Have You Seen The Scissors?

We have officially moved! It is amazing how much stuff we have - we were a bit insane to move it all ourselves. Lesson learned. The sheer quantity of stuff meant the move took two days - and there are still some things left at the old house. (Little things, though, like my plants and Dan's beer brewing stuff.)

The new house is lovely. Actually, it's really a big giant mess with boxes strewn everywhere but we are slowly making it home. And once it is home, it will be lovely! Sadly, the kitties are having to stay in the craft room so they don't get lost amongst the boxes, but fortunately the room is quite large so they aren't suffering much. They are just lonely. I keep hoping that we can let them out soon, but at the pace we are going it will likely be Wednesday or Thursday. Poor kitties.

Both Dan and I are fairly exhausted (and pretty dang bruised, too) even though we had great help during the move. It seems like we aren't making progress with the unpacking, but we are. We are, dammit! We even found all the proper plates and flatware such that we didn't have to eat out today at all! That's the first time in almost a week. We are so freaking tired of fast food - and even restaurant food has lost its luster. (Not that we are big eating out type folks anyway.)

Well, back to the coal mines. Or at least the boxes. I hope to be able to finish the kitchen tomorrow. I only have a couple of more kitchen boxes so it's totally doable! (How did we get so much stuff?)

Insanity

I've officially hit the wall.

Today, we spent the morning packing up some then went over to the new house for the DSL install. Which took a lot longer than it should have. Which meant Dan didn't get to pull the cables for the house networking and speakers. Currently we are back at our (old?) home, packing more. Well, I'm taking a mental health break because this is what our kitchen looked like about thirty minutes ago.

It's kind of insane. Since that picture was taken, I've taken care of the under the sink stuff and the junk drawer while Dan has barreled through our daily use glasses and plates and is now working on my teacups.

I, however, have hit the portion of the program where I am so amazingly overwhelmed that I have to walk away for a bit. At this time, alcohol is usually imbibed. (Fortunately, the booze has not been packed.)

Now that I have distracted myself with blogging, though, I can go once more unto the breach... at least for a couple of boxes. I'm also thinking it is a good time to get the Malibu rum out.

Frustrations & a Birthday

Happy birthday to me! I'm the big 35 today. I feel like I should be all adult-like and whatever by now, but... nope.

Big plans for this day? Well, yes. For my birthday, we got a house.

I think both Dan and I are cycling between exited and overwhelmed. Because OMG, moving! We are doing 'THE BIG MOVE' on Friday, after which we will have officially changed residences, but gah, the work required to move! And not just packing (though that's a joyous kick in the teeth). There are a number of things at the house we want to fix up either before or right after we move in - paint touch-ups, a crack in a cabinet, change out dishwashers (yes, I'm taking my beloved Bosch with me)... Nothing huge, just a ton of little things that will manage to suck up massive amounts of time.

And, here's where the frustration comes in, we have to get all new exterior doorknobs. After closing when we got the keys? Well, "the keys" turned out to be a single key for the front door. And that single key doesn't work on the other two exterior doors. Apparently, the sellers packed the other keys and put them in storage. Nice. And we need those keys to change the cores in the current locks. Well, we don't need them, need them. We could always pay a locksmith to pick the locks to change out the cores - it'll only take about 45 minutes to an hour per lock (and we have two deadbolts and two locking handles across three doors). I'm sure locksmiths are super-cheap when you have them come out for four hours at a time.

Yeah, new exterior door handles.

Also, we did our walkthrough Saturday. The sellers weren't exactly kind moving out but whatever. Touch-up paint will fix that. However in between the walkthrough and closing, the spring on the garage door broke. So we get the keys (sorry, key) and go to the house and the garage door won't work. Fun, huh? Naturally, the garage door is not covered by the home warranty. We went ahead and got it fixed (I seriously feel like our bank account has sprung a leak) and our realtor is seeing if we have any recourse about getting that reimbursed or anything, but honestly, I'm not going to hold my breath.

So yeah, the whole broken garage door, key-not-keys and "hey, look! they banged into the door pretty bad here while they were moving their stuff out!" wasn't the most exciting way to start the new home-owning gig, but whatever. I think once we get our stuff in there and start to get all settled in, we'll forget all of the initial frustrations and just be really pleased at our new place.

To end on a happy note, I will share pictures of the two rooms about which I'm currently most excited.

 

The left picture is the living room which I enjoy greatly. Open floor plan, big windows (on the left wall so not visible in the picture) and (engineered) hardwood floor. The picture on the right is a big empty room. But that big empty room is going to be my room. Okay, okay, I get to share it with the kitties (their jungle gym will be in there) but that is my future crafting room. So excited about that. (Placement-wise, it is through the French doors on the left side of the living room.)

Of course, I'm excited about the kitchen/dining area and Dan's office, too.

 

The kitchen needs brighter lights (which is actually a general rule for me and lights anyway since I tend to go for supernova level of brightness) but I'm excited about it. And I'm really happy for Dan to have an office all to himself and not have to share with my crafting stuff! I'm sure he's pretty pleased, too!

Well, I'm going to go back to being lazy and trying to ignore all the packing we have yet to do. It's my birthday, after all!

SO CLOSE!

You may notice the countdown a couple of posts down. Today is closing! Rather, today was closing! Yes, we have closed! All the paperwork is signed and our downpayment is all in. Now we are just waiting for the lending agent to double check the paperwork and okay the release of funds. Hopefully this will happen soon and we'll have the keys to our new house tonight!

OMG, we just bought a house!

This Is Not July

It has rained every single day since Saturday. Earlier this week we even had a few days with highs in the 70s. Normally, we don't even have lows in the 70s at this time of year. Seriously, what is up? Stop it!

News!

Our closing has been moved up!

We are still going to move the big stuff over the weekend, but now we'll have a few more days to migrate over some smaller items and Dan can run speaker cables and whatever else, so hopefully the "big move" weekend won't be quite as insane.

Yeah, who am I kidding? Moving is always insane!

Cute Kitties are Cute

The kitties are still enjoying our current hoarding of all the boxes we come across. They are going to completely adore the unpacking process. So many empty boxes!

Speaking of packing, I've been doing a handful of boxes every day for the past week or so. Today, though, was a super-productive day. I lost count after I packed up 12 boxes and that all happened before Dan was off work and able to help take care of a some things in the guest bedroom. Once he got involved, at least four more boxes were packed and we even took apart the guest bed!

We've still got a lot of stuff to pack, but most of our books, files, a good portion of our linens and most of the guest bedroom are all packed up. Barely a dent has been made in the kitchen though (I think we've packed one box of kitchen stuff). Hopefully this weekend we'll get to the china and some lesser used stuff. It's really amazing the amount of stuff we've accumulated in the past decade.

Also, the closing countdown I posted earlier might not be accurate anymore. The seller asked if we'd be willing to move closing up! Not sure by how much though. Financial paperwork could be where it needs to be early enough for closing to be a full week ahead of schedule, but the seller's realtor doesn't work on weekend (seriously) so I'm not sure if we've missed the window to make that happen. We shall see! And entertain ourselves during the wait by packing!

Getting Closer

Boxes

Oh my! We are moving at the end of the month! It's kind of hard to believe, but we are definitely getting prepared. We've been collecting boxes to pack in and I've even packed up a handful.

Most of our moving boxes are in the garage, but the few I've gathered from Costco have been hanging out in the kitchen. Which means the kitties are enjoying the influx of boxes to play in.

If moving wasn't such a stressful endeavor and full of unkitty-friendly change, I bet they would enjoy the process just for all the different boxes.

Ear News

Yesterday was Bitty's appointment at the kitty dermatologist. I totally didn't know they had those, but yep, they do. It seems mostly dogs go to dermatology vets, but Bitty still got great treatment. In fact, the mass in her ear that we were worried could be a polyp or deep infection (or worse)? Turned out to be a mass of hardened ear wax! (There was some long, multi-syllable words that the doctor used to say what it was but ultimately it boiled down to hardened ear wax attached to ear ear.)

It took some wax-softening drops and three ear flushes to get it out, but the wax came out leaving a sparkling ear with no ear drum issues. Yay! The doctor showed us the ball o' wax after it was removed and it was HUGE. I mean, I'd think it was big if it came out of a human ear. To have come out of a five-pound kitty's ear? ENORMOUS. There was a small amount of blood on the part of the wax ball, which was what was visible, and I think that made it look non-wax enough that our regular vet was thrown off.

But yes, good news! No polyp, no billowing ear drum, no spreading of last month's tumor. Ear wax!

Of course, the bad news is that Bitty has a bit of a yeast infection in her right ear again. Dr. dermatology man said that was most likely a reaction from some environmental allergen and is why she gets ear infections all the time. So we've got some drops that she'll be on for ever and ever (if they work) to see if we can eliminate the reoccurring infections.

Not the most fun outcome - Bitty certainly doesn't handle ear drops well - but I'd much rather take regular ear dropping over all the bad things the ear wax could have been, so I think it is a good trade off.

I'm a Fraud

Apparently I went on a shopping spree today. Zappos and Sears. Oh, and Dell over the weekend.

Only thing? Yeah, it wasn't me. (My shopping spree was confined to Ikea.) So I got to shred my credit card today. Whoo?

On the plus side, our shredder easily shreds credit cards. (It slices, it dices, it juliennes!) I rarely get to use the CD/credit card feature, so yay?

Also good, Amex is sending me a new card. I won't get it until Wednesday, though. (I guess tomorrow the vet gets the Visa for Bitty's ear appointment.) I do wonder how long I'll get to keep the new card before more fraudulent charges are made.

And totally random: I made a pork vindaloo tonight for dinner.

It was my first time making a vindaloo curry. It was delish! (Five stars out of five from Dan!) I got the recipe out of Curry Cuisine. It's the third or fourth recipe I've done from that book and I've been pleased all around. (Though one recipe made massive quantities more than it said it would. I think their onions are much smaller than what I use so when a recipe calls for six of them... But it was delicious, so I didn't mind the gallon of curry.) Of course, I never follow the recipe exactly, but I still give credit for the nummies to the original source.