hopped up on Pepsi and pixi sticks. That's nothing compared to some of the ingenious wiring.  The light switch in the master bathroom is backwards.  The light switch turns on the fan and the fan switch turns on the light.  I've hit the wrong switch so many times in the last few days I nearly ripped the damn thing out of the wall.  I mean, whether or not he did it, how did that not drive him up the damn wall? Speaking of wiring, we might, in the future, have to re-wire this house.  I don't think all of it has to do with Mr. Fix-It, but there is some seriously screwed up circuitry going on here.  For instance, there are switches in the fuse box to which we can find no discernible connection.  One particular switch turns off an outlet in the den, two in the office, two outlets and the light in the library/guestroom, and the light, bathroom, and all outlets in the master room.  Another switch turns off just the light over the kitchen sink.  Now, we're going to see how much trouble we have, but we are suspecting we'll be saving up for a re-wire in the near future.  Of course, I realize that most of the funky wiring is because of the several remodels that happened in the 40+ years of the house's existence, but some of it is so oddball, I can't imagine why he didn't fix it. I mean, honestly, even if we're only in this house for ten years, there is so much we have planned in correcting such issues it seems almost unnatural that no one else thought of them.  Then again, maybe he did, and things changed.  Who knows? We haven't found bodies or body parts in any part of the house or under it, which is good.  I haven't located the ancient fraternity beer keg graveyard either, so we might be good. What I have discovered is lip prints on the shower curtain in the hallway bathroom. Yes, lip prints.  As in, lips covered in lipstick giving the shower curtain a big old kiss. You know, in a way, I can expect a butt print or even some strange genitalia art, but lip prints? I was taking a shower and notice a rather orangish blot and thought maybe it was a little mold from the moisture of the room.  Happens to shower curtains sometimes.  On closer inspection, I realized what it was and was suddenly awashed in various mental scenarios that would leave lip prints on the shower curtain. A woman, lacking toilet paper or tissue in which to blot her newly-applied lipstick, decided to use the shower curtain? The previous owner was a transvestite who wore just a little too much make-up and bumped into the shower curtain on his way into said shower and left a puckered mark. Someone really loved that shower curtain.  Someone who hated to leave it behind.  There was just no room in the moving truck.  She stood there, weeping, telling it over and over again she was sorry for abandoning it even after all they had been through together.  It was her friend, her confidant, that which kept her bathroom floor dry.  As the horn honked outside, calling her to a new destiny, she gave it one last kiss goodbye... To tell the truth, I believe someone was freaky-deaky.  I mean, there's a dimmer switch in that same bathroom.  Who puts a dimmer swtich in a bathroom?  Oh, no, this was no ordinary bathroom; this was a bathing room of lust.  I bet if I look hard enough I can find left over remnants of the mounts they used for the trapeze.  Oh, yes, serious fetish play probably went on in that room involving lipstick and shower curtains. I am not looking for the YouTube video for it. That which has been seen cannot be unseen.  Better to live in ignorant bliss. But, that situation definitely lends a possibly interesting story for the hole in the wall in the back bedroom. ___________________________ Yeah, we knew home ownership would be a lot of work, especially at the beginning, but dude, the weekend project list is getting longer and longer. Pretty soon it will need to be broken up into chapters.  "The House: Chapter One - Adventures in DIY Correction and Other Hilarity."

My feet are threatening to leave me; I'm covered in paint; but I'm happier than a cat rolling in a catnip bush. It has been a very long, very exhausting, but very productive day. We, along with several of our dear peeps, spent the entire day working on our house. I have to do the inevitable and traditional pause to reflect on how awesome the words "our house" are. Our house. Our house. Our house...in the middle of our street... Wait, that's not right. Anyway... Todd spent the day running network through the house, which required him to crawl under the house like some giant vole and contort himself between beams and rocks to drill holes and shout things at a friend as he was feeding cables and wires through said holes.  And, yes, while he's sore and exhausted, he's a happy geek boy.  I get the feeling doing the actual job sucked a lot of monkey ass, but he sees the dirt on his clothes and feels the ache in his knees only for a while.  In the end, the convenience of network anywhere in the house is a convenience that makes him shrug off the struggles to get it there. I spent the day with my lovely, lovely sister-in-law and several lovely, lovely friends taping and painting.  Mostly taping.  Lots of taping.  Ye gods, there was a lot of tape.  I'm thinking I should change the entry title to "Painter's Tape: The Sticky Side of Hell".  It took us hours to tape.  But, after the tape came the priming and painting which went fairly quickly.  We didn't get it all done, but a huge chunk of the work was knocked out. To all those who helped: Damn, we love you guys.  We owe ya'll tons of slave labor love. Tomorrow, we continue painting and Todd, like a dedicated techno geek, will tinker with the network some more.  I don't know if we'll get all the painting done tomorrow, but if we can at least get the walls and some of the trim done, I'll be happy. Now, Super Husband seems to think we can start bringing some boxes over.  While a great idea, there is no place to put them.  Except the sun room.  One thing I did notice, it was the one room not defiled with random mounds of crap.  And, because of that, it was the one room we all congregated to when we needed breaks. So, I'm thinking no. However, we do need to move boxes. I'm going to aim to get the "library" finished so we can move the books.  If we do that, then we can pile boxes of books and knick-knacks in there, and at least feel like moving is happening without crowding out the one room we have to just spread out and breathe. It wouldn't be so important, I think, if it weren't for the fact our current abode is filled with towers of "boxen"* as Todd calls them.   I told him that while it seems insane, I just need one space that's not filled.  One space that doesn't make me feel claustrophobic. Granted, this is speaking to a guy who spent most of the day under the house with support beams on his chin, but that should emphasize my point. So, we'll try to compromise. Either way, our house was filled with love and laughter today, our first real day of bonding with it.  Okay, it was filled with love, laughter, and a helluva lot of curiosity at random findings like the hole in one bedroom, the non-tacked down molding in a bathroom with the dimmer switch, the painted tile in the other bathroom, and the fact the hot water heater is set to "lukewarm".  But those, honestly, had their funny side.  Except for the hole.  I'm still pissed about the hole.  (I'll have pictures of it later since I left the camera at the house in my exahausted-filled stupidity.)  But mostly, it was filled with love and laughter.  We had people we loved there and there was laughing between the groans of exhaustion. It was a long, but a good day. ______________________________

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have officially bought a house! Yes, after weeks of The Waiting, one lazy contracter, and an incredibly stubborn appraiser, we finally got to close on the house today. There has been much happy, wiggly puppy dancing from yours truly along with the odd squee and at least one instance flopping on the sun room floor. I don't have videos of my happy dance, but insert your own and I'm sure it will suffice. I tell ya'll, we were on the edge of our sanity towards the end.  Super Husband woke up yesterday morning ranting, "Someone needs to make a goddamn decision on something!" You see, it's been raining here non-stop for about 17 days which apparently was the cause for an amazing amount of delay in finished the sunroom supports, according to the contracter.  Todd went out there a couple of days ago to find no one there. This on top of the contracter telling him earlier in the week that he was going out of town on Thursday.  Dude, it has to be Done By Thursday!  So, he called our agent who called the selling agent whose response was basically, "Excuse me?"  Apparently, they were telling him people were working on it despite the opposite happening.  Now, I understand that the rain was a factor, but when the selling agent fired the guy and brought in someone else, they got it done in two days.  Wow.  That's the difference between someone who really cares about the job getting done correctly and efficiently and someone who doesn't take into consideration how his laziness is affecting other people. And, don't get me started on the long-ass scratch on the wall left by the same idiot.  The only reason I haven't demanded his number so he can fix it is because we found the matching paint in the storage room.  It seems minor, but dammit, this is our home, and he had no business being irresponsible, especially when they were going to get paid $4000 for the job! Either way, a better person was hired, and with some serious begging from our real estate agent, the appraiser finally decided enough work has been done to the room to let us close. So, tomorrow, we have a bunch of awesome friends and family coming to help us do the whole painting thing.  This should be hard work, but fun as hell.  I love our peeps! And, I have to tell you, that's the greatest thing about getting a house, being able to share our happiness and our space with our loved ones.  I am under the firm belief that a lot of laughter in a home practically embeds itself in the walls and hides in the corners.  Brick and mortar remember far deeper than even we humans can, and a lot of joy in the stone makes for a jolly home. Maybe I ought to embroidery that. "A lot of joy in the stone makes for a jolly home." Yes, it's cheesy, but I like it.  Nyah. Anyway, I will take pictures of the chaos.  I don't expect our helpers to really want their pictures blasted on the internet, but I'm sure there will be much to share. To the paint brushes! ____________________________ My wonderful sister-in-law, who is brilliant managed to give a name to the horrendous color in one of the back bedrooms.  I had been trying to define it ever since I gasped at it.  Fushia, mauve (Todd said mud)...it was such an strangly odd color of ugliness that it had no name.   Becky figured it out at first sight: Lunch Meat.  Yes, we have a room the color of lunch meat.  I'm have tempted to paint sliced olives on the walls and call it Pimento Loaf.  I think I would get served divorce papers.

So...the waiting... Dude!  The waiting! That's the worst of the house-buying experience. You find the house. Then, you send in a bid. Then, you wait to see if you get the bid. You get the bid, and then you wait to see if the inspection is kosher, which there is always something no matter how minor, and you hope it's all minor. Then, you wait to see what the seller will repair. Then, you wait for the appraisal. Then, you wait to see if the seller will fix whatever the appraiser didn't like or wait to see if the seller will still sell the house if the appraisal was less than the value for which he/she was trying to sell it. Then, you wait for any repairs. Then, you wait for closing. Add to that the insurance thing, the packing thing, switching utilities thing, the purchasing of things like a fridge thing...painting, wiring, minor repairs, moving... They do not show this on those HGTV shows. I should be bald now. I do have new grey hairs.  I'm too young for this shit. Now I know why we weren't all smart enough to do this when we were younger. And, I will say, it could definitely be worse. This could be a money pit.  Or this could be like when one of my patients was dealing with a house. She and her husband were building one in the Carolinas.  They were due to close in the summer.  That happened to be the summer Hurricane Isabella was blowing through.  They had no knowledge of such storms, but the builders did and wanted them to close before the storm came in so they wouldn't be responsible if the house blew over.  Luckily for my patient, the bank was closed.  But, because of the stress of the house thing, all they bought for the duration of the storm was some wine.  She and her husband spent the storm passed out. You know, all things considered, I could see worse ways to spend a hurricane. Either way, it could be way worse. But, still, the stress sucks. And, yet, after this, we have to buy furniture. The wrestling match over that will be seriously fun. Heh. __________________ Oh, yes, the people who help will be paid in alcohol and food.  Probably pizza.  The weekend after we get fully moved and out of our townhouse, I intend to spend alternating between a drunken stupor and a continuous happy wiggly puppy dance.  The puppy dance will be funnier for those who chose to come watch.

Yeah, so the townhouse is drowning in boxes, packed and unpacked.  My last bit of sanity, such as it is, is hanging by a thread.  The cats are threatening to send themselves to China (that should tell you something).  Life is full of chaos, chaos, and "why the hell are we keeping this crap?"  As a result, there hasn't been a whole lot of creating. This kind of bugged me.  I'm not really happy if I'm distracted from my creating for a long period of time. Enter Lara. She's awesome.  She's fabulous.  She makes fabric and anything fiber beg for mercy.  She gave me a call a couple of weekends ago with an emergency.  The call went something like this: "So...how long do you think it would take you to embroider to black snakes?" "Um...I don't know and why?" As you have been told time and again, we are members of the SCA. Sometimes in the SCA, people get important accolades for various achievements, like service, the arts, sciences, fighting, being really cool to new people, showing up... Well, a friend of ours was getting knighted.  This was some seriously awesome news. Now, Lara volunteered, she said, to make him a cloak.  This is not an uncommon gift for such a ceremony.  However, she did not receive the materials to make said cloak until very close to the event.  If you're making a cloak for someone who is receiving a peerage, you don't bloody throw it together.  But, you do if you can't get the materials from other people until the last minute. This is why a new unofficial rule has been made in our group: if you insist on being awesome enough to be elevated, you better damn well give us at least a month to plan or by god, we will send in cracked-out over-weight can-can dancers to your damn ceremony. Anyway, my friend needed help.  Hell, I needed an excuse to ignore projects.  (What is it about projects you must do?  They take on an air of suckage compared to projects you want to do.  I have learned I can no longer take commissions because of this.  That might be wrong, but apparently, unless the projects are emergencies or happen on my own time, they take forever for me to finish.) So, I  embroidered snakes. There were two, but the other snake was a mirror image of this one, so I just took a picture of one. They're pretty easy, which is good because I had four days to do them. This is not a complaint.  I was happy to do them.  I love me some embroidery.  But, man, there were at least two nights were I saw the dark side of two in the morning, so I'm rather glad they weren't any more complicated than they were, and I'm also very glad I learned several new stitches. Yay learning! The pictures of James wearing the cloak are still on the camera, but it was lovely.  Lara did a fantastic job, and I was happy to be a part of it.  It was a fabulous moment in time.  (I will try to post the pictures later.) However, if she ever elevates and gives us less than a month to procure an item such as a cloak that is worthy of her status, I will personally infect her house with swin flu and rabies. I'm just sayin'... ___________________ I have apparently become the go-to person for emergency embroidery projects.  Until the SCA, I didn't know those existed.  I don't mind, but it's kind of funny.  People outside the fiber arts think "emergency embroidery project" is an alien venture.  It can't possibly exist because, you know, everything is done by machine. Yeah, well, in my world where machine embroidery is cheating "emergencies" happen, and by God, I will try to meet them.  Take that you damn machines.

First, I would like to announce I love our agent at Pulaski Mortgage.  We totally forgot about fixing the interest rate on the loan, but she didn't.  I got a phone call the the other day with and announcement of 4.5% and a half percent origination.  We locked that shit down!  (Incidentally, ya'll, if you want to buy a house and have a down payment, do it!  You'll not get a better time than this!) Second, I would like let everyone know that apparently it is very likely we will be closing on May 15th, the original date we set for closing. It appears the seller found someone to do the repairs on the addition despite the short notice and the consistent deluge of rain.  Apparently, he's figured a way around the $4000 price tag as well.  All I can say to that is "Can I buy you a case of beer?" Super Husband apparently also managed to get ahold of the insurance guy and get things rolling that way. So, barring fire, flood, alien invasion, or worldwide annihilation via fire, flood, or aliens, we should be closing in a couple of weeks.  (Notice I don't say zombie apocalypse.  Ya'll, if I can't keep this closing from going through because a few zombies, I'm a sad excuse for a bitchin' babe, in my not so humble opinion.) The packing continues... ________________ I don't know why I didn't take pictures of the chair deconstruction that happened this weekend.  Super Husband looked at the very-much-needing-to-be-junked chair, weighed the fact we have no truck with which to haul it away and the fact it really is too horrible to give away, and came to the conclusion that surely it must come apart.  His favorite quote of the night? "If at first you don't succeed, find a bigger hammer."  A pile of splintered wood, cushioning, and ripped up fabric later, and we had a nice pile of ex-chair to put in the dumpster.  I so should have taken pictures. I don't know why I didn't.  If nothing else, the boy seemed very happy in his endeavors.  All hail furniture destruction!

So, yeah, it was brought to my attention that my attempts to stop the unending comment spam I was receiving  effectively broke my comments. Sorry about that, folks. They should be fixed now.  There shouldn't be a request for security words, the need to sacrifice chickens, or any sort of requirement involving Hobbits, Dwarves, or Elvis. I was left with no choice in all of this.  You should have seen the spam.  I mean, we're not talking your normal Viagra crap.  What I got were lines and lines and lines, whole novels, of gibberish involving pharmaceutical companies and apparently some guy and some woman wandering a country side and talking in tongues.  It was truly bizarre... ...and it came in droves.  I went away for a weekend and received no less than 250 of these pieces of spam.   I had flashbacks of the time period when one of my best friends and roommate at the time convinced me to get AOL.  You have never seen spam bombings like that which you get on AOL.  This was close. Now, if I had my way, I'd pay someone to write a program that will track down these happy little spammers, and once I located them, I would find me some truly obnoxious college football players, give them three kegs, a case of JD, and promise them hookers.  When they got all good and fired up, I'd tell them their target not only hated football but thought it was gay and knew they went all Brokeback Mountain after the games. Go, my monkeys, be free... I'm sure the impending mess might get me in trouble, but come on, would any judge in any land, except Nigeria, actually convict someone for taking deserperate measures to protect her blog from spammers, the very scourge of the internet this side of Oprah on Twitter? If you don't hear from me in 10 to 20, you'll know. ________________________ I seriously have a hatred for spammers that knows no bounds.  I think there should be a spammer hunting season.  The government posts known spammer addresses for a limited time on the interwebs and registered hunters get to go out and gets them some trophies! OOOWee!  It would be beautiful.  A girl can have her dreams.

Okay, so the inspection on the house was stellar.  Despite a few electrical problems that were mainly from the age of the place and a couple of minor "whatever we'll fix it" things, the house in is in great shape. There was only one thing that confused him and has confused us.  Now, it confused him even more because of his expertise. The sun room/living room addition is on wood pilings.  I'm not fond of this because, well, it looks like a room built on the foundation of a deck which can't be stable. The inspector made a comment on how he couldn't understand why you'd over-engineer an attic over an addition to the point it could handle a helicopter landing but yet, build the floor like a deck.  Now, he wasn't worried because it had been this way for some time and had not suffered and ill effects.  That's the only reason I let it go. But, yet, I knew there would be an issue... I just knew... Back when the housing market was booming, the bankers, sellers, and real estate agents were pressuring appraisers to make sure houses appraised to sell no matter what it took.  And, if you couldn't do it, then we'd find someone who could, thank you very much... Yeah, apparently, the guy who bought this place four years ago experienced this because he got an FHA loan on it no problem. Enter our bank appraiser...who takes one look at the room on the wood pilings and announces, "Yeah, this has to be fixed or the loan is null and void." When the hubby broke this to me, he handed me alcohol.  It was that surprising. Now, we are lucky because the seller understands and is determined to fix it, but the problem is, can he find someone to fix it within the next two weeks? (Lara, shut up.  Seriously.  I love you, but I have to smack you now.  My over anxious system can't take you saying we won't close on the 15th of May even if you are right.  Just let me deal with it as it comes.  I can't deal with it as a possibility. I can only deal with it as it comes.  I know you understand.  Love you lots!) So, yeah, this could create a problem with closing.  Granted, we can push closing back, but if it goes back too far, then we find ourselves going month-to-month on our rent which is about, oh, $800+ dollars. If it were the guy I originally rented the place from, it wouldn't even be a problem because he wouldn't have stiffed us.  But, these places are owned by a new guy who is squeezing every dime he can out of the renters even though there are people who have been here for 15+ years.  (Someone explain to me how a guy could buy a set of places with renters who have raised their whole families here, which is incredibly weird for any rental property, find himself determined to alienate the very people who would stay here indefinitely.  It's a mystery to me.)   What it comes down to, we have to be out of here by the end of May. The reason we planned things the way they are was so we wouldn't be pulling this last minute moving crap. We've had many friends tell us they'll help us, but we're trying everything we can to keep it from being that hair-pulling rush. But, you know, I suppose, if we manage to pull it off and not owe $800, then we're doing well.  Hell, if we come away with this and still have our jobs, we're doing well. Either way, I just want some smoothness from this.  I stress.   Not as hard as I used to thanks to Zoloft, but I do stress.  Right now, I'm just trying to get through the fact that for ever box we pack there's at least 4 boxes unpacked. Anyone who has moved understands this. Hell, as much as I've moved through life, you'd think I'd know this. But, you know, you can't help but praying that maybe, this time, it will be different. I'd be happy if the May 15th worked. __________________ I'm not entirely unhappy about the pilings being replaced because it means the room will be ultra stable.  However, finding out this is a major concern two weeks before closing is something I hoped to avoid.  If we don't close by the 15th, my husband will come home to me sitting in the middle of a bunch fo packed boxes, naked, screaming, and ripping out my hair.  After last year's house buying fiasco and what it too to get us here, I feel justified.  You have been warned.

Probably about two to three blog updates to follow in the next day or so. You have been warned.