little by little

Saturday was spent working in the carport, loading the flatbed trailer with things to go to the yard, and unloading it out there. ( How can two people have so much crap????? No doubt sixteen years living in the same house  with one person being an obsessive fabric & all things sewing collector, and the other a consumate ‘car guy’ has something to do with it. )
It really began to heat up over the weekend, so the work was slow going. Sunday morning we went back out to the yard and moved things around so that we could load the Corvette onto the flatbed trailer, then we brought it home and loaded it into the enclosed trailer. Thank god for an electric winch ( as it is a really heavy car and not running ) .  This we did in fits and spurts, as it hit 100 degrees on Sunday. Things are now being loaded in around it. 
I am removing more from the inside of the house – trying to make things look more spacious. Yesterday I condensed the shelving in my sewing room down to one unit, so I can take the other one apart and load it up. I need to go through the closets again, and really pare down whats left in there. 
The current thinking is that we will have an appraiser come first of next week.  As soon as we get a number from him, we can actually list the house. 
We both have dentist appointments on the 10th, and it’s looking like Richard for sure will leave around the 12th to make another trip north. He might get a friend of his to go with him, in which case I’ll sit this one out. I’m still not ‘working’ ( don’t know if Sal found another in LA to do the builds for the new show ) . Either way, this would be a fairly quick trip. Two days north, two days at the house, and two days back south. 

Am I there yet?

On a side note, we watched the two – disk series “Elisabeth I” starring Helen Mirren last week and it was wonderful.  And also a little film ( in the spirit of Waking Ned Devine)  we watched called “American Women” was pretty amusing.

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blah, blah, blah……

With the weekend before us, Richard is telling me that the carport will be empty in a few days. Hope so. We filled the dumpster to the brim last night, and it will be emptied today and left for another week.  
I have settled on a white bedding with black trim scheme for our bedroom. And I’ll embroider a couple of red pillows as accents. With the pale yellow walls this should look bright and colorful, despite being predominantly black & white.  I spent the better part of Wednesday shopping for the components ( my best find was a beautiful black DKNY bedskirt at Macy’s that was originally $190 and I walked away with it for $38 !! ) I’ll post pictures when I finish. I can use all of it later, so I don’t feel too weird about spending the money.
It is typically warm here, in the mid 80’s, so as yet it’s not too bad. I am able to keep the house naturally cool at about 76 degrees, without using the a/c. I just can’t work outside mid-day. 
Gretchen and Tom will be going to the beach house next week for a few days. I hope the weather is good for them, as I’ve been watching and it’s been in the upper 60s there or the past few days.

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back to it.

So now that I’m back the work begins. There is still packing / decluttering to do, and the boxes will go into the now empty trailer. Once that’s done I can begin thouroughly cleaning and doing a bit of touch up painting inside. The big chore is starting the stone work covering the patio and across the walkway along the back of the house.  Then some landscaping in the backyard, cleaning out the sheds and carport. Making at least one trip to the dump. Oh, and putting a new fence up along one side of the property (where the neighbors took it down last year). 
The timeline for moving is contingent on selling this house ( we can’t make two house payments once we move and the income situation changes ) and so I need to get it listed asap. If the listing happens by mid May, and takes a month ( hopefully ) to find a buyer, with the average 45 day escrow here, that would put us out of here around the mid to end of July.
I want to run and hide – in Washington. 
With a glut of houses on the market here, I need to do everything possible to make this house stand out from all of the rest. Leaving nothing that needs to be done by future owners. The resale prices are holding in this area, and actually rose a tiny bit in March, but the volume is way down on the number of houses sold.  I’ve seen that a couple of homes that I looked at a month ago are now off the market – at least the signs are gone, and looks like people have moved in. We want to show it to our new neighbors’ friends who might be interested, but even for that I want things to look as good as possible. 
Better get my butt in gear, the clock is ticking.

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connected.

during the trip this time around we will have phone, cable and internet at the house. Yesterday I was able to schedule everything to get hooked up the first two days that we are there. So, in addition to a bank account and P.O. box, most everything is set to have that part of the move seamless.
I’ve lost my packing momentum.  Partly because the trailer is nearly full up. So anything else that gets packed will just get stored in one of the bedrooms until we come back, then it will go into the trailer and wait for the next trip. The only thing now left in the guest room is the bed, and a few items hanging in the closet. I took the floor to ceiling shelves that held a zillion boxes of fabric down yesterday. I will need to go through the house doing a little hole filling and touch up painting when we return. 

This morning as we headed out for a walk I was greeted by a huge chicken atop the fence three doors down.  There is a large extended Equadorian family who bought the house three years ago living there, and I’ve seen a couple chickens in a small pen in the yard a while back. But this really took me by suprise, as we nearly met eye to eye.  It froze there, and Sunny never noticed it. They have a small yappy dog who usually goes apeshit at us, and I’ve always thought that the dog might go after the chickens, given the oppurtunity, but with the size of this chicken maybe the tables are turned, as the dog was no where in sight. 

This afternoon both Richard and I each are having a first appointment at a new dentist. We’ve both had trouble finding a dentist that we’re comfortable with, who takes our lousy insurance. Needless to say, we are both overdue for exams / cleanings and such.  My biggest fear in the world is dentists in general, and having someone poke and prod around in my mouth is terrifying to me. And the thought of having an injection in my mouth nearly sends me over the edge. Even x-rays usually are painful ( I know its because I get so tense ), with those things that always seem way to big for my mouth.  I know it won’t be as bad as I imagine, but there is a part of me that would rather be put into that ‘twilight sleep’ that you hear advertised on the radio. But the other part says that that’s even scarier.  I did have a dentist years ago in El Cajon who would give me vallium to take before I went in, and used nitrous on me while I was there – which made it all bearable. Those days are gone, with the insurance thing. 
Here’s hoping this afternoon goes well.

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more…….

The weekend was spent packing and sorting. This will be the main thing in my life for a while. Yesterday we emptied a 6×6 shed, then dismantled it and loaded the whole thing into the trailer ( one of those rubbermaid ones ). Then, we moved inside to go through and box up two large bookcases ( ceiling height and four foot wide ) , and get them loaded onto the trailer. The house is a disaster, and even though I think I’ll do one room at a time, it doesn’t work that way. All heavy things need to be on the bottom, so I’m going from room to room boxing up this and that.  and of course we’ve needed to rearrange the trailer a couple times already.  Still not sure if the MG midget will be going this next trip. It is really small, so there’s room, but there’s also lots more from the house and shed / carport areas that need to go.  
I’m tired. 
I may end up taking the day off from packing and do some work sewing. 

In the newspaper today, there was an article about Rollerskate Land in Santee. It will close forever on Saturday. Here is a picture that they refrenced that made me smile:   The caption read: “RollerSkateLand in Santee has seen fashions come and go, such as those displayed by a group of skaters in the early 1980s”  I wonder if they picked the skaters because they matched the building?? So – rainbow-y.  Looking closely, I think the guy in the long pants has a marguerita in his left hand – I don’t know if they sold liquor there, but it wouldn’t suprise me.  The liquor laws here are so different than in washington.  At nearly any concert venue you can get hard drinks, not to mention all of the zillion corner liquor shops nearly matching the number of taco shops here. Anyway, it iwll be demolished to make way for new stores – a Henry’s ( now owned by Whole Foods ) or something.

Another thing that I found in the paper was an article on photo-scanning. There are now a few services that will take whole boxes of pictures and scan them and put them onto a DVD.  One site will transfer 1000 photos for $50.  I’ll look into it more, but sounds like a way to keep/share lots of old pics. 

tick, tock, the day is calling……………

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trip recap

So yesterday was spent catching up on life here. I feel so lucky that there wasn’t ‘work’ waiting for me ( well, there is, but it’s stuff that can get done next week).
We went for a walk, and Sunny acted all goofy – happy to be back on one of her usual routes.  All of the laundry done from the trip; got the front yard mowed, edged, and some weeds pulled, and watered everything. Went to the post office, ( it always feels like I’m being punished when they go and retrive the large box of mail, even though they are nice about it ) grocery store and another couple errands. Came home and washed the car and then the dog ( anyone who knows her knows her fondness for the hose-jumping ) – she was especially patient while I washed the car so she got to play in the hose for a while after I bathed her. 

The trip had a different feel this time. The fact that we were actually beginning to move, with another trip to haul more there in just over two weeks was kind of weird. I wasn’t sad when we left, like I usually am, knowing we’ll be back soon. Towing the trailer meant that we travelled at between 60 and 65 mph the whole way. The gas milage sucked, with the trip there getting about 8.5 and towing the empty trailer back here was a mere 10.5 as compared with the usual 16-18 miles per gallon that we usually get with the truck. And Richard became increasingly unhappy with the transmission  –  it doesn’t seem like there is much control over what gear you’re in.  
We arrived on Sunday afternoon, with Gretchen and Tom there already. Justin came out that evening and we had a wonderful dinner ( she cooked ) . They stayed until Tuesday morning, and Justin left early on Wednesday morning. It was great to have time to visit. We spent Wednesday morning dealing with contractors, then we opened an account at a local bank and a P.O. box in Ocean Park. The whole ‘setting up residency’ thing.  We left that afternoon for Seattle, and stayed at Mom’s house.  Thursday we mostly hung out at mom’s, sleeping in. We went to Gretchen’s for dinner that night and were joined there by Ryan. 
Friday we did the financial planner stuff in the morning, then went back that afternoon to finish up some paperwork.  We spent that evening looking at boxes of old slides that Mom dug out of  the closet. These were taken by my grandfather from the fifties through the mid eighties. Family – mostly my aunts, uncles, and mom and dad, but there were a lot of my sisters and I in there too. Lots of pictures of his work – beautiful ( and sometimes really oddly funky – hey, it was in the sixties and seventies ) copper fireplace and range hoods, and some other assorted iron work. It was amazing to look at all of the things he built – I remember looking at pictures in his shop when I was a kid – but of course I didn’t have a clue as to the work that was involved. It got me to thinking about what has become of so many of them – people remodel after twenty or thirty years, and of course some of those things are pretty dated – did they keep them? I would love to know, and be able to see some of them first hand.  Most of the slides ( they are an odd large size ) were taken with the camera that Ethan currently has – the Yashica-mat? – I think.
Saturday we met up with Ryan and went to Crave, where Justin cooked us breakfast ( I had a yummy apple dutch baby ). Then on to see Ryan’s new house -so cute – before going back to his condo to see all that he had done there before he moves this weekend.  Later that afternoon we went to Snohomish to Deb’s house for dinner and had a nice evening catching up with them. 
We left to go back to the beach on Sunday morning, stopping in Illwaco for some fresh crab that we had for dinner that night. I made Richard go for a long beach walk ( as he had not been there yet this trip, and it was a pretty low tide) and the weather was beautiful . To hell with the weather reports in Seattle that said things were flooding all the way there. It was a gorgeous drive the whole way from Des Moines on, to the house. In the high fifties once we were there, even, with clear skies and little wind.
Monday morning we left out of there at around 8:00, with a quick stop at the little Bakery in Nachotta – Bailey’s-  to pick up the best scones that I’ve ever had – and an espresso next door, then it was on the road south.

I had forgotten how lovely the spring is in the northwest. There were daffodills in bloom- huge meadows scattered with them in some places, cherry trees ( I think ) in bloom in white, some pink, and some an incredible orchid color. There were some early blooming rhodedenderons, some camelias blooming and green, newly leafing out trees everywhere.  I’m excited that this will be my home soon.
I did come back here to the wisteria blooming, along with some returning freesia and tulips; and the work that we put into the front yard is paying off – it is greener and lusher than it’s ever been.  Who doesn’t like spring? 

Now I can get busy packing again. We leave on the 14th.  Not sure if a car will go in the trailer this time – maybe just stuff out of the house and the shed & carport area.  I also am going to start on the slate work on the back patio and the walkway under the bedroom windows, to match it with the stuff I did in the front.  A lot to do before this goes on the market in just over a month.

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