Moving Made Harder

My advice to you is, when you buy a house, don't wait a month to move in. Unless you have to. Unless, in your excitement the day after closing, you tear up all the carpet and linoleum to refinish the hardwood floors, and you rip down all the ugly paneling in the "den" and frame a wall to put up new, modern drywall (as opposed to plaster, I guess), and moving in would mean not finishing the floors. Because you really ought to finish those damn floors before you move in.

I guess waiting a month is rough, because instead of the house being a home, the house is a project that you carry with you to and from work and your real home. It wears one out, I think. But we didn't know that until we'd done it. No one offered any advice, really, and if they had we probably would have told them hush up, we know what we're doing.

Also, if you're not living in the house, it's real easy for a dripping bathroom faucet to turn into a gushing fountain that could potentially flood the entire basement. What? Oh, yeah, yeah, that happened to us. But see, we thought the dripping faucet wasn't anything. We thought the puddle of water in the basement was from the toilet. Later that night, we figured out it was the sink (turned off the faucet, everything dried out).

The next day, when we stopped by to put up drywall, the toilet had flooded and the basement was a mess again. It was the tank, see, it never stopped filling. We turned off the valve to the toilet, but the next day it had flooded again (ghostly? The valve WAS turned off). Three days in a row. It's like a sign from God or something. He deals in threes, you see.

If we'd been living there, those enormous water problems wouldn't have ballooned like they did. We would have caught them at the trickle stage, right?

So, we moved in all the way on Wednesday. Or rather, we moved everything out of the apartment and into the house. We were up until 3 am on Wednesday night doing all that, you know, vacuuming the apartment before we left so they didn't think we were quite so piggish when they came to clean it up for the next tenant.

Something that took longer than we'd expected was moving the cats. They were very frightened. We only had one cat kennel, so we held the other two in our laps. Well, Bastet rode in my arms, Sobek rode on Stoker's shoulder. He really loved riding in the car. Sobek did, that is. (Stoker likes riding in cars, too.)

Bastet is pretty good at riding in the car with me because she's so well traveled. She's been from Mesa, AZ to Salt Lake, and from Mesa to Nashville. She's also ridden on a plane with us. She's a jet-setter, that cat. A hippo jet-setter (I don't know, something about her screams hippo. She's a hulking creature. Beautiful and hulking). Polly (short for Neopolitan, like the ice cream) rode in the kennel -- she's still quite skittish.

The cats hissed a lot in the house, at first. The previous owners had cats who left behind lots of terrible smells. So I think the cats were waiting to be jumped by enormous tom cats or something. That or I'm right about the devil room and there ARE ghosts in the house. Cats can see ghosts, don't you know?

Anyway, it took us longer than we thought to calm the cats down, and even when we left they weren't calm. When we returned from buying new cat litter, Sobek was burrowed between some pillows on the couch. He was like a kid hiding from thunder (I used to hide from thunder under the velvet throw pillows on my mom's couch, so that's how I can make that comparison). When Sobek saw Stoker, he ran into his arms. It was like a Kleenex commercial or a Cat Fancy sponsored music video for "Reunited." It really tugged at the heart strings.

The cats are doing better, the odd thing is that suddenly they're all sleeping on our bed with us and so I can't move at night, lest I kick a cat off the bed. Bastet has successfully rubbed against every possible object, to claim them, as the supreme cat in the household. I think she worked herself into such a frenzy from marauding about the house, shooting out her scent, that now she has a cat cold. Her little eye was a bit oozy last night, poor thing. I told her to rest today. Get some sleep. Recuperate.

Anyway, moving was the most horrible thing I've had to endure for a long time. I thought the glue-scraping was rough, and it was. I thought the sanding was a burden, and it was (especially the devil room. I NEVER thought we'd get through all that black tar. And it WAS tar. I've had it confirmed by several sources). I thought filling the nail holes with stainable filler was rough, and it was. But moving stands as the number one shitty thing a person has to do in their lifetime.

It could have been worse, I could have been 8 months pregnant with a two year old, two cats and a dog, and it could have been from DC to Miami, or Southern California to Miami, or Miami to Denver. Take your pick. Luckily it was from one side of the circle that is Nashville-Davidson, to the other side.


P.S. The floors look excellent, and who can complain about new appliances? Especially a side-by-side fridge when all you've had your entire adult life has been the top-freezer monstrosities apartment complexes offer. The beasts!

The Devil Room in our House

I've been telling people for about a month that I'd post some pictures of the new house. Here are some:

There are three things to note in this picture. First, the wood paneling. It's gorgeous. It's really thick, heavy paneling. Some would call it knotty pine, though I'm not in the know about lumber, so I have no idea. Knotty pine? Probably. We ripped it out. Second, the enormous hole in the wall. Would you say that's CRT television size? It is. This is the red-neck flat panel TV. The back half of the TV comes out in the bathroom closet. Oh, and the holes in the wall (there's another one by the back door)? Yeah, they were covered by the previous owner's furniture. The first time we saw them was in the final walkthrough. Third, yes, that is BLACK carpet. Lovely, isn't it? You can see Stoker gathering up the pink carpet from the hallway (pink and black carpet. Who comes up with this crap?). We ripped that out too.

There were black and white vinyl tiles underneath the black carpet. Apparently these kind of tiles may have had asbestos in them, a possibility that we were totally unaware of, as you can see from the photograph. Stoker isn't wearing a respirator or anything (but he IS wearing flip flops. They're great for working on the house). I think the little spots in the photo are absestos floating around (these spots don't show up in the other rooms). Or evil spirits. Honestly, it's always been difficult to take pictures in this room, every image shows up with spots in it. We call this room the devil room. It has a thing for being black (so we're going to paint it white. Or yellow. Take that, you devil room!) and gloomy (the paneling really sucks up the light).

Notice that underneath the vinyl tiles, the floor is completely black. We think that was tar. Underneath the tar was the most perfect hardwood floor ever. It was unbelievable. No dents or scratches. It was immaculate once we sanded the tar up (but since then, as Stoker has been rewiring and dropping tools, it has gotten dented). During the sanding stage we wore masks. But I'm sure the damage was already done to our lungs at that point. The problem with the tile and everything was that the day after we closed, we stopped by the house to see how it looked. Stoker thought he'd dig right in and start tearing everything up. We didn't have a plan and we hadn't consulted anyone about how to do things, so we didn't know that it was a good idea to wear a respirator. But you'll be glad to hear that we wore them when we tore down the hideous acoustic ceiling tiles in the devil room.

Here, you can sort of see the floor underneath the tar. It might have been a good idea to use a paint scraper to get the tar up, but at that point, we were so tired from scraping the paint and glue up in the OTHER two rooms. I think if we could do it over, we would use the drum sander because it's a tougher sanding machine, or so they say. We went through a lot of sandpaper. The worst part about this was that the tar turned into a dust that settled on our hair and skin. Also, the floor took forever to sand. It was very demoralizing.

So all the pictures have Stoker in them. But I worked too, I promise. We took turns sanding and I was the one thinking about pictures, I guess. This room is almost finished. We've already stained it and coated it with polyurethane. The walls have been stripped and rewired, plus we added a wall to split this room. We made a utility room where the back door is, and where it joins the kitchen. Now we just need to put up the drywall.

ABBA: Stress-buster

It's weird how stress makes you not want to work. At least, it makes me not want to work. It makes me want to listen to ABBA and stare at a blank wall, reminiscing about simpler times. Or it makes me want to vacuum vigorously. Clean like there's no tomorrow, or rather, that tomorrow there will be a panel of judges filing through my house to score my work.

Stress makes it difficult to focus. For several weeks the stress has been gathering. I got a cold sore last week, and then wonder of wonders, Cassi got one. Cassi's my youngest sister. She lives in Omaha. She blamed me for the cold sore, claiming that because I told her over gmail chat that I woke up with a cold sore, I cursed her. It seems impossible, but what do I know? I tell her at 9 am that I have a cold sore, at 5 pm she calls to shout into the phone that SHE has a cold sore.

Remember the Simpson's episode where Burns is in a tank outside the Simpson home, about to get revenge on Homer's mother, and Flight of the Valkries is playing (I think that's the piece)? And Burns is like, "I've waited for this day . . . " and he's wearing a helmet and looking all evil and formidable, and then the song suddenly turns into "Waterloo! I was defeated you won the war!" It's ABBA! It kills me. Smithers is like, "I'm sorry sir, I accidentally taped over your song."

Oh man. It's funny on so many levels. I was just thinking about that, because I'm thinking about ABBA and how great ABBA was, and is. Seriously, Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid can't be outdone. They're right up there in the pantheon of rock gods.

We close on the house today. At 2:30. Remember when I was just a little girl writing about how I was in love with Stoker and I resented him for going to California without me, and then he was asking me to marry him, and now here we are, buying a house in Nashville, Tennessee? NASHVILLE! How does that happen? I was in SALT LAKE. Now I'm in TENNESSEE.

That's some crazy shit, that's all. I'm probably the only one who gets it. Well, I'll take some pictures of the house with my disposable camera, then I'll develop the pictures. Then I'll send you copies. I'm technologically backwards. I don't know how to post with pictures. Everyone else has their digital SLR. I have my camera, which is constructed of paper.

I Really AM Thrilled about the House in Nashville

I've been swamped at work. One of my (lazy-ass) coworkers left the company and I inherited one of his projects. Needless to say he had only done a small fraction of it. I was also in the midst of two other projects and so now I feel like I'm treading water, trying to get through them but going nowhere.

We close on the house on Friday. Thrilling. No, really, I'm thrilled. But a part of me just really wants to retreat to Utah. I blame the recent developments in my allergies on Nashville, and yesterday I found out that my allergist is charging ME for the allergy shots (immunotherapy) that I was doing. It's very shady. After the allergy test when they said I should do the shots, they told me my insurance would cover the shots. I didn't really want to do the shots. But, the prospect of perhaps getting over allergies at some point . . . and hell, if the insurance is going to pay for it . . . so I went ahead with it.

Do you think I would agree to pay for an allergy shot once a week? Hell no. Plus I have to drive to the hospital for the shot. I would have done the sublingual drops instead (insurance does NOT cover the drops. But is this really so different from NOT PAYING for the shots? The difference is the lie, so, NO), which I believe I could give to myself, from home. Anyway, I'm going to tell the doctor they can duke it out with my insurance company, since both of them seem to have lied to me.

I didn't have this ear problem in Utah or Arizona, though I HAVE had allergies my entire life. So, does it make sense why I'd want to go back to the mold-free desert? Yes? Good.

To sum up: house - Friday; allergies - racket, lying doctors; Utah - oasis; stray cat - new cat.

Oh yeah, I ran into a starving stray cat. A kitten really. We took her home. Too many animal ghosts haunting me for what I didn't do.

A Few Days Later, the Healing Begins

It's hard to be mad about the house now. I feel like I've gone through a break up. I had my heart set on that house, you know? There was a short period of shock, disbelief, and mourning. But now I'm at the vengeful stage.

"How could the house do that to me?! Who did it think it was? That lying bastard!"

Honestly, now I just count myself lucky that we got out relatively unscathed. I mean, there are scars, of course. Of course there are scars. But at least we found out early on that it wasn't quite what it appeared to be. Before we got in too deep. Before we'd gotten too committed and breaking up would cost twenty thousand in repairs and a structural engineer to vouch for it's soundness. You know what I mean?

So, I'm moving on. And I think anyone who'd take that house would have to be a blind idiot. If they're smart, their love affair will be short-lived. Just long enough to figure out what lurks below the surface, in the crawl space (might I say it?). No backbone. You know. Nothing there. No integrity.

Integrity and backbone. Two essentials for a good relationship. With a house or a human.

And Then The Mother Raccoon Shreds the Insulation, Making a Nest for Her Babies . . .

I really think a family of raccoons lived in the house at some point. We almost bought it. We came this close to buying it. Then we had it inspected yesterday and we were lucky enough to get a thorough and honest inspector who charged a fortune, but can you really complain when he saves you from purchasing a former raccoon's nest? Do raccoons live in nests? Is it only rats who live in nests?

I know it was raccoons by the names of Angel and Sheila because those were the names written in the circuit breaker. They also seem to have operated a barber shop somewhere in the house. I imagine it was in the room with the black disco ceiling fan. Though it could have also been in the little room next to the closet and the master bathroom. I had thought there used to be a vanity in there. But now that I've put more of my deductive reasoning powers to work, it's occurred to me that one of the raccoons was a barber and he cut hair in the little room by the master bathroom. No vanity. Just a barber chair and maybe a mirror (both gone now, of course). Of all animals not in the homonoidea superfamily, the raccoon is the only one I can think of who could brandish clippers and a comb.

Angel and Sheila seem to have been fond of jury-rigging important household items like the water heater. They enjoyed storing their treasures in the ventilation ducts for later use, items such as nail files, crayons, and pogs. It was also extremely necessary that every room in the house be cable friendly, thus the six way cable splitter dangling from the house like a fly caught in a spider web.

Angel and Sheila also loved nestling in the insulation in the attic, or when it got too hot up there, down in the crawl space. The crawl space insulation was a little more tricky because first they had to rip it away from the air conditioning ducts. But that was actually convenient, as they could then tear a few holes in the duct and instantly cool the crawl space at the same time. And why have your dryer duct carry dryer heat and lint to the outside world when you could make another perfectly soft nest in the crawl space with all that heated lint by not connecting it to the dryer vent? For the winter of course. When the attic was too crowded.

The crawl space was the perfect spa for two raccoons.

Only raccoons would think a Lowe's emergency jack would really support a structure, when they realized their kitchen was sagging because it didn't have a finished foundation. And that was the biggest mistake of all. That was the real kicker. That's why we won't be buying that house. I could live with all the other crap. Rather, I could fix all that crap. But the sagging kitchen? No way.

To make a very long story short, I guess if you don't take care of your house while you're living in it, when you move out you realize you've been living like an animal. Or you never realize it and simply move on to the next house and destroy that one through neglect, too. It depends on your level of enlightenment. Do you collect crap and store it in the vents like a rat? Do you tear things apart and leave them a mess like a raccoon? Do you feel comfortable and cozy wallowing in your own filth like a pig? Or, are you more like a cat, bathing all the time?

So it's back to the drawing board for me and Stoker. In our defense, the house looked pretty good.

Pictures to come. Maybe. If I feel like it. If I get around to it.

Buying a House and Doing the Triathlon Thing: Hard Things are Fun

You know how you always plan on doing something but you never do it? I've been that way my whole life. I've been planning on going back to college to get a doctorate. I've been planning on finding a teaching job and getting my teaching license. I've been planning on becoming a big adventurer.

I'm finally doing two things that I've been planning on doing for a while. We're buying a house and I'm getting ready for my first triathlon. I know! I know! It's amazing that I'm actually doing something.

For some time now I've been using the excuse that I'm still settling after getting married and moving twice, and yeah, that's why I haven't been getting things done. It's been over two years since I got married and we've been in Nashville for nearly a year and a half. I'm not sure how long it takes to get used to big changes, but I've always been a late bloomer (my favorite book, as a child, was Leo the Late Bloomer. I'm not kidding. I had my mom read it to me over and over again. It was very short).

I have no evidence to back this up, but I think big changes are harder to adapt to the older a person gets. That's been true for me, at least. I think it's because you get more familiar with how shitty life is. Even if you're a very positive person, you have to admit that life is quite crappy. Yes, you DO have to look on the bright side. It's very hard not to ogle the dark side of things.

Anyway, I finally took the bull by the horns and said, basically, to hell with convention* and not having the best gear and not having an easy place to swim, I'm going to be a damn triathlete. A sexy triathlete. I don't know if triathletes are typically considered sexy, but I think fitness is good looking. Fitness and living healthy are the bright side of things. The dark side is not being healthy when you could be healthy. Like when you choose to drink and smoke and live a depressing, harsh life as though you have something to prove about your misery.

That's just my opinion and I've been there before. And in most things I'm not very good at being middle of the road. So if I'm not trying to be healthy, I'm sliding towards the dark side of things. That's the way it works for me and I guess you could call that human nature.

So on Wednesday I found a place to swim. It's kind of a long drive and it's going to cost money, but it's a great program. I found it through the Googles (as the cool kids are saying these days). They swim two to three times a week and there are two coaches. On Wednesday I nearly drowned a few times because I'm so unfit for the pool. I've been running and riding a lot, so I'm pretty good there. Surprisingly enough, running and riding strength don't translate much into swimming strength. I guess that's the beauty of the triathlon.

But it worked out great. The coach already gave me some tips that improved my stroke immensely. The thing for me is always getting my chin out of the water enough to not drown. And you know how it is, when you're worried you're not breathing well and you're running out of breath, the panic makes you breathe harder and instead of focusing on swimming well, you're struggling to calm yourself down and all that.

When I got out of the pool at the end of the session, I could barely lift myself up onto the pool edge. I was so worn out. But it felt awesome.

Buying a house is a different story. It feels great too, but it also feels stressful. A couple of times both Stoker and I were about to snap. I don't know what that means, really. Not that we were both about to go berserk, but that we were about to say, "Hell no. Let's not buy a house." The two of us know that it will be a good thing. All the stuff leading up to the closing is just a gauntlet, to see if you really really want to buy a house.

It's a very hard thing to do. What kills me is that there are all these people who have done it. And there are people who do it at the same time as breaking the law, like with stolen social security numbers and stuff (that's what I've heard, anyway). How the hell do they get through that? They must have no soul.



*I'm not sure what convention is in this case.