There isn’t much going on around here right now. I don’t know my exact start date for the new job, which is a whole boring story about fiscal years and new budgets and new projects, blah blah blah, and trust me, you don’t want to hear about it. Point is, it’ll probably be August before I start, which is fine with me.

Since I have some time before the job starts, and I’m sort of obsessed with the idea of getting our house ready to sell, I’m going to start painting the kitchen next week. I’m doing it in phases so it doesn’t seem so overwhelming. Next week, I’m just doing the cabinets. I’m going to leave the walls alone for now, I’ll do them when my parents are visiting next month.

Next week is also the first week of summer vacation for the public schools here, and there are a couple of girls in the neighborhood who’ve been very eager to baby-sit. They’re going to alternate days and come over to keep Cate busy so I can get some work done. She gets in this mode where she wants to be held all the time and screams if I set her down, so having an extra set of hands will be very helpful.

Btw, if anyone has tips for a simple way to paint kitchen cabinets, please let me know. I’m planning to take all the cabinet doors off (since I’m replacing all of the hinges and knobs anyway) and bring them outside so I can work on them on the deck, and keep at least some of the fumes out of the house. The guy at Home Depot said that all I need to do is wash the cabinets to get any grease off of them, then prime and paint. It sounds way too easy, I was sure I was going to have to strip the stain off of them first. Any other helpful hints out there?

For the record, we aren’t still 100% on the move to North Carolina yet. We need to take a trip out there to check out the area and make sure that it’s really where we want to be. And it’s weird, I keep thinking about all of the things I was planning to do with Cate in Seattle when she got older (the zoo, Pacific Science Center, various outdoor music festivals) that we won’t be able to do if we move, and that makes me a little sad. Which is not to say that the Raleigh-Durham area doesn’t have its share of that kind of stuff, I just don’t know enough about what’s there.

But, we can sell our house next May with no pre-payment penalties on our mortgage, so I want the house to be ready to put on the market by February. Even if all we do is move to a different suburb of Seattle, I’ll be ok with that. I’ve just had my fill of this whole “country life” crap and I’m ready for civilization.

And yeah, ok, yesterday when I took Cate for our daily walk, we got to stop and pet a couple of horses, and that was very cool, and I realize that I won’t have that after we move. But it seems like a very small sacrifice compared to all of the things I hate about living here.