Atomictumor

Man, moving sucks.

We gave ourselves a Thanksgiving deadline, as the mighty collision between the lady’s family and mine will occur, so we’re moving my stuff in and getting the house shipshape.

So far, as the pictures Sunday indicated, phase one is going nicely.

Phase two, well… its a good thing the lady I love is an overachiever.  A very cute little overachiever.

Gotta get back to work.

Earlier this morning, Bos was working on removing some molding at the base of the bathroom wall.  We recently bought a new vanity, and it needs to sit flush to the wall, so the molding had to go.

So, about an hour ago, I heard Bos jump up and yell, “turn off the water, turn off the water!” to which I replied, “I don’t know where to turn off the water!”  A call to the Water department solved that.

What happened that required the emergency shut-off of water?  The guys who installed the molding in the bathroom a few years back nailed it through a pipe.  So, when James removed the molding and the nail - voila!  there was a bubbling brook in our bathroom.

Grumble.

So, I was sitting on the back porch.

The lady was working (still is, for that matter) at the day job, the kids were fed and doing homework/playing in the bedroom, and I was pretty proud of myself.

We’ve been slowly moving my stuff into the new house (her house), and its neat watching out stuff get joined together.  Already, my big screen TV has found its way into the living room, my flat screen sweetness is the bedroom TV (like it was at the original Casatuma), and the lady’s old living room TV, after much debate, warnings, and allusions to the children, is in the kids bedroom.  Along with a computer apiece.  And all their toys.  And the bedroom furniture.

She had done a wicked awesome job putting the toys up and organizing the playroom into their now larger bedroom (minus a buncha toys that we’re giving away, unbeknownst to the kids).  They have some Transformers and Spiderman sheets hanging up on the wall to hide the toys and give Pigpen a little hidey hole (the boy loves hidey holes, its where he puts on his super hero clothes), and it looks damn fine.

Last night, I made a huge leap by connecting and setting up my audio stuff, and I have Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky playing on vinyl in the living room.  Ahh, nice.  Earlier, because its balls cold here in Tennessee, I started making a fire, after carefully opening up the chimney flue and loading the reserve wood pile in the house down with some dry sticks.

Yes.

This is what its all about.

So I stepped out on the back porch to look at the bitching view for a spell.  I started thinking “huh, I’ll write a post about how awesome this is”.

I stepped in the house, and damned if I didn’t smell smoke.  I peeked out to see if smoke was coming out the chimney, but it was too dark to tell.

I wandered over to the fireplace, and found that the chimney flue had managed to be closed.

“Son of a bitch”.

As soon as that revelation was made, the smoke detectors started wailing like Satan’s dryer buzzer.

“Son of a bitch”.

One of the dogs started panicing, on account of all the loud, so MastaG started consoling him.  The other dog, no dummy, bolted for the still open back door and hung out on the porch.

“Son of a bitch”.

I averted the crises, one by one.  Opened the chimney flue and verified it was latched.  Pulled the batteries off the smoke detectors, opened the windows, turned the fans on.  Consoled the dog.  Flipped the record.

Wrote the post.

So, I’m out on the porch writing again.

This hasn’t happened in a while, on account of the ol’ battery in the ol’ lappy started going south a few weeks ago, charging up to 100% and then depleting itself (when unplugged) in a good 10 minutes or so.  I did some searching, and it looks like Dell batteries tend to wait until they’re about 14 months old and crap out.

Except mine only waited until it was 11 months old, and still under warranty.  A couple of emails to the friendly Indian guys, and the needful was achieved.  The new battery got here yesterday, and my laptop is back in full on 6 hours on the porch mode.

And what have I learned on the porch?

That its balls cold outside.  Balls cold.

But the needful has been achieved, yet again.

Speaking of the needful, today the ladyfiancee spent about 4 hours working some magic in the moving process back at the ol’ CasaTuma, and when I went in there today for my evening ritual of boxing up crap and bringing it to the new abode, the house was strangely empty.  She did some rocking on over there, lemme tell you.

Moving is a bitch.  I’m happy that we can take it kinda slow, in that theres no need to throw everything down in a weekend and live off boxes and whatnot.

Tomorrow is another throw down and move things day, as the lady and myself both have the days off work, and are prepared to go in there, both barrels blazing, and get some shit out.

Then we go to sleep at 9:30, if it goes like the past week or two has… sheesh.

It’s been feeling a little too cozy at the Cemestos Gardens lately. <1200 square feet + 6 people with varying degrees of mood swings = high probability of irking someone just by existing.  It’s fun to whine about, but even more fun to figure out solutions:

• Get smaller furniture.  In theory, if we have mini-furniture, we’ll have more room to move around, right?  And it’s fun to buy furniture.
• Daydream about adding on, despite the fact that we don’t like the road we live on, we’d have to chop down several trees, any addition would make the house look lopsided, and home renovation is a pain in the arse.
• Convert the crawl space into a bedroom for Wingnut.  He’s too young to be afraid of spiders, and he’s a great crawler.
• Okay, back to that daydream about adding on - did I mention that the plans I drew up included a super-secret parents’ room with a plasma TV and wet bar?
• Search the classifieds for homes we can’t (yet) afford, like this one (which, admittedly, I like primarily because it actually has 1.3 acres - that doesn’t happen very often in the Oak Ridge).  Wait, can this be considered a solution?  I don’t think so, because it just makes me woeful.  I’ll have to cross it off.
• Try to make myself feel better with the whole “the longer we live here, the more equity we’ll build” line.
• It’s handy to remind October that she’s the only one in the family to have her own bedroom.

Hmmm…that’s about it on solutions.  Back to browsing the classifieds.  I also like this one.  Dig the stone.