I took Julia to the thrift store this morning to see if we could find some pants or lightweight jeans that she would like for her bag, but which would be simpler to sew than the pair of regular denim jeans I had planned on using.
Well, that didn't go as planned.
On the bright side, it's reportedly going to be the coolest bag in the WORLD. So there's that.
I spent all day making Robin's Christmas messenger bag from a pair of pants we got (for that purpose) at the thrift store, and some lining fabric she picked out of my stash. We're all pleased with the results.
Why, yes. I did go cross-eyed sewing those striped pockets to that checked lining. Thanks for asking.
Julia's is going to be made out of a pair of jeans which, I realized while I was working today, is considerably heavier fabric than the khaki-type pants in Robin's. Wish us well.
Just spent an hour at the phone company. I finally got the information I needed for the guy who contacted me a week ago, and we exchanged half a dozen text messages last night (with varying degrees of success), and he even tried to stop by, but it was dark and he was afraid there might be dogs in the cul de sac, so he didn't make it all the way to the door.
We determined that the next thing was for me to go in and sign something, which I did, but he wasn't completely ready for me when I got there. Eventually I signed about eight things (returning each of the various portions of my deposit on the initial application, and then re-paying them for the new one), and he gave me a new work order to post in the window, and photocopied my ID and...well, that's it.
There's really no telling whether his desire to make things right will result in the work actually being done any sooner than if I'd just gone down and put in the application today, but I'm sure he's doing all he can.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that my initial application did in fact get lost in the shuffle because in addition to telling me to go to the employees' entrance and ask for him (rather than waiting in the half-block long line for the public entrance), when I did that, and he came out to help me, he gave me nine little corporate notepads "so you can write down phone numbers."
Anyway. Presumably it's now properly applied for. We'll see when it actually gets installed (the good sign is that, as always, the phone company installers are out in force today, and still working a couple blocks west of the new place, but moving, as the days go by, in that general direction.)
We watched Wall-E today, and figured out which kinds of bags I'll be making for the girls, and that we'll make peanut butter cookies this evening.
Now I'm here to check the mail and check on the house & dog & guinea pig-sitting situation here on our old street, then off to buy peanut butter and stop by the thrift store to get some more jeans for with which to make the girls' messenger bags.
Looks like the garage area (yes, Dad, there is one) is pretty well closed in, structurally speaking, so we're thinking we may be able to put some screen on the wire and then we can keep the front door open without letting the cat all the way out. We all think that would be a good thing.
I texted our meter number to the phone company guy at the start of business today; no response yet, but I did see utility trucks out and about today, so at least they're open for business and whatever has to happen can now proceed to do so.
And, that's about all I have to say, what with it being vacation and all. Not a lot going on.
I keep calling our street a "country lane." Here's what I mean by that:
We're really not out in the country in any sense of the word, but the seven houses on our cul-de-sac (three adjoining across the end of the road, and four adjoining off to one side) are at the end of a single short block with a corn & coffee & squash field on one side and a grassy field with citrus trees on the other side. The only cars that ever drive down it are the five or six that live at the end of it, so the kids (I've seen at least 10, aged from two to eleven) have the run of it most of the time.
That's Julia, honing her newfound bicycle prowess.
Just a quickie, cause it's already past dinner time and there's nothing here for the kids to do while I skim my Facebook feed and toss a quick post up.
Julia had hesitated to go out and play with the neighborhood kids (I estimate 10 or 12 in our seven-house cul de sac), because she has a bike but never learned to ride it without training wheels. So today we took them off and taught her. I knew it would come quickly, because she's good at sports and physical things, so once she had a flat street and some time, it took about half an hour.
Then she made friends with the 9 year old next door, and spent the rest of the day with her.
We made our first batch of cookies this morning - just chocolate chip, nothing complicated - but there were enough to eat a bunch and share a bunch and freeze a bunch, and tomorrow or Monday we'll make another kind.
Kay, time to get going; more tomorrow!
Posting a few photos at last. Christmas, after all the hectic and tiring and overwhelming that led up to it, was lovely. The tree was...well, okay. The girls liked their presents, we sat around and watched A Muppet Christmas Carol and napped and played with the new toys and the cat (and made new toys for the cat) all day. Just like it's supposed to be.
Then we even found a grocery store open in the evening, so there are cookie ingredients for tomorrow and everything we need for dinner & breakfast.
Now we're here to check email and post (and say hi to the new neighbors starting to move in downstairs), and then back home.
Look! Space! Yes, the shelves in the bedroom and the space under the bed are packed solid, but the living space is totally livable. We actually have a table. At which to eat and do puzzles, even if other people are home and wanting to do other things. At the very same time.
...which is have all our stuff (except this here computer, plus a chair and small table) in the new house.
An added benefit to that is that I now know the new place won't get any more crowded with boxes and stuff. It can only improve from here.
We hung some quilts on the wall (provisionally, where there were already hooks) and it made a big difference in the bedroom especially, which had been starkly functional until now, and I don't mean that in a good way.
I'm not feeling very Christmasy, what with all the work we've done and still need to do, but knowing the move itself is behind us is, truly, what I wanted and I got it.
Now I'm back here at the online computer to do my Christmas shopping for the girls. It's not as bad as it sounds, though. I have their stocking gifts all bought and wrapped, but the other gifts I want to give them have online components.
One is a membership to an online computer game they love playing, so I need to find out the terms they offer so I can decide how many months they get, and also find something to print out and wrap up to actually physically give them.
The other is that they'll be home with me most of the next week, so I thought a good gift that I wouldn't have to deal with before Christmas would be to find simple sewing patterns for a purse (for Robin) and a tote bag (for Julia) and let them pick the fabrics from my stash and help me make them.
So I need to find some patterns for them to choose from and, again, something to print out and wrap.
And the final thing is to bake cookies together over the coming week, but I can look up recipes for that in my cookbooks (which finally got moved today), or online when the time comes. I have cookie cutters and some of the specialty ingredients (chocolate chips and sprinkles) so there's something for them to open in connection with that.
Bob's giving the whole Christmas Tree In A Land Without Tree Stands thing some thought, and we'll cobble together whatever he figures out when I get home. I bought some ornaments (Costa Rican grocery stores gather all their Christmas stuff in a 1/4 aisle and mark it 70% off several days before Christmas, it turns out), and we made some, and they can do popcorn strings if we all feel up to it.
So.
Gotta go gooping. (That's googling/shopping, you see.)
Merry Christmas, y'all.
Yesterday I got the call I've been hoping for; or rather, I got what at first appeared to be the call I've been hoping for from the phone company.
The guy asked for me, then said he was the one who had processed my application for a phone line back in July. He went on to say that, the following week, he had been involved in a car accident, and ... well, you can see where that's going. I'm a little skeptical as to how the absence of the person who took my application, entered it into the computer and printed out the work order for me to hang on my house, translates into the application not proceeding, but whatever.
He said he had heard that I went in to request a transfer of the as-yet uninstalled phone line to a new address, and that I was mad about it.
Now, I did request the transfer, and I did tell the guy that the line hadn't been installed, but I wasn't mad. Nobody in my neighborhood had phones installed, and many of them had been waiting longer than I had. Some of them years longer. I only put in the application because it looked like there was some utility work going on in the neighborhood back in July, but I wasn't surprised that it never happened.
Anyway, this guy apparently feels personally beholden to me, and while I did tell him I wasn't upset, I'm certainly not going to discourage him from doing what he can to get our phone hooked up in the new place.
He asked for the exact address and I started to give it to him - with no street names or house numbers, it's really just a description from a known starting point. So I told him, from a particular condo development, it's 50 meters south, 100 meters west, and 50 meters south.
And he said, "That can't be. That's not a paved road."
And he's right.
We determined that I do, in fact, live on an unpaved road, and that he knows exactly where it is. He said he'd just stop by that afternoon and get the information. Talk about personalized service. Or a small country.
Except, the one thing he needs, besides the address, is the number of the electric meter at the new place, not the number of the next door neighbor's meter, which is what I provided to them when I went in to request the transfer on the 10th.
It's not as simple as looking at the meter itself, because there are seven houses on our tiny little cul de sac, and all the meters are installed in a row halfway down our (unpaved) country lane. And our electricity is currently shared with, not the house next door, but the house next door to that.
I have no idea.
Anyway, the landlord said he'd stop by yesterday to show me which is our meter, but he didn't. The neighbor whose house shares a meter with ours (who, by the way, is very nice) says she doesn't get the bills directly, but that the landlord picks them up and either pays them or bills her or something; anyway, she couldn't help.
So now...who knows. I tried calling the landlord back today, but a child answered the phone and said the guy has a new number. And the new number wasn't available.
Anyway, I still think it's a net positive; getting a proactive call from anyone at the phone company shows that things are happening, and they're still installing phones all over the old neighborhood; in fact, they're done with this particular street and a couple of blocks closer to the new place.
So, here's hoping.
Had to come by here on the way to the office this morning to pick up the hand truck that I borrowed from work.
Well, okay, and because it turns out that all of my pants are still here, except for the paint-stained jeans I'd been wearing the entire weekend.
There's still just as much to do here as there was yesterday (except for one [1] carload of sixty gazillion [60Gz] books, that I moved yesterday), but now the kids are away till Christmas Eve (or Day) and work should be very low-key, and the roads are very clear (except for that one ambulance-worthy accident we passed this morning) and hopefully the next few days will be productive without being crazy-making.
I went ahead and got a Christmas tree with the girls last night, which I envisioned as being an extra-special, unexpected Making Christmas Happen thing for them, but in fact we couldn't see the tree in the dark, Robin cried because we were killing it, and Julia fretted that it would fall off the roof of the car and damage things.
Oh well.
But now we have it, and it looks pretty nice in the light of day, and smells good, and that's one more thing partially dealt with. Next up, figuring out how to stand it up and get it water in the Land Without Tree Stands.
Okay, off to work. I did take a few pictures of the wreckage of the old place and the Lovable Insanity that is the new one, so those'll be appearing eventually.
Happy Monday, y'all.
The new house is fine, the night was quiet, the cat and bird and children all seem to have adjusted quickly and with a minimum of difficulty. (The turtle too, I think. Communication is not her long suit.)
We got furniture and stuff and things into a very livable first-draft arrangement last night, and had pizza and A Charlie Brown Christmas and passable showers.
In fact, it was so livable that it makes it hard to see the value in coming back here (where we'll keep a computer hooked up till the last minute) to gather more Boxes O' Stuff to throw onto the currently almost manageable Piles O' Stuff at the new place. The sense of urgency and Must Have At Least The Bare Necessities that got things (like an evening run back for electrical tape and other Must-Haves) done last night is entirely lacking today.
Now I'm just looking at an apartment full of stuff that has to be moved from one place to another, with insufficient boxes and in the knowledge that it's going to be in the way as soon as I do.
Ah well. It does make the new place seem all the nicer, so there's that.
Just jumping in real quick to say we're moving and tired and I'll be offline the rest of the day. Maybe even the rest of the year; no telling yet how long it'll be till they install a phone and then the DSL.
I went over to the hardware store to talk to the transport guys and see if one of them could do our heavy moving later in the day or tomorrow, but the guy who said he could do it, said it had to be RIGHT THEN.
In retrospect, we were not at all ready to do it right then, but we went ahead anyway, and now the furniture part is done. I wouldn't do it like that again, but I'm really glad that the entire rest of the process is under our control and at our pace.
Now I'm going to have some lunch before I turn around and realize it's dinner time.
I stopped by the place on the way to work this morning and there was a little old man with a big long roller who had already painted half the walls by 8:00 a.m.
Bob stopped by on his way home from work just now, and he said all the walls are painted, so the guy will be doing the edging tomorrow.
He was really nice this morning, and I'm sure we can take the girls over to see it, and maybe run a few carloads over in the afternoon, once he's finished a room or two.
I carried a dozen boxes down to the garage while Bob was at work, but I can't really tell yet how it's going to go. There are empty shelves and things, but there's still a lot more to do.
The girls were all excited when I brought them home this afternoon, so I gave them each a suitcase and let them put things into them; that lasted about 15 minutes, but at least they have their part, and can do more of it if they get the urge.
For a family that's fixing to move less than a week before Christmas, we're ticking along pretty calmly here.
I took my commute on ... I think it was Monday ... to get myself from "How on EARTH am I ever going to get the girls presents they'll like and care about for Christmas?" to a simple, realistic and pleasing plan for how to do exactly that.
I shopped for stocking stuffers on my way home from work for the last couple of days, and I'm wrapping them this evening. I've also picked up a couple of immediate essentials for the new house, like an on-demand heater for the shower (most Costa Rican homes, including the one we're moving to, have no centralized hot water) and a pack of compact fluorescent bulbs. For the most part, the things we're going to have to acquire will come afterwards: curtains by me and some extra table/shelf action by Bob are the main ones.
We can't get a tree till after we move, so there's no dealing with that till next week. We've made a bunch of Moravian stars to decorate it with, we can string some popcorn, and I'll buy some lights and red balls. Voila, pretty, homemade tree.
The neighbor who sold us Bob's fridge when he moved here actually wants it back, so we don't have to figure out how to sell that or whether to move it.
I don't see doing a whole lot of packing until this weekend, since it's such a nearby thing and we can take the small stuff over ourselves either before or before and after the furniture goes on Sunday. Not like everything has to be boxed on a deadline for someone else to deal with.
The things I most want to have taken care of, aren't really in my hands. I was worried about scheduling with the girls while I'm off work, so I wrote the email that needed to be written, and now I just need to wait for a response. I'm a little concerned about the painting in the house, but it all sounded really good on Tuesday. Hopefully there's no problem there.
So...I guess I'll just get back to wrapping the stocking stuff and maybe make sure the wine from the other night hasn't gone off.
Came back to add:
I realized after I hit Publish, got the wine, and went back to the wrapping that the reason having a glass of wine while wrapping the gifts felt so right was that, nine years ago about this time, I was wrapping Christmas presents with Mom in my apartment in High Point, and she offered to pour us some wine. I only had a little because the big present we had for everyone that year (which Mom of course didn't yet know) was the news that I was expecting Julia, who was born the following August.
We tried a new restaurant this evening; they've been building it for ages, and we actually tried to go a couple of months ago, but it wasn't open yet.
It was brave of us to try, because this was happening again, and...well, let's just say you wouldn't want to be on the road if that were true.
ANYway, the food was good (mine was; apparently Bob's was VERY VERY VERY VERY good) and the ambiance was very nice, and Self Conscious Waiter was self conscious, but also very attentive and friendly.
Then we stopped by the house (which showed no signs of paint or pre-paint processes, but one must have faith, mustn't one?) and talked about where to put things and who gets what room and stuff.
And now we're home and Bob made dark chocolate pudding and we're waiting for that to chill while I talk myself into making the baked treat I had planned to make for my boss's birthday tomorrow, even though I'm all full and ready to just sit on the couch and watch Friends.
Well, the phone company is definitely making strides in and about this neighborhood - I passed sub-contracted phone company minion dudes working on the lines when I left for work this morning, and again when I got back home. I nearly had to forgo posting this evening because the Internet went out early today (Bob was offline by the time I got to work this morning), and only just came back on about half an hour ago.
Again, very glad we requested the phone line transfer before this started happening, and also glad it's going on, since the new house is less than a mile from the old one, and maybe all this Progress will trickle down to that neighborhood and result in us actually having a phone sometime soon.
And on that topic, we're now the proud renters of The Other House. The contract the owner prepared was entirely reasonable; I was taken aback to see "three years" in the first clause, but it turns out (which Bob actually knew and told me) that rental contracts are three years by law. But the owner added some more text that effectively made three years the maximum period (I'm sure it could be renewed if everyone were happy three years down the road), and he added a clause a the bottom that actually makes seven months the minimum, by stating that we would lose our (one-month) deposit if we move out within the first seven months. That's entirely reasonable.
So we signed the contract and paid the first month, AND, it turns out the owner is still going to paint. He said he has 10 houses he rents out, and the guy who works for him just finished painting one, and is ready to do ours starting tomorrow. So we told him "white" and let him know that we'd like to take some carloads over on Saturday and move the major stuff on Sunday, and we think that's all going to work out just fine.
We also ascertained that eight of his ten houses have three bedrooms, and asked him to let us know if a 3BR should become available at any point.
We also gave him a papaya, which seemed to go over well.
The dead dog was picked up today, the landlady found a half-buried cutoff valve that isolates the burst pipe so Bob has cold water at least, and the utility company (or minions thereof) were on the street today apparently moving toward installing the remaining phone lines in the neighborhood. This last makes me glad we already went down to transfer the phone line application to the new house, because if they showed up and installed here, then who knows what would be involved in getting it moved from here to a new location, plus there would be a transfer fee and stuff. The neighbor at the new house said that when she applied for a line (no idea how long ago), they came along and installed it really quickly. We're hoping that remains the case, since we'll be without Internet till the phone is installed, and then another week or so after the phone is in for them to send the DSL tech out. But it sounds promising enough that we're probably not going to transfer the cable over. I think. We sign the contract and actually take possession tomorrow, so we'll find out then if the owner painted at all. If he did, it all happened on Sunday (or today), so probably not.
Bob walked up to the corner store this afternoon and 10 minutes later came back in calling for me. A black lab-type dog that had been trotting down the street when he walked up the block was now lying in the road having fits.
Another neighbor came out and together we made the gesture of trying to give the dog the universally accepted home remedy for poisoned pets, which is milk and lemon juice, but the poor thing was way beyond actually ingesting anything, and only lasted another minute or two. We pulled it onto the sidewalk, but didn't really know what else to do.
The first thing I did was to go check on my friend's dogs, since I'm house/dog sitting for them this weekend. They were freaked out, having seen everything that had just happened, but they clearly hadn't been fed anything themselves. I checked the yard carefully for any tossed-in food, but didn't find any.
I suspect the classic milk & lemon juice antidote has some basis in reality for some poisons, but I seriously doubt it would have any effect against a substance that can kill a dog in five minutes flat. Nevertheless, in the name of doing something, I went ahead and squeezed a lemon into the dogs' dishes and poured in some milk, just in case whoever it was came along and tossed some more bait over the wall. I also explained to them that they should not eat anything unusual they might find lying around.
Another neighbor came out and asked what had happened, which I explained. She called the police or the municipality or whoever you're meant to call, but today is Sunday and I don't know how responsive they would be even during regular business hours. The dog is still lying there.
And THEN we were back in here, making Moravian stars and watching each other play the Harry Potter game, when Robin said she smelled something. I didn't notice it at first, and then it hit me. A burning insulation/plastic/electrical kind of smell. We checked everything in the house and didn't find anything.
The smell was stronger out in the garage, but fainter outside in the street. Eventually we concluded that the wind must have gusted the smell in, and the garage walls were keeping it from dissipating.
So we all went back to our various occupations for six minutes, until a pipe burst on the hot water tank in the utility space off the garage.
We got the water turned off out at the street, texted the landlady, and filled Bob's water bottle and...well, that's all really.
See, this could never happen at the new place, because it doesn't have hot water.
Update:
9:35 p.m. -- Bob and I are talking about plumbing and insulation and building codes and what kinds of fixing up the new place might require, when we hear a muffled crash from outside.
9:40 p.m. -- I'm on a kitchen stool, pulling down the still-drooping bits of plaster that didn't just fall off the porch ceiling.
Dear Universe:
We get it, we get it. We're going. How about you leave the place in decent enough shape that L. can re-rent it without feeling she needs to withhold part of our deposit, eh?
So, we had a brush with an alternate house today; the landlady said the house two doors down was for rent, and she thought it had three bedrooms. I went and talked to the lady, but it turns out it's only 2BR, is really a bit out of our price range (ie, $100/month more than the place we've taken), and is in fact already promised to someone else. So we'll not mourn that one, except to briefly acknowledge that it would have been exponentially more lovely than where we're going. But for $100/month, we'll get along without the exponential loveliness.
The girls are still campaigning for moving sooner rather than later, and I'm leaning that way myself; it will make for a big push over the next week and weekend, but it means that my week off between Christmas and New Year's can be used for settling in and resting up, rather than doing the actual move and then trying to recover while back at work.
Bob stopped by the place on his way home from work this afternoon and there was no sign of any painting or anything. Frankly I'm a little surprised, since the owner really didn't seem to want us to do it ourselves. But if he doesn't do it by the time we sign the contract on Tuesday, I'll tell him that we plan to. There's no point moving into the place and then bemoaning the smudgy, poorly painted, hospital walls.
The children and their local grandparents have now seen and approved the house, and apparently the landlady got our letter giving notice on the second apartment last night, because there's a For Rent sign on our gate now. My neighbor down the street knows a community group that might want to buy our soon-to-be-spare refrigerator, and the phone company work order has been posted at the new place. I've spoken with the next door neighbor a few times now, and she seems very nice. There are seven houses on the cul-de-sac and at least three of them have very young children. Pamela, next door, is five and an only child. Michael, across the way, didn't want to eat his hot dog the day we were seeing the house for the first time, and was threatened with having his kiddie slide taken apart - apparently for the second time that day. Two children of maybe four and six were at the next house after Pamela's when we stopped by today. No sign yet of older kids.
The owner was ... he seems nice enough, but I think communicating with him is going to be a learned skill. When we first saw the house, I asked if it would be okay with him if we painted, and his response was, "What do you mean?"
...How do you clarify "is it okay if we paint the walls?"
When I went back to pay the deposit, he asked again, "What were you trying to say about painting it?" So I said we meant that we would buy the paint, and we would do the work, and then he wanted to know what color. I said white or cream, and he wanted to know what I meant by "cream". After a while I think he accepted that by "cream," I didn't in fact mean "vermilion with chartreuse tiger stripes" and, as I say, he seemed to indicate that he would do the painting. There was (needless to say) some conversation about which walls we might be talking about (Umm. The ones with all the fingerprints on them from the previous tenants? IOW, all of them?) I can only assume that whatever he does will be this weekend, since we start renting as of the 15th.
So, the question of the hour is, when do we move? We can either do it over next weekend and early Christmas week, and have Christmas there, or we can hold out and have Christmas here (which would mean putting up a tree, like, NOW), and move the week between Christmas and New Year's.
The girls are in complete agreement that WE SHOULD MOVE NOW. TODAY. WHEN CAN WE GO SEE IT AGAIN??? And Bob and I are shuffling through the factors to decide what'll actually happen.
I may yet do the whole SketchUp thing like I did before the last move, but it's complicated this time because my Real Computer is running Linux and, as such, needs an intermediary program set up before I can install SketchUp.
In any case, the house is about 520 square feet, with no light shafts or hallways and not including the laundry room, whereas the apartments are 410, including light shafts, hallways and laundry room. The smaller of the two bedrooms in the new house is about the same size as the larger of the two where we are now.
So all our stuff will fit. And I like that the living room is contiguous with the kitchen, so whoever's cooking doesn't have to go off behind closed doors (or around corners or whatever) while they do it.
It is, as I said the other day, not very attractive, but the owner seemed to indicate that he would be painting it, and once we put our things in it and choose curtains and stuff, hopefully it'll be nice.
We went down today to transfer our existing application for a phone line (which we put in for last July, but there are no lines available in this neighborhood) over to the new place, and while we won't know till it happens, it sounds like that may work out okay. And when it does, we can have DSL instead of cable Internet, and thereby not have to pay for TV we're not watching. So that'll be nice.
Here's what it looks like right now. We believe that if the owner paints it, it'll be off-white as opposed to another coat of the oh-so-popular Industrial Hospital it's currently sporting.
We went ahead and paid the deposit on the house, then stopped over to measure the rooms and take pictures, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow for those because for now it's pizza, beer and Torchwood.
We went to see another house today. I have resoundingly mixed feelings about it. It's on the right end of our budget range, almost as close to the school as our current place, and small but large enough to be workable. In short, it'll do and we're taking it.
So we spent most of the day playing the Harry Potter game (it took the three of us most of the day to get Julia's Harry past the Flipendo level) and drawing temporary tattoos on each other. (Well, okay. Mostly it was me drawing them on everyone. Robin got a butterfly and Julia got a parrot and I got a purple gecko.)
And then while I was cooking dinner they started calling from the living room, but I was all cooking eggs and not about to leave them to go look at the computer, and when I finally did, it turned out something had...happened.
The entire display was rotated 90º clockwise. And the children were still playing the game.
I put an end to that, took them in the kitchen and fed them dinner, then came back out to see what there was to see. I posted a jokey little complaint on Facebook, then restarted the computer to fix the problem.
Except.
It didn't fix. Windows came up and said, "Hey, your resolution and color depth are pretty low, how's 'bout I fix that for ya?" And I said sure, and it did. But apparently Windows had no issue with the whole having-to-crane-your-neck-90º-to-the-right-in-order-to-get-your-hand-eye-coordination-to-work-enough-to-put-the-mouse-where-you-want-it thing.
I tried a few things, complained on Facebook again, and eventually went for help. Bob came up and tried a few things, then helped me turn the monitor on its side (which looked weirder than you'd think - I took a picture but I don't feel like downloading it right now) and then he went downstairs to Google it for me.
Then he came back upstairs and fixed it, yay, the end.
The Grinch wouldn't play, so we watched The Gods Must Be Crazy II instead. Julia and I fell asleep, but we'd already seen it. I like the badger part.
I made Robin's cake today; mocha cake with extra dark cocoa powder. Very rich and very yummy. I'm surprised it didn't keep us all awake for the movie, but then we only had small pieces.
Robin got some really nice presents from my family; Lisa faked us out with a Harry Potter computer game that we all started enthusing about, then she opened the box and there was a shirt and some Mad Libs inside. And then under the shirt, there was the game after all. So now we all know what we'll be doing tomorrow.
Pac-xon is an addictive little game. Way better than traditional Pacman.
It's all the girls' fault, naturally. I said it looked like fun, and they invited me to play, and there's this "Try Again" button that works in a non-standard game restarting way (it restarts the game, but keeps you at whatever level you were on), so they convinced me that I kept getting additional lives.
...there is no news.
We drove around town for a while this evening and didn't see any For Rent signs. Guess we'll try again in a few days; in the meantime, the Doctor is about to regenerate and I want to see how he comes out, and also how long it takes for him to mention that the new teeth feel weird.
Eleven years ago today, I had lunch with my Mom, and we bought a hairbrush.
We were waiting around to see if I was in labor, you see, and it turns out I was. I'd just had a prenatal appointment and the doctor, knowing I lived an hour and a half away by bus, suggested we not go home just yet.
So we had a (light) lunch at the Hotel Don Carlos, and bought a baby hairbrush at Mas X Menos (I can't recall that we ever once used it, but I'm sure the girls appropriated it for their stuffed animals eventually) and then went back to the clinic and were admitted. Well, I was. And Mom got to stay right up until I went into the delivery room. She brushed my hair for me.
Alex and I picked out the name "Robin" while waiting for the second checkup, if I recall correctly. I was wearing an enormous shirt with a very large paisley pattern. It was nicer than it sounds.
She was born in the late afternoon, and we stayed the night. I remember trying to get her out of the plastic bassinet beside the bed in the middle of the night. I couldn't reach it that well. I'm glad I didn't drop her.
We took her home the next morning, about an hour or so before Dad showed up at the hospital, having moved heaven, earth and office schedules to get an earlier flight.
We scandalized the neighbors (who told my mother in law on me) by taking the baby out of the house when she was just a couple of days old. Broke the quarantine, don't you know. "Quarantine" being derived from the same root as "cuarenta", meaning 40. That's the number of days you're traditionally supposed to be paranoid about the baby and avoid exposing it to...well, pretty much anything if I recall correctly. But I needed nursing bras and wasn't about to leave the baby behind when she didn't have any sort of eating schedule worked out yet.
She turned out okay, though. I don't think we ruined her.
The post on the day she's actually here to celebrate with us will probably be less about me and more about her, but she's with her dad today so I get to reminisce instead.
Today is rent day and, as such, the only opportunity to give notice on one or both of the apartments until next rent day.
We went to see a house that was available on Thursday, and at the time we weren't very impressed with it. I described it as "adequate", and we let the owner know we were going to keep looking around.
Last night we talked over the options and decided that, while it really isn't The One True House, it would in fact do nicely as a transition from two apartments to all living together, en route to all living together in a more pleasant space and hopefully somewhere that the girls can each have their own rooms.
Except, when I called the owner this morning to see if it was still available, it wasn't.
Fortunately, Bob measured the rooms and some of the furniture this morning and we determined that we can fit everything into one of these two apartments. It'll be tight, but we're ready to both A) All live in the same place and B) Spend a lot less on rent each month.
And that way when we do find something, we won't be paying for three places for the first month.
So, that's the update on that.
And now for something completely different:
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