Today I dropped Soupo off at school as per usual. (Yeah , that’s a superfluous “per” but I like it.) Then I got to go to the dentist. It was Big Time. It was Katcha’s very first dentist visit ever. I was sorta expecting wailing, crying and much gnashing of teeth. But no, he was a champ. Sat up in the big scary dentist chair and opened wide. Now his teeth are all sparkly. Then Grandma showed up and took the little guy home. Why didn’t I take him home you ask? Because then it was my turn to get the ol’ choppers cleaned. I had my teeth cleaned and that’s not the best part. Then I had a cavity filled. It was a “shadow” cavity. I don’t have to tell you what that means. But I will. The cavity bored straight through my enamel on tooth #2 (#2? Dunno. It’s just what they called it.) then ate around so there was a hole inside my tooth. But it’s all better now. And my dentist got to practice with his mouth camera. He still doesn’t know how to use it, but I got to be choked a little. What’s a day without gagging?
Even more better stuff! The dentist office finally got the whole insurance thing figured out for us! It’s only been three years it’s been screwed up. It’s all better now. Then I get back to Mom’s and pick up Katcha and there’s a message I should call the Little Woman. So I do. The closing on the house is now on the 16th where it was supposed to be from the start but then it might have needed to be pushed back to the 20th only as it turns out, it doesn’t. So we close on the house on the 16th. Both houses get closed on the 16th. Did you know the 16th is this Friday? Great googley-mooglies! It’s this Friday! But Mom can watch the boys, so we’re Jake. And because we’re closing on the 16th and not the 20th, we get possession of the new house on the 26th and don’t have to give this one up until the 30th. So we’ll be ultra-swank and have two houses for four days.
So I had to call our insurance guy and have his minion get our insurance worked out. That went soooooo well, I thought I’d splurge and get the sewer back-up insurance for an extra 40 smackoleans a year. I skipped on the earthquake insurance though. It seemed the way to go.
Then I picked Soupo up from school.
Then I washed the dishes.
So that’s why I’m late getting this out this week. If you’re all mad about that, you’re really going to be cheesed the end of the month. And the start of next month come to think of it. With the move, I’ll probably be off-line for a bit. Don’t know how long it’ll last. Maybe not any time at all and you won’t notice the difference. Or it could be a while. So this late MMP is just like a taste of things to come. Or something.
And it’s really just as well I didn’t get it out on time. It would have looked like this anyway:
Accretion Thy Name Is Basement
We spent the weekend packing up all the junk in the basement. The Move is rapidly approaching and we want to be ready. At this rate, we will be. Barely, but still ready none the less. I think all the activity has scared off the basement bears (the big cowards). So at least my trail mix is safe. So there’s that. But great uncle Moses’ gumbo! Where did all this junk come from? There was a moai by the furnace and I think (but I’m not sure, I have to do some more research) we found the tail section to Amelia Earhart’s plane in the coal room. (It’s an old house, we have a coal room.) More than once the phrase “What is this? Should we keep it?” was heard. Then we realized if we don’t know what something is, we shouldn’t be packing it for the move. Unless it’s something cool like a voodoo shrunken head or monkey paw or something.
-Rue.
So it’s just as well I was late. It gave me something to write about. Huh?
-Rue. (for real this time)
I knew something was missing from my Monday, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Thanks for reminding me that I’m long overdue for a trip to the dentist, BTW.
We’re clearing a lot of stuff from the attic this week. I’m afraid to guess what they’ll find up there. Possible the other half of Amelia Earhart’s plane. Most of the furniture is getting tossed, and a bunch of boxes will be going into storage until I have time to sort through them.
At least you’re doing your house closings in the right order. When we bought our place the closing kept getting delayed, and we ended up putting just about everything but the cats and our clothing into storage and staying with friends for what was supposed to be a few weeks but ended up being over three months.
I was going to go with “Olmec head”, but the Simpsons beat me to that gag. By about 6 years.
If something has been in a box so long you don’t know what’s in there, you’re gonna store it longer? Ha! I pity you! Get rid of it! (Unless it’s something cool. Do you have a monkey paw stored in your attic as far as you know?)
-Rue.
Rue I hope you didn’t get rid of the Moai. I mean, if it’s really big like the ones on Easter Island, you should put it in the front yard of your new house. That and some pink flamingoes that light up at night would be the jakest yard art ever. The new neighbors will be so jealous. They’ll be pointing at your house and whispering to each other and maybe even be shaking their heads. They won’t be making fun. It’ll be all jealousy cause their yards don’t look as jake. Plus Soupo and Katcha could climb all over it. They’d have fun for hours on end.
Does your new house have a basement? If not, where are the bears gonna live? If they decide to move in with you, they might take over the living room. Then they’ll start using the computer. Your computer will have all kinds of bear porn on it. Trust me on this. We bears like our bear porn.
Pool update. The privacy fence is only gonna cost around $3500. Only, you say? I was afraid it’d be around $5000, since I want it to be 6’ high and go all around my big backyard. When the fence is up, I won’t have to look at the junk in my neighbor’s back yard anymore. I won’t have to look at the fact that he has yet to mow his yard either. Normally I wouldn’t care if he doesn’t mow his yard real often, but the rest of us have been mowing since mid March and he hasn’t mowed once yet. I am becoming a yard nazi about this. So, it’s a good thing I’m putting up the fence cause then I won’t care cause I can’t see it so the yard nazi in me will settle down. So, anyway, the tree guy is scheduled to start June 2nd. After he gets done ( he says 2 to three days), the pool guy comes in and does the pool. After that the fence lady (I am all equal opportunity when it comes to home improvement) comes in to do the fence. If all goes well, I’ll be floating in my pool by July 4th. YEHAA!
Oh well, that’s my contribution for now. Oh, one more thing. This Saturday, I’m having dinner with FairyChatMom! I’m all excited about this. She’ll be the first real live in person doper I ever met. That is a special honor for her. Y’all be sure and let her know that.
The storage thing is a temporary solution. To condense a saga that rivals War and Peace in length to manageable size, we’re clearing out the attic to make room for a friend to move in there. After her recent hospitalization, my wife needs round-the-clock care, and we had a choice of moving her into a care facility or hiring home care (neither of which is within our budget, even with our health insureance assistance). Fortunately, the friend who had been helping out with the housework volunteered to move in; it’s a win-win situation, since she gets to live rent-free in exchange for taking care of my wife while I’m at work. She has to be out of her current place by the end of this month, and we expected to have the attic ready by then.
The problem with the attic is that a number of years ago a friend of a friend had needed a place to crash and I had offered him my attic. While he was staying there, he offered to help around the house, and under my wife’s direction (and without checking with me) bunches of stuff were boxed up and put in the attic. None of it was labelled, and for all I know there may be a monkey paw, the Maltese Falcon, or the Holy Grail up there. Trying to sort things out up there has been on my to-do list for the last three years, but little things like my wife’s deteriorating health kept getting in the way.
Anyway, after we got my wife home and settled into the new routine, we were going to work on The Attic. Unfortunately, at about this same time my friend had a little accident at her part-time job and screwed up her back, and that put a crimp in our plans. So last week, realizing that she only had three weeks to vacate her old place, she made a few calls to check prices, and Thursday some movers are coming over. Tonight I’m going up to tag anything that I know is trash, which the movers will just haul out for disposal. The rest will be moved to a storage locker, and over the next few months I will go through it, just to make sure I don’t accidentally dispose of anything valuable. I strongly suspect that most of it will end up either in the trash, or donated somewhere, or maybe posted to eBay (something I keep talking about looking into, under the “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” theory).
On preview: swampbear, sounds like your pool plans are coming along swimmingly.
Giant… moai… in the front… yard… surrounded by… light… up… flamingoes…
That would be so perfect!
(Uhh… Swampy, are you sure you’re… you know… a boy who likes boys? I’m just saying because we seem to have the same tastes in yard art and well, every time I bring something like this up to the Little Woman she just rolls her eyes and shakes her head and mutters something that sounds like [sub]“tacky, tacky, tacky!”[/sub]. So I was just wondering since all the… you know… boys who like boys… on TV all seem to have some innate decorating sense and you… you know… like boys… but you seem to lean towards decor that makes the Little Woman go [sub]“tacky, tacky, tacky!”[/sub]. It just confuses me.)
-Rue. ([sub]“tacky, tacky, tacky!”[/sub])
Your friend LurkMeister. Is she going to turn your attic into a groovy pad like Greg did on The Brady Bunch? Beaded curtains and all?
If she does and you hear what sounds like two women in high heels walking around, don’t worry. It’s just the rival high school’s goat mascot.
-Rue. (not signing this one)
I’ve got the solutin to all your storage problems!
Live in a bitty little apartment with barely room for a sofa, let alone a significant portion of Amelia Earhart’s plane. Granted, you may grow tired of the Very Noisy and Smelly People Across the Hall; similarly, you may find it a bit cramped to fit a family comfortably in a one-bedroom apartment. Some of the progeny might have to sleep in the bathtub, on the kitchen counter, etc. . But surely, it’s worth it when you can move all your earthly possessions to your next tiny residence in the Littlest U-Haul (that’s an in-development PBS series, BTW).
Also, it’s not really the same to have your pink flamingoes and moai on the little 5’ X 6’ deck, rather than the great green expanse of your front lawn, but isn’t it worth it to have visitors gaze up from the parking lot in amazement, viewing your unique 3rd floor display of lawn art?
And you’d only have to share the pool with three hundred other people!
We had the Smelly People Downstairs Kn*ckers. The actual people themselves weren’t smelly, but their food sure was. It was authentic Korean food, which is good and all, only the smell wafting, no POURING into your apartment at 3 in the morning a.m. was somewhat less than yummy.
And that would wake up Motorhead and he’d serenade us with whatever wall-thumping crap he could find in his drug-addled haze.
Apartments? No, I don’t miss them. Thanks.
DAILY posts Gaze-hell? I gotta do this every day? I ain’t no James Lileks you know.
Oh, and to save time later, the link.
-Rue. (not a lot of people)
Rue not to worry. Boys who like boys tend to have interior decorating sense. Not that I have that either, cause I’m thinking how cool it’d be if LurkMeister’s friend did put up beaded curtains and keep a goat in the attic.
[sub]Please don’t tell anybody about my not having the interior decorating boys who like boys gene. They might take away my toaster oven.[/sub]
Everybody knows that exterior decorating tends towards things like flamingoes, yard gnomes, little-boy-peeing fountains and such. So you don’t need to worry about having any of those latent tendencies people sometimes talk about. Probably.
Not much anyway. Really, they’re probably hardly noticeable.
Probably.
Kn*ckers is this gonna be one of those PBS reality things like Manor House and Frontier House? Are you gonna set up your flamingo and moai display on the balcony for the viewing audience? I need to know so I’ll remember to watch.
Gazelle does FCM really have cool [NOTE: In Rue threads the correct term is “jake”] threads? Cause I was thinking of showing up in just jeans or shorts. And a shirt of course. And shoes. We’re going to a public eating place and I’m betting they’ll have one of those signs about shirt and shoes required. I mean, should I perhaps wear khaki pants and a polo? Dark suit? Black tie? I gotta know before Saturday.
LurkMeister BAD! BAD PUN! Course that’s a good thing, so you can come hang out at the pool.
Speaking of decor others might tsk at, I recently purchased and have proudly displayed in my home my very own glow-in-the-dark statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I love it. I have it under a lamp behind my stove, and when I turn off the lights, she glows! I cannot tell you all how happy this makes me.
I don’t think she’s the beaded curtain type, but she does have a dog that’s the size of a small horse. She swears that it will be happy up in the attic; we can’t have it running loose in the house for a number of reasons (our cats would freak out and it could easily knock my wife over just wagging its tail). We are putting up a dog run in the back yard, though.
She’s a landscaper, and she’s already started fixing up the outside of the house; we now have planters on the front porch, roses by the fence, and she’s reseeded the bare spots. I suspect there won’t be any flamingo or moai, though.
swampbear, thanks for the invite. Of course, you’ve never seen me in a swimsuit, so you may regret that later.
Threads are, IMHO, difficult to classify. FCM is a classy dame. You can’t go wrong with khakis and a polo. Casual yet bidnezzlike. And, of course, jake.
Oo! Oo! Kn*ckers! You need this! Really. It would be cool, swank and Jake all at the same time. PLUS it wouldn’t take up all the space on your deck. Or balcony. (What light through yonder window breaks? Tis the east and Kn*ckers, the lightbulb in Bela Lugosi’s tummy.)
How’s that for decorating Swampy? Hey! When the pool’s in, you could have a “Decorating Swampy Party”! Pinata optional.
-Rue. (trying to live up to my potential)
She’s cool.