Note: In case you didn’t read her response in yesterday’s comments, Nance and Rick’s camera is a Nikon D70.
* * *
(From the move last week)
I brought everyone but Mister Boogers in my car – Fred brought him. Miz Poo and Spot did a call-and-respond howling duo all the way to Smallville. 20 minutes seems a lot longer when cats are howling the entire way.
* * *
Yesterday morning at 4:30 found me standing buck nekkid in the bathroom with the light on, earplugs in my ears, cats milling about my feet watching me perform surgery on my pinky finger with a needle. Without glasses on or contacts in.
That just screams “Monday”, doesn’t it?
(For the record, at some point over the weekend I got a small splinter under my fingernail. I thought I’d gotten it out, but apparently not, because I woke up Monday morning with my finger throbbing. After cutting my fingernail as short as humanly possible and digging at the area just under my fingernail for a good fifteen minutes, I got the little fucker out. It’s sore today, but it feels 10,000 times better than it did.)
* * *
Y’all, this whole no-internet thing in Smallville just sucks like nothing you could imagine. No internet, no cable. IT’S LIKE LIVING IN THE GODDAMN 1800S!
Yesterday I left Smallville at 7 to drive to Huntsville to clean cages at the pet store, and didn’t get home that night until after 8:00. That’s a long fucking day, and too long for the cats to be home alone. After I left the pet store I went to Target, filled up my gas tank at the cheap gas station, then went to the Madison house to hang out, write my entry, do some picking up, do some laundry, and do some web surfing. Etc etc etc.
At 3:00, the lady from the carpet store came to measure the house and quote us a price for having the carpet replaced, and while it was more than we wanted to spend, I think the cost will be worth it when we don’t have to fork over a $5000 carpet allowance at closing.
They’re coming to carpet the computer room and the entire upstairs next Wednesday. And the other guys are coming to paint the house this Wednesday or Thursday.
That’s right, you heard me – we’re hiring professionals to paint the majority of the house. Because we? Are burned the fuck out on the painting. Fred’s back hurts when he uses the roller for too long, and Sunday afternoon I was stuck with painting the edges of the dining room, and I was filled with hatred like I have never felt before, I hated this goddamn house so fucking much that in retrospect I am amazed because my hatred should have set fire to the fucking thing. And my hatred spilled over to everyone in the vicinity and I stomped around and had a temper tantrum like a five year old and then had to go upstairs and lay down in a fetal position and do some lamaze breathing before I went on a killing spree.
Then I suggested to Fred that I would offer him 2,000 sexual favors (hey, my kid reads this journal, I’m not going into details) if he would just fucking call a professional painter.
And he did, and the guy came over and took a look around and quoted a price, and I fell to my knees and thanked god when Fred asked the guy how soon they could get the job done. And the paint guy said he’d do everything he could to get it all done by Saturday, HALLELUJAH.
It’ll take a day or a day and a half to get the carpet put down, so at some point – possibly this weekend – I’m going to spend an entire day cleaning the bathrooms and scrubbing the floors, so I’m thinking that next Friday our house will be up for sale.
I hope like hell it sells as fast as the house two doors down sold (a week), and I hope we make nearly what they did, though we’re planning to underprice it by a bit so it’ll sell faster.
We’ll see.
* * *
Comments:
That is just so cool — I’m glad y’all had such a good time and that the move to the Smallvill house is finally over. Now you get to unpack — whee!
Now I get to unpack? What’s this “now”, kemosabe? I spent half the day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, and most of the day Thursday unpacking. There are maybe three boxes left to be unpacked, and I’ll get to those when I damn well please, because I am the boss of what gets unpacked when. Ha!
Being a farm girl, I want to warn you not to let the cats near the baby chicks. They will eat them. Sad but true.
I was going to squawk indignantly about how I’m NOT that dumb, but god knows I’ve done some dumbass shit in the past. For the record, the cats aren’t allowed unsupervised access to the chicks – I let them in to sniff around while I’m changing out the water or feeding the chicks, and they seem a little interested, but mostly scared by the chicks. I’d never let a cat hang out with the chicks if I weren’t around – we keep them in a room with the door shut so the cats can’t get in there. Unless they can figure out how to turn the doorknob, I’m not going to worry about it. Though Tommy IS an awfully smart little bastard.
Who is putting up the joint podcast? I want to hear it.
It’ll be up over on Nance’s site, once she gets home from SC and has a chance to have her kid edit it a little (or maybe she’ll just put it up unedited – I don’t think she’s decided yet). She’s going to be in SC for a few more days, so I don’t know when she’ll get a chance to do that. I’ll link to it once it’s up, I promise!
Where the magic happened.
What do the city cats think of the salty country cats?
I thought there’d be a lot of hissing and growling, but for the most part the city cats don’t seem too interested in what Newt and Maxi are doing. They’ll sit on the cat tree and watch Maxi and Newt sometimes, but they’re more interested in the birds and the traffic. We did crack the front door and let someone – Mister Boogers, I think – sniff at Maxi through the crack and they both growled, but that’s about it so far.
Sugarbutt’s favorite hiding place.
Some questions:
How is the house stuff going?
How is Mr. Boogers? Does he still hate me?
How are you and your family?
Are you coming back to us?
House stuff is going well – I think I need to get dark curtains for the master bedroom, and I still need to get the trim in the guest bedroom painted, and the entire house needs to have the floor scrubbed (we’ve had a lot of delivery people traipsing in and out lately), and the pipe to the showerhead in the downstairs bathroom cracked and needs to be replaced, so I’ve got to shower in the upstairs bathroom for the time being, and the “cold” knob in the upstairs shower keeps falling off, but other than that, it’s all okay.
Mister Boogers makes himself at home.
Mister Boogers has adjusted the best of all the cats – he seems to think this whole thing is quite the adventure – but, yes. He still hates you. But that’s fine, because I hate him back for you. He’s been waking me up at 5:30 every morning with his incessant howling, so I’m about ready to kick him out the damn door. I bet the country cats would kick his ass all over the yard, though. He talks a good game, but he’s really a wimpy little bastard.
Fred, the spud, and I are fine, but I’ll be glad when the Madison house sells and we can all be under the same roof again.
I’m coming back to you, my darlings. Though, fair warning: updating will undoubtedly be spotty for a little while. I’ll still write every day, Monday through Friday, but I may not be able to get them all posted on the day they’re written for, because there are going to be the occasional days when I stay in Smallville all day. So you might get a day or two of no entries, followed by multiple entries at a time. Once we have an accepted offer on the house, Fred promises we’ll get internet in Smallville.
In fact, this might be the last entry posted until the end of the week. It all depends on the painters and when they decide to come, and how long it takes them to finish.
Until then, I’ll play 63,000 games of
Snood (I hadn’t played it in years, but when I was bored in Smallville and not in the mood to read, I realized I had Snood on the laptop, so I sat in the living room and played game after game after game. I’m getting better, thank god – I got so frustrated at how poorly I was doing that I turned the difficulty level to “child”, just so I could win one fucking game!), do chores around the house, read, and watch TV shows I’ve downloaded from iTunes.
iTunes is THE SHIT, I tell you what.
* * *
My new bed – which I LOVE – and my new comforter. I’m not feeling the love for the comforter just yet, but it may grow on me. What I really wanted was something like
this in aubergine because I adore the Matelasse bedspreads, but Bed, Bath and Beyond and Linens and Things and Target had nothing like that, so I went with something I thought would go well in the room. I haven’t completely discounted the Matelasse bedspread, though. Maybe I’ll get it in the future.
I absolutely adore this bedspread I got for the guest bed, it’s too bad it doesn’t come in some shade of purple as well. What really rocks is that it
lists on Amazon for $100 for the full/queen size, and I got it at TJ Maxx for $35. LOVE IT.
The shower curtains I got for the downstairs bathroom. The problem with a suspended-rod bathtub/ shower is that the shower curtains have to be wider than the standard. And it’s close to impossible to find a wide-enough shower curtain in a pattern I like. I ended up getting two shower curtains and overlapping them a little, and you honestly can’t tell at all. Plus, I really like the dragonfly design, and I think it goes well with the bathroom color.
Sleepy.
“Hellew.”
All of today’s uploaded pictures are
here.
* * *
Previously
2006: “I prefer ‘va-jay-jay’,” he said almost prissily.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: And why is it that I ALWAYS have my period when it’s time to leave on vacation? Why? Whyyyyyyyyy?
2002: I don’t want to have to think about Ozzy having a boner, thankyouverymuch.
2001: Fortunately, I have many more lazing-around-the-house-reading hours in the day than he does.
2000: I didn’t think cats did such things once they were fixed.]]>