the world is your acorn

friedapplepie posted a photo:

seriously, why did my mom send me this? and why was she watching it in the first place?

FYI…

http://beautybff.msn.com/?vid=37fb7780-364e-449c-8554-63b19912e96d&from=en-us_msnhp&GT1=32058

friedapplepie posted a photo:

when we first moved here, the little red haired girl used to go to knitting circles.

friedapplepie posted a photo:

friedapplepie posted a photo:

We’ve been working our asses off trying to get settled. I think partly because it’s a much bigger house than where we moved from, and partly because it’s not been well kept, it’s been a tough go. We keep discovering ridiculous things about it as we live here, and the management company is slow and reluctant to respond. It took about 3 weeks to get a leak in the tub fixed, and the handyman seems to think a slow leak is not a problem. They still haven’t addressed the water pressure problem, and it’s unclear if they will, and the handyman is mad condescending about it.* We have a whole list of other things that we need to get them to do.

Then there’s the stuff that we just have to deal with on our own. There were no blinds/curtains anywhere in the house, so we have to buy those. They didn’t freshen up the paint in the house like they said they would, and there are some pretty gross rooms, including the bathroom. There’s tons of cabinets in the kitchen, but every single one has built-in, non-adjustable shelves so that nothing taller than 5 inches can be stored anywhere. The house is huge, but only has 1 ceiling fan, so we either have to buy standing fans or install ceiling fans ourselves. So far we’ve bought 1 standing fan, but I’m tempted to install some ceiling fans to lower our summer electric bill.

Anyway, there’s a ton of stuff like that. It’s expensive, but also time consuming and physically exhausting going out to buy stuff and installing various items around the house. Luckily, our New Little Buddies came by this weekend and helped us bang a bunch of stuff out, and for the first time we feel a lot more like we live here. It actually seems doable suddenly. There are still a lot of things, like more curtains and towel racks and the baby’s room and painting and all that, but we’re getting there. Last week I was so anxious about not feeling at home in our house that I couldn’t get any school work done. Now we’re about 6 weeks away from baby time, and I need to buckle down on this qualifying paper so it can get done by then, on top of getting ready for an end of June conference presentation and setting up my data site for July.

Trying not to panic.

*I’m not just being spoiled about water pressure, it’s actually really bad. When the washing machine is on, the rest of the house is down to a trickle. On top of which, low water pressure is really inefficient.