here.
3/27/07
An acidic and hostile place: since 1999
here.
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* * * Apparently, here in the country, it’s not unusual for a woman in a red truck to pull into your driveway and toot her horn. When you go out to see what the hell’s up with that, she’ll shoot a significant look at your trash pile at the end of the driveway and ask if you need anything hauled off. Unfortunately, you’ve probably already arranged to have someone come and haul off the pile over the weekend, so you have to turn her down. She’ll take it well, though, smile and wave and say she was just checking. Is it weird that I think that’s really cool?
* * * I am absolutely loving being in the Smallville house. I haven’t done much since I moved in aside from getting stuff put away and moved around. There are still things to be put away, but it’s looking very much like home. After spending a good part of the weekend in Smallville, Fred is eager to get the Madison house sold and move out here himself. He said that the living room section of the front room is very cozy and feels like home to him. I told Nance while she was visiting that I’ve never loved a house as much as I love this one. We’re going to sell the Madison house, and I won’t miss it for one moment. It never felt like home the way the Smallville house does, probably because we worked so hard making it the way we wanted. I’m so comfortable here and I can’t wait ’til Fred and the spud are here full-time, too. I need to get my ass in gear and start on the front flowerbed. Maybe once we’ve got the Madison house up for sale and I don’t have to worry about getting shit done over there, I can concentrate on the outside of the Smallville house. For sure I need to start hauling wood from the concrete pad in the back yard over to the wood shed. I need to get set up to strip the door that goes between the kitchen and laundry room. I need to get the weeds in the back yard mowed. The list is endless, but I don’t care – I love it!
* * * Where’d you get the dragonfly shower curtain? I love it! I got it at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I was all pissed off, thinking I was going to have to get a fabric shower curtain and then have to get a liner too (what a fucking racket, that), when I looked down and saw the dragonfly shower curtain. I like it a lot, and I think it goes well in the bathroom. Sorry if I missed an explanation of this, but I thought you were going to wait until the Spud was out of school for the year to sell the Madison house. Is the Smallville house in the same school district? Or are they less anal there than they are here about moving to another district and staying at the same school. We’re thinking, assuming the Madison house sells quickly, that there’s no way we’ll be closing on it before the end of April. Given that the spud graduates in the middle of May, we’re talking about a time of a few weeks where we’ll be living in Smallville and she’ll be driving to Madison for school. We’re not going to go out of our way to tell the Administration of her school that we’ve moved, so before they can “catch” us, they have to figure it out. And I suspect that, since it’s only a few weeks, they’d be okay with it anyway. I wish you luck with the sale of your house. I have had mine on the market since Sept!!!! I sold two other houses in the past 4 years and both went so quick but the market today is just the shit I tell ya! I am about 4 hrs north of you in Southern Illinois, so hopefully your market is better! I think the market here is pretty good, because they recently closed a base (or part of a base?) in Washington, and there’s going to be an influx of people who are being transferred here. The realtor seems pretty confident that the house will sell quickly, and he’s told us that there’s a shortage of houses in that price range at the moment, so we’ll see. He sold the previous house for us in a matter of days, and the house that was for sale a few doors down just sold in about a week. Fingers crossed that ours goes just as quickly! Did you get a new car? Or did E’gar get a paint job? Or WAIT! Is this the mystery Fredmobile? I got a new car several months ago, ya damn skimmer – last Fall, maybe? I sold E’gar to the spud and got a Suzuki Reno. I kind of miss E’gar a little. I like the Reno (which I have dubbed DelMar), but not as much as I liked the Aerio. Sugarbutt and the kitchen cabinets are a match! How did he get up there? From the floor to the counter, from the counter to the top of the fridge, and from there to the top of the cupboards. Except for Spot, they’ve all gotten up there and looked around (Miz Poo whined at me until I put a chair by the cupboards so she could get up on the counter; spoiled rotten, our cats? NAHHHH!), but Sugarbutt and Tommy spend the most time up there. Tommy also likes to hang out in the hall closet, especially if someone startles him. I guess he feels safe back in the darkest part of the closet. I love the iron mug-holder paper towel hanger too! Where did you get it? Actually, I didn’t get it anywhere – it was already there, the previous owners asked if we wanted it, and we said yes. I wasn’t that crazy about it, but with the face mugs and my little salt & pepper collection on it, I think it’s rawwwther charming. Just had to tell you – I LOVE your kitchen cabinets! Thank you! I like them a LOT more than I did when we first bought the house. I switched the pulls from the white ceramic ones to the darker ones we have now, and it makes a HUGE difference. We might change the cabinets at some point in the future, but I have to say, the more I live with them, the more I like them. Are you painting before pulling up the carpet? Seems to be the better way to go, so as to not have to work so hard to keep the paint off the new carpet. Yep, painting will be done this week, and the carpet will be done next week. The guys who are coming to lay the carpet are the same ones who are pulling up the old carpet and pad, so painting will be done before they get here. (via email) I remember when Fred would be at the new house by himself and he thought the house was haunted. Have you had any ghost experiences now that you’re moved in? I haven’t had a single ghostly experience, and whether that’s because I just don’t really believe in ghosts or because there are no ghosts here, who knows? For the record, all the orbs that show up in our pictures that so many of you think are signs of a otherworldly presence, I prefer to think of as specks of dust on the camera lens. I’d love to be proven wrong by a benevolent ghostly presence but with a week and a couple of days down, that hasn’t happened yet. Are the NotYours cats okay with no longer being allowed inside the Smallville house? I know they have the condo of kitty luxury on your front porch, but I wasn’t sure if they’d have hard feelings since they can see the City Crew inside hanging out where they used to be allowed. I have to say that you have balls (figuratively) for transporting that many cats at once. You’re a braver person than I! Newt and Maxi seem okay with not being allowed in the house, at least so far. Honestly, they weren’t all that interested in coming inside much, anyway – we’d let them in, they’d sniff around, then howl mournfully until we let them out. I haven’t seen much of either of them since Saturday or Sunday, when Fred accidentally locked Maxi in the garage and went wandering off to Madison. It was just luck that I happened to hear Maxi yelling when I went out to my car to leave. I let her out of the garage and she’s been back briefly once or twice, but I think being locked in the garage made her nervous. what is the name of the color (actually there are 2 so I should say colors!) that you used in your new bedroom?! It is beautiful! Apparently the bottom is “pale purple” and the top is “silver smoke”. Pictures of the paint can labels are below, for reference. (Top) (Bottom)
Note: In case you didn’t read her response in yesterday’s comments, Nance and Rick’s camera is a Nikon D70.
The first night was a little creepy, because it was my first night in the new house, the cats were freaked out, and I wasn’t accustomed to being in the house at night, and especially not at night by myself. All houses make noises at night, and the older the house the more it pops and settles. It was creepy being there alone that first night, and add to that the fact that the cats weren’t letting me sleep any more than 20 minutes at a stretch, and I wasn’t in the happiest of moods Wednesday morning. I made it through the day, though – went to the pet store early, because I’d traded with the Wednesday morning person, and just as I was about to leave for the pet store, Fred called to tell me that the post office had called to let him know that the chicks had arrived. He left work, brought the chicks home to Smallville, set up the brooder (you can read more about it at his site), and went back to work. I finished up at the pet store, went to Madison to check my email and do some vacuuming, and went home to Smallville. Wednesday night was a bit better than Tuesday – the cats let me sleep a little more, and I actually got a good night’s rest – and I woke up Thursday to do some more unpacking and wait for my Extra Special Guests to arrive. Yes, that’s right – Nance and Rick came to visit! I swear to god, the only thing getting me through the whole moving hell was the knowledge that Nance and Rick were coming and I could stop with the unpacking and the crazy running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and just hang out and babble at Nance and Rick and relax. The spud thinks Nance and Rick are funny. You guys, I had SUCH a good time. Friday Nance and I sat around and babbled and babbled and babbled some more. In fact, Friday morning we babbled for two hours, then Nance said “Okay, seriously. We need to do a damn podcast!”, and so we babbled on for another hour before Fred showed up, then we had to end the podcast because he didn’t want to be part of it (PARTY POOPER). Nance listened to it and swears we didn’t sound like complete idiots, but we’ll see about that. Sometime Friday night, Fred suggested that we play Trivial Pursuit. He dug out his ancient version of the game and we played, then I insisted that we run to Wal-Mart and get a version of Trivial Pursuit that wasn’t from the 1800s. We did that, and spent the evening playing a few more games. I don’t know who emerged the victor, although I do think that Fred and I won the first game and he’s such a poor sport that he danced around the room in victory. Nance and Rick won the next game (I think) and probably the one after that. By the time we were down to the last game it was late and we were all exhausted and I could barely keep my eyes open, but still didn’t want the evening to end. Me tired. By the way, I did try to insist that Nance and Rick stay with me in the Smallville house, and they were going to, except that I have no internet out there at all, and Rick needed internet for his schoolwork, so they stayed in a hotel. Saturday Fred was going to work on painting the Madison house so that would be done and then all we’d have to do is replace the carpet in the computer room and upstairs, and the house would require nothing more than a good cleaning before we put it on the market. Only, after doing some puttying and caulking, he said “Fuck it”, and came over to Smallville. We took Nance and Rick to Decatur for lunch at Penn’s, where they got to appreciate the hamburgers Fred thinks are the finest foods on the face of the earth and with which I am completely unimpressed. Nance and Rick claimed to like the burgers, but I think they have better taste than that and were just saying it to be nice. Ha! We ended up spending the better part of the afternoon playing this game called CatchPhrase, a game I didn’t think I was going to like, and DIDN’T like at first, but once I got over being self-conscious I decided I absolutely loved it. It’s this game where you have to give clues to your partner to guess a word or phrase, and if they guess it you hand the little handheld computer thingy off to the other team to do the same thing, and all the while there’s a timer beeping, and as time is running out, it beeps faster, and it’s all very nerve-racking, but in a cool way. We played several games of that, and then Nance and I hung around the house and babbled while Fred and Rick did A Project involving the chickens and a bigger place for them to run around in. We went out to dinner (where we were waited on by this kid who was a dead ringer for Willard from Footloose, bless his heart) then went back to Smallville and played about a thousand more games of CatchPhrase. Here’s how one part of the game went. Fred was trying to get me to guess the word “lucky.” Fred: A leprechaun brings you – ? Robyn: Joy! Fred: No. When you see a leprechaun you feel – ? Robyn: Joyful! Fred: NO. Someone who wins the lottery is – ? Robyn: Wealthy! Rich! Has lots of money! Happy! Fred: NO! I did finally get it, but damn. I’m going to be teased about that forEVER. Then there was the time, later in the evening, where I had to get Fred to guess “Jazz singer”, and it went thusly: Robyn: You hate this music! Fred: Country! Rap! Robyn: No! And then I, the least musical and most tone-deaf person on this entire planet, proceeded to SCAT. And Fred got it! Then we were laughing about it, and I took a drink of water and Rick said something that made me laugh just as the water entered my mouth and it went directly into my lungs and I made a complete ass out of myself by spitting water all over the front of me, and choking. I am such a prize, I really am. Also, two things of note: There was some journaller abuse going on, because when Fred gets excited he flails around a LOT, and he ended up kicking the holy hell out of poor Nance. Secondly, at one point Fred and Rick were on a team together and Fred was trying to get Rick to say “spread”, so he leaned back and spread his legs, and Nance whipped her head in the other direction so fast I think she gave herself whiplash because Fred was wearing shorts and she was afraid she’d see a little more of Fred than she’d bargained for. The entire time Nance and Rick visited, Miz Poo was ALL OVER them. Miz Poo LURVES Nance and even though Nance had allergies going on (since everything’s blooming down here) and the cat hair wasn’t helping, she patiently petted Miz Poo for hours. I think at one point Mister Boogers showed up for some love from Nance, and I know Tommy settled in with Nance, then kindly farted on her. Don’t you totally want to come visit us? Also, Nance had me drooling with envy over not only Little Lulu her laptop, but also over her cool-ass Nikon camera with the monster zoom lens. She insisted that I give it a try (I didn’t want to at first, ’cause I was afraid I was going to hurt it), and I fell in love. Fred got to use it, too, and took some awesome pictures. Except for the cats in the carriers and Spot in the litter box, all the pictures in this entry were taken with their Nikon. I think we need a camera like theirs. And I think Fred’s starting to agree with me! Mister Boogers doesn’t know what those chirpy things are, but he does NOT approve. They love to sit on the cat tree and watch what’s going on outside. We don’t have nearly enough cat toys. They can lay on the cat tree and watch what’s going on for HOURS. Did I mention I LOVE this freakin’ camera? Maxi doesn’t hate you… but she’s considering it. (Rick and Nance took some of the pictures, and Fred took some (I think he took the bird in flight one, fourth from the bottom), and I took a few, too. It was a collaborative effort! Go check Nance’s entry for the best picture ever taken of Tom Cullen.) They left Sunday morning, early, to head for South Carolina, and I missed them immediately. I don’t know when I’ve had so much damn fun, between the gossiping and the game-playing, and just generally hanging out, it was exactly what I needed, an interlude between the craziness of moving in, and the craziness of getting the Madison house ready to be put up for sale.
Check out Donna’s kitties, grooming each other. Sugarbutt and Tom Cullen still love to groom each other like that, though they get too worked up and start fighting about ten seconds in to the lurve session.
poor kids in Enterprise, but we got nothing but wind and rain here. I hope that’s true in Smallville as well – I’m about to head out there to work and clean all day. Then I think I’ll come home and pack some boxes. Fun!
Edited to add, 5:30 pm central time: We’re fine. The tornado that hit was a couple of hours south of us, and last I heard, the really bad weather’s expected to go around us. I hope it does! Edited to add, 9:00 pm central time: Still no bad weather – just wind and rain – and it looks like the bad weather’s done for the night. I’m amazed that Survivor wasn’t pre-empted by the weather coverage, because I swear to god, every time we have bad weather it’s on a Thursday and Survivor gets fucked up!