the world is your acorn

I have a lot of boxes in decent shape for moving. Most are the “small” size of Uhaul box, there are a few “medium” sized ones, plus some odds and ends. In order to obtain these boxes, here is what you have to do:

1. Be the first to email me.
2. Come pick them (all of them) up. I live near Sylvan Park.
3. When you are done with them, pass them on, free of charge.

friedapplepie at gmail

It has been 7 days since we, with the help of some good friends, unloaded our belongings from a Uhaul truck into our new home. Which we own. It’s been a busy 7 days, which is part of the reason I haven’t had a chance to post. Here are some things:

• The Little Red Haired Girl’s mom was here for 6 days. She helped us clean both this place and the old one, figure out where some furniture and pictures would go, unpack a lot of things, do some work in the yard, and buy some things from many different places. She also bought us meals the whole time she was here. It was amazing to have her here, and I’m pretty sure we’d still be swimming in boxes if she hadn’t been here. That said, I was happy last night to finally have the house to ourselves. To be in OUR place, making OUR dinner, setting OUR table, doing OUR dishes. You get the drift. It feels amazing.
• Even though The Little Red Haired Girl took the week off, there has been an emergency situation at the museum and she just went to work. I don’t know how long she’ll be there, but our fabulous plan to grill trout and summer squash in OUR backyard will have to wait another night.
• We bought a new sink, and are getting rid of the stupid double basin thing currently disgracing our kitchen. I know some people prefer them, but I think they are a waste of space. How am I supposed to soak a pan? Or hang a collander off the faucet? Or wash a large platter? Our new sink will be big enough to bathe a toddler in.
• Along the same lines, we bought a garbage disposal. How do people live without one? Now we just need someone to install these things for us.
• We took the afternoon off yesterday to hit Music City Brewer’s Festival. The weather was perfect, the beer was good, and we even ran into some folks we knew. We left after 3 hours, when it was getting really crowded and the crowds were getting really wobbly.
• The dog next door is a barker. We call him Cujo. He is probably actually a she. She spends all day in the backyard, barking at anyone in her line of sight. Which ends up only being us, since all the other neighbors adjacent to that yard have put up privacy fencing. Our neighbor has already expressed her belief that “That’s what dogs do” to us, so we will be in the market for some privacy fencing of our own soon. I feel sad for Cujo, though.
• Our neighbors on the other side are super nice, and I hope to get to know them better.
• We went to Bellevue today to look at furniture at Finders Keepers in the Bellevue Center Mall. That place (the mall, I mean) is so bizarre and depressing. Half the store fronts are deserted, and the place just seems gloomy and deserted. Weird.
• Our new front-loading washing machine is wicked confusing. There are all kinds of buttons, knobs, and dials that need to be adjusted and fiddled with. I have no idea how full I’m allowed to stuff it or how much detergent to use. The manual is even more confusing. And you know I’ve read it.
• I’m going to piddle around and try and be useful for a little while now.

It has been an absolutely crazy few days. We finally got into the new house on Thursday evening, and began painting the interior on Friday morning. We painted frantically until Saturday night (with the help of Everything Guy, The Theater Professor, and others). Sunday was spent cleaning the place top to bottom, then early Monday morning we started loading the Uhaul. The move was surprisingly smooth, and a lot of people turned out to help us either load or unload. In fact we returned the Uhaul by 3 in the afternoon, and had the rest of the day to deal with the unpacked items left in the old place. What with all the painting and cleaning we did not do a very good job packing. Anyway. Everything Guy stayed to help with the packing of odds and ends, until The Little Red Haired Girl’s mom arrived from Virginia.

Now we are close to getting everything out of the old place and having it cleaned, thanks to mom. Stuff is slowly coming out of boxes, and as of last night I got the internet working, thanks to Mischief Man who crawled under the house and installed our cable in the right places for us (Comcast 11, friedApplePie 1).

It’s a boring post, but I wanted to express my appreciation for all the people who helped us in the past few days. Without them we’d still be wallowing in our own filth over in the old crappy apartment. We are damn lucky to have such a generous and caring group of people around us.

All kinds of people came to help us today. Well, three. But it was awesome and helped exponentially. We are on our way back to finish the second coat, and then painting will be done. A day ahead of schedule. Thank god, because packing is about a week behind. If you’re lucky, The Little Red Haired Girl may share her adventures cleaning the hardened, crusty gunk out of the refrigerator with a putty knife this morning. No joke. I think she was gagging the whole time.

Got up early this morning to clean, tape, and paint the new house. While it’s super exciting to have bought the thing, it sure is anti-climactic what with all this painting and packing and moving and whatnot. I’m still excited though. Just exhausted.

Also the cable guy came to “install” our cable, which just meant he went into the crawl space, discovered that cable is on, told me that it would be $50 to move where the cable jack is, and charged my $20. Awesome. Comcast 11, friedApplePie 0.

I’m finally trying to deal with the soggy mess left in the basement after Basement Flood: January 2006. Why did I find a family of snails in the Weber box? Where did they come from? What do they eat?

Jonathan Coulton’s song, Code Monkey, along with this video made for it by Tra5hTalk is tender, somehow.

This is the icon for Nashville’s weather today at Accuweather. At least Weather Channel has the decency to say “Sunny” so we can delude ourselves into believing “going outside” is a reasonable thing to think about doing. Not Accuweather though. Only the cruel, AccuTruth for them.

Every morning I wake up nice and cool, believing that my air conditioner has gotten its shit together and “climate control” is actually within my reach. Then, as it gets warmer outside, the a/c kicks into high gear, battling away as the temperature on the thermostate crawls up, away from the target temperature, one degree at a time. Meanwhile I can see my electric bill doing a similar crawl, one dollar at a time.

With any luck it will really thunderstorm this weekend as predicted, and moving day will be a cool 90 degrees with no rain.

A very cool flash animation -
Animator vs. Animation