Category Archives: House Stuff

got stress?

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I’m not sure what’s going on with me lately, I just have this general feeling of anxiety that I can’t seem to shake. I think it’s because there’s a lot of stuff happening that’s in a weird transition phase, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. For example:

* My job will be starting sometime in the near future. I’m still not sure of my exact start date, which is annoying, but I’m more worried about the fact that I’ve been out of the work force for almost a year(!), and oh man, what if I’ve forgotten every blessed thing I ever knew about technology in the meantime?

* Cate will be starting daycare when I start working again. I found a wonderful woman who has an in-home daycare just a couple of miles from my house. I instantly clicked with her and just felt very comfortable with the idea of Cate staying with her, and her references were outstanding. But I also worry because Cate is at the peak of this separation anxiety phase, and I’m concerned about how hard it’s going to be when I have to leave her there. (And I mean that for all 3 of us – Cate, me and Patsy the daycare lady.)

* We’re actively working on getting our house ready to sell next year, with no real idea of where we’re going after that. I like to plan things in advance (Dave would say that I plan compulsively), so the fact that we have no Step B to follow our Step A is really stressing me out. We most likely won’t be staying in Washington, which makes me sad because I’m going to really miss my friends here, and I’m worried about how hard it’ll be to find a new group of friends wherever we go. Obviously, if we end up in North Carolina, I have a built-in support system already there, but it’s not the only possibility on the roster, and I’m a little unsure of how I feel about the other options.

So. There’s that. If you’re wondering why I’m not blogging as much lately, it’s because it takes away from my precious hand-wringing time. I’d like to start drinking again, but then I get all jittery about carrying Cate (especially up and down the stairs), so I don’t think that’s a very good solution. Rats.

if you need me, I'll be watching the Style network

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Hey look, another video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkY78_c7Ow

This one shows Cate’s backwards-crawling technique. And you get to hear her little rattle that makes noise every time you touch it, which I haaaate. Sometimes it’ll start up when no one is touching it at all, which makes me think it needs an exorcism. Creepy.

I mostly film these for the grandparents, but if any of you are interested, you can go here and see two more videos that I made the same day.

This is totally random and has nothing to do with anything, but have any of you ever seen the show “Clean House” on the Style Network? It’s been on for a few years, but I’ve only recently discovered it, and I’m hooked. I think part of it is Niecy Nash (from Reno 911), who I think is hilarious. But I also have this obsession with seeing the insides of people’s houses – that’s why I always look at real estate websites, regardless of whether or not I’m actually thinking about moving. In the case of the websites, I get ideas for decorating my house. With “Clean House,” though, it makes me feel better about how messy my own house is. And it’s fun to feel superior to people who are obviously insane for the amount of crap that they collect. (Who needs 150 sets of salt & pepper shakers? WHO?!?!!)

That show has also gotten me thinking about all of the excess clutter in our house, and I’m suddenly feeling very motivated to have a yard sale and get rid of a lot of our junk. I hope to be able to do that as soon as we get our driveway fixed later this month. Even though we aren’t 100% sure where we’re moving next year, we know we’re definitely selling this house, so it needs to be… well, a lot emptier than it is now. My understanding is that the emptier it is, the bigger it will look, and the easier it’ll be to sell. I hope. Because man, y’all have no idea how ready I am to be out of the boonies.

things that are making me angry right now

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1. The auto-scooping litter box in my office (a whole other room, people!) got stuck and started making a horrible screeching noise at 4:30 in the morning, forcing me to get out of bed and go fix it.

2. After fixing it, and doing the requisite trip to the bathroom, I lay in bed for over an hour, unable to fall asleep again.

3. I am now cleaning my house, because I cannot sleep and I cannot think of anything better to do.

This does not bode well for a happy day.

things noticed on our daily walks

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* There are a ton of rabbits here. I don’t know if it’s an unusual amount or not, because last summer I didn’t go walking in the evening nearly as often as I do now. But every night we seem to run into at least a couple of little brown bunny rabbits with their little white cottontail butts, and they are just the cutest thing ever. I’m sure I would find them a lot less cute if I had a vegetable garden, but since our yard is just one big weed-fest, I don’t mind them at all. I just hope the mama bunnies keep their babies out of our yard, so the cats don’t get them.

* We also have a ton of slugs, which never cease to gross me out.

* One of our neighbors apparently owns a helicopter. I guess it’s a hobby, and he certainly has the acreage to store it. It’s just… huh. I’ve lived here for two and a half years. How did I never notice that before?

* If there’s a cow with no udders, that’d be a bull, right? Even though it doesn’t have horns either? There are two of them in a field right near our house, and anytime we pass farm animals, I always do the “Hey Catie, look at the (fill in the name of appropriate farm animal).” But I have no idea what to call those things. I always say cows, even though I’m pretty sure it’s the wrong name.

* Another night we walked past a field of horses, where there were like four horses in one pasture, and one horse in a separate fenced-off area (all on the same farm). I thought that was weird, but whatever. Then I realized that the one horse that had been separated from the others was… um… aroused. To put it mildly. I’m pretty sure the other horses were girls, so I guess I understand why the (very clearly) boy horse was separated from them. But I went from doing my usual “Hey Catie, look at the horsies,” to “Oh dear god, run away! Don’t look at the horsies! Eyes straight ahead, missy!!!” I know she’s way too young to understand, I just don’t want to put those kind of scary images in her subconscience or anything.

* A couple of nights ago, we ran into a kid who was clearly the opposite of the firecracker punks. We have a lot of gravel roads in our neighborhood, so it’s pretty ideal for those all-terrain vehicles. I heard this kid’s four-wheeler about five minutes before I saw him because it was so loud. When he saw us, he stopped, turned off the ignition, and walked his four-wheeler past us. Wow. How polite is that? Cate was right on the verge of dozing off in the backpack carrier, so as he passed us, I thanked him for not startling her. He kind of did the “aw, shucks” nod and kept going. It’s nice to know there are some teenagers in the world whose mamas brought them up right.

* Last night we passed one of our neighbors, who warned me that she had just passed a coyote, and her description of its location was right across the street from our driveway. Great! I went into hyper-mommy protective mode, holding onto Cate’s legs in the Baby Bjorn (no nipping at my baby’s toes, thank you), looking suspiciously at every shrub and hedge along the way, and getting mentally prepared to scream, yell and possibly kick the coyote if it came toward us. I don’t know how bold the coyotes are around here, but I’ve heard stories of them being totally unafraid of people, so I was trying to psych myself up for anything. I also wanted to get home as fast as possible to make sure all of our kitties were inside so they wouldn’t end up a coyote snack. We made it home and never saw the coyote, although I did hear some of the neighbors’ dogs going berserk (barking like crazy), so I think I know which direction he went. Add that to the list of reasons I want to move.

home improvement time again

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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.

step one of a major transition

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So, remember how I said that Dave and I decided we didn’t want to move to the Bay area? And that we were kicking around some other ideas?

Well, we started doing some research on Dave’s employer, and it turns out that they have lots of satellite offices all over the US. For a while, we were thinking about Colorado: it’s a nice state, a bit closer to our families, cost of living is cheaper, yadda yadda.

Then Dave found out that there’s an office in Durham, North Carolina. When Dave told me that, I started jumping up & down saying, “Can we move there? Can we? Can we? Huh? Pleeeeease? Can we???”

The ironic part, of course, is that for years I swore up and down and all around that I would never live in the South again. Ever. I hate the heat, I hate the bugs, and I hate the racism/sexism/homophobia. I’ve now moved around enough to realize that insects and discrimination are everywhere. And the heat in North Carolina isn’t as bad as Mississippi. At least everywhere is air-conditioned there, which is way more than I can say for Washington.

I guess the explanation for my total change of heart is that – surprise, surprise! – it’s actually true what people say about how having kids totally changes your priorities. The idea of a simple two-hour flight to see either my parents or my sister (as opposed to the six or seven hours it currently takes), and being just down the road a bit from my brother in Charlotte suddenly sounds really appealing. There’s even a direct flight from Raleigh to London that’s only 7 1/2 hours, rather than the ten hours it takes now. So Cate would be closer to her grandparents on both sides, which can only be a good thing.

Plus, let’s not forget one of the biggest perks, which is that Cate and e-baby could grow up having regular playdates! How awesome is that?

I was trying not to talk about this at first, mostly for fear of jinxing it, but Dave talked to his boss, who basically said that it was cool for us to move wherever after Dave finishes his current project (read: December). And that’s fine because we apparently can’t sell our house before May 2008 anyway (damn you, AmeriQuest, damn you all to heck!!). Unless we want to fork over several thousand dollars as a “pre-payment penalty” on our mortgage, which, no thanks. But it looks like this could very likely happen next year.

Of course, it also depends on Dave and I taking a trip there to check out the area, and making sure that both of us fall in love with it. Which I don’t think is going to be a problem. Right now I’m totally addicted to looking at houses online, and oh man, the houses there are so pretty. I love the Pacific Northwest, but the houses are seriously dull-looking. And North Carolina real estate is so much cheaper than the Seattle area! We could be debt-free and have a decent savings built up in just a few years. College funds and everything. I can’t even fathom it. Sounds like bliss.

a photo blog

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Behold!

Isn’t it cute how they put those little score marks on the cheesecake to indicate how big one slice should be? I find those hilarious. Two slices then? Yes, please.

I also decided to go ahead and fire up the Dyson for the first time today. And oh my god, y’all:

Is that not the grossest thing you’ve ever seen? I was kind of expecting the cat hair. And I knew that lots of my hair would be in there, since I’m in that fun post-partum hair-falling-out stage. (Lucky me!) I tend to forget that living in the country means that there is always dirt in your house. But that was only the first floor and the stairs – I haven’t even gotten to all the bedrooms yet. I’m terrified.

Catie says: “You people expect me to learn to crawl on that filth? Are you insane?”

The one thing I don’t have a photo for: earlier tonight, the teenager across the street (the one who kitty-sat for us last week) called to let us know that she had just seen a coyote heading up our driveway. I promptly freaked, and ran outside to call the cats inside. I never saw the coyote myself, and all of the cats are present and accounted for, so it all ended well. But that was quite a little moment of panic that I had there.

And it reinforced the thing I’ve been nagging Dave about for ages: I hate the country and I want to move. You know, just in case he didn’t hear me the first ten thousand times I said it.