More pictures of the new house



Entryway

Foosball coffee table!



Built-in wet bar





Guest bedroom



Master bedroom

And check out this tub!



Pics of the new kitchen

Pics of everything else in the new place to come soon, I promise!

Side note about photos

You probably already know that I'm spending my free time decorating the new house, primarily by hanging things on the walls (to cover the holes in the walls left by the previous tenants), hanging curtains, and getting some new furniture.

I thought I was being pretty clever by getting new things to hang on the walls, to avoid a huge spackling/repainting project; I hung what we already had, of course, and then (to avoid spackling/repainting) I started getting creative.

I hauled out some old posters, got some cheap poster frames, and hung those.

Then I got a couple of vintage liquor posters on ebay, and hung those. (We now have a vintage liquor them in our entryway, which is way cooler and way more French than it sounds.)

Then I decided to print some 8x10s of some of my old travel photos, frame those, and hang those around.

Here is where it gets tricky.

Naturally I started with the road trip, and went from there. I selected some photos from Rome, one from Buenos Aires, and some from my very first trip abroad, to London and Paris, lo these twelve years ago. I don't think I'd looked at those pictures in the better part of a decade.

Naturally, looking at all those pictures has precipitated a massive wave of wanderlust.

Of course, you're thinking that now I really want to pack up and go to Europe, after looking at my pictures of Rome and Paris and London. You're right, partly--I always want to pack up and go to Europe.

Mainly, though, right now I want to pack up and go out west. Utah, Wyoming, and Montana.

Bear with me here.

The greatest pictures I took on the road trip were in Utah, with a close second in Montana. (Wyoming ranked right up there in terms of scenery, but my photos didn't capture it.) I also got some great shots at Badlands National Park, in South Dakota. Looking at those photos makes me want to return, to really explore those places rather than just zooming through with a camera.

This is not the time of year to go to Wyoming and Montana, I know. It doesn't matter, I won't be going there anytime soon. We can't afford it, and we're going to Costa Rica next month. That should scratch the travel itch, at least for a little while.

Still. Look at that photo. How could you not want to go there?

New home update

I was going to post a diatribe about how the DMV is secretly run by Satan-worshipping assholes, but I'm feeling sluggish this morning. So I'll leave that for another day, and instead let you in on what's happening around here.

As you may know, my husband and I recently relocated to a big, twisty Victorian home. For the first time in my life, I'm in a place with a) high ceilings, b) big windows, c) lots of rooms. And room, in general. I suddenly have an extra room to fill with furniture--and that's after we purchased a new sofa, for a total of three sofas.

All that room space means lots of wall space to cover, too. The previous owners had a love for bright color; one room is painted hot pink, one is a kind of bluey lime green, the office is silver with broad purple stripes, the entryway is fire-engine red. (It looks better than it sounds.) But that also means that the holes they left in the walls, from pictures, curtain hardware, etc., can't really be spackled over, since those particular batches of paint are long gone. And that means I have a lot of holes to cover over.

So I'm spending my days figuring out what I can hang, for a minimum of money. I've printed some of the travel photos I've taken over the years, and pulled out some old posters. (Cheap poster frames are tacky, I admit, but I don't have the energy or the money for a custom framing job right now.)

I'll also be furnishing that empty room on the cheap. I've already gotten a rocking chair on craigslist ($35), and we'll need another coffee table and another nightstand. I've repurposed some other furniture into a entertainment center; it's not quite the right color, but I hope some spraypaint will take care of that.

So if any of you have any old furniture, or pictures, you're looking to get rid of, let me know.

Everything's unpacked, that's the good news. I may rearrange a few things, but that's minor. I'm not working as much as I would like, but my new job tells me they would like to give me more shifts in the next couple of weeks. If that's the case, then maybe I can stop looking for another job, and just work there. That's what I'd really like--I love the people and the menu there, and if I could add on the money-making shifts (Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights), I could potentially make enough money to live on there. Keep your fingers crossed.

I have been doing things other than gardening, and thinking about gardening

OK, not really. My life's been pretty routine lately, which is why there hasn't been much of note on this blog. I go to work, work is good, I come home, I eat dinner, I watch a movie or something, I go to bed. Rinse and repeat. I'm ready for spring, but I think I've covered that. I'm hoping to get the cold crops planted outside this weekend; but the temperatures are supposed to drop into the 40s, so maybe that will have to wait.

We had the neighbors over for our first dinner party, which was very nice. Lovely people, and I felt so civilized, eating good food with fellow adults, using matching silverware and wine glasses. I spent all those years in New York building up sets of 12, in hopes of one day doing the kind of entertaining that would require sets of 12: china, red and white wine glasses, dessert wine glasses, champagne flutes, silverware, napkins, napkin rings, ramekins, espresso cups, steak knives, blah blah blah, not to mention the serving bowls and platters and pitchers and candlesticks and whatever to accompany all that. Naturally it all collected dust under my bed in New York, as I did not have the space for such entertaining.

But now! I do! With a table that will seat 12!

So seriously, please invite yourself over for dinner at your earliest convenience. I'll be tickled to use all that stuff, we'll all eat and drink well, and it's not like I have anything else going on these days.

A few updates:

I think the snow has now, finally, all melted.

Still taking the hormone-regulation pills which are supposed to lead to regular ovulation which may one day lead to pregnancy. So far as I can tell, neither regulation nor pregnancy has occurred. But at least I'm not having crippling stomach pains from the pills anymore.

My hubby went in for an invasive but routine medical test yesterday. Everything was fine. (We weren't worried, just one of those things you have to do when you get old. Still, glad everything was fine. I love my hubby.)

We have movement on the debt repayment front! I was able to officially cross two debts off the list this month, and God-willing-and-the-creeks-don't-rise I'll have another crossed off the list by this time next month. We were treading water for so long that even this small movement, with small debts, is very encouraging. I'm allowing myself to now daydream in earnest about the family compound, because maybe one day we'll actually be able to afford something of the sort.

(Granted, my daydreams involve buying a big piece of land and then inviting everyone to come build their own house on it, not buying an expensive Kennedy-esque thing with houses already built.)

I want my friends to come visit me.

That is all.

I have a chipmunk

He's apparently made a little burrow under the snow. Every morning I see him poking his head out of his snow cubbyhole. Right outside the sliding glass doors in the den.

He's super-cute.

Of course, he's probably nesting inside my wall.

And he'll eat up my whole garden this spring.

And yes, there's still a good foot of snow on the ground.

But the good news is that the daytime temperatures are above freezing now, so I'm hoping the rest of that snow is not long for this world.

In the meantime, Mr. Chipmunk is super-cute.

New job! And new furniture

I started the new job yesterday. Unlike the position at MIT, it's actually permanent. So now I have a real live permanent job, with benefits and a salary and everything. It's at a microchip company out in the 'burbs. We had to get a second car (the Prius), but now my commute is 5 miles, since it's in the next 'burb over. It's a big improvement over a 90-minute commute, with walking, and 14-degree temperatures. Everyone at the new job seems very nice.

Also this weekend, my folks were in town. They brought up my grandmother's dining room table. So now we have a dining room table, finally. We can eat like civilized people, and entertain. It's mahogany, seats 10, comes with six mahogany chairs. I also inherited some china and crystal. There's a great furniture consignment shop in town, and this weekend I picked up a mahogany china cabinet (to hold Grandma's china) and an extra prep table for the kitchen, at cut-rate prices. And I got a treadmill (since I won't be walking to and from the train station anymore). It was the weekend of furniture.

Once we get a load of firewood, that will take care of all the most pressing household needs (winter clothes, bookcases, desk, table, Christmas presents, new car, etc.). After the holidays we can concentrate on paying off debt/second-tier stuff, like furniture for the guest room.

We leave for our annual Christmas road trip a week from tomorrow! I can't believe it's so close...

Yardwork

DH and I spent most of the weekend tackling the yard; a formidable task, given that DH blew out his back and had to be medicated to the hilt on Vicodin just to get out of bed. I suspect the lack of exercise since moving, coupled with the stress and heavy lifting of moving, are to blame. I’m hoping to get him out of the house and walking around a bit more in order to alleviate some of the pain.

But we managed to clear the foot and a half of dead leaves out of the front yard, anyway. I left the backyard for next weekend. First was the trip to Lowe’s to purchase a rake, a shovel, a snow shovel, an ax, you know, standard home implements. DH raked the front yard while I picked through all the deadwood in the yard for usable kindling/firewood. We then scrounged an old tarp, loaded all the piles of leaves onto it, one by one, and dragged it to the back corner of the yard and dumped it. The leaf dumps will become compost piles. It was surprisingly physical work. Wouldn’t our parents be proud? Look at us, voluntarily doing yard work.

While dumping leaves, I discovered an old grill, haphazardly covered, by a locked storage shed. (The storage shed houses the landlord’s crap, and we were told in no uncertain terms to leave it alone. “Crap” being the operative word—there are stacks of boards, bricks, flagstones, old buckets, what I suspect was once a volleyball net, and various other detritus scattered around the yard. I’ve been attempting to pull all that stuff behind the storage shed, so I don’t have to look at it all winter.) The grill was in pretty bad shape—the bottom rack was half-rotted out, the casing was pitted with rust, and there was a propane tank hooked up to it, though I have no idea how full it might be. Nevertheless, I immediately thought, “Hey, maybe we could clean this up and use it!”

Until I opened it, to discover 1. A mouse. 2. A mouse nest. 3. Calcified charcoal, housing both a mouse and a mouse nest. I slammed the lid, jumped back, and made DH poke the mouse nest with a stick until the mouse dropped out of the grill and ran away. Where’s a cat when you need one?

Of course, then I was paranoid all the rest of the day, and kept picturing homeless mice running out of the piles of leaves everywhere.

But we have a clear front yard, new fireplace implements, enough scrap wood for at least a couple of good-sized fires, and a newly restocked pantry. So I’ll call that a productive weekend.

The house is clean!

I had yesterday off, so I spent the day giving the house a mega-deep-clean. I scrubbed down the walls, the radiators, the cabinets, the doorknobs and doorframes, cleaned all the windows and windowsills, mopped all the floors, and finished by scouring the backyard for usable kindling (of which there was plenty).

I can't even tell you how disgusting it was--apparently no one ever thought to wash down the walls. There was dark chunky stuff embedded in the paint near the toilets. I refuse to speculate on what that was. I poured out at least twelve buckets of black mop water, swept down at least twenty cobwebs, and went through most of a can of Comet and three sponges. I also rearranged some furniture and hung some pictures (strategically, in some cases, to cover holes/marks on the walls).

Now I'm tired. If my landlord ever decides he's going to try to raise my rent, I'm referring him directly to this post.

But we also have a whole bunch of kindling, in the form of fallen twigs and tree branches. One of the advantages of living in the 'burbs, I guess. This weekend we'll need to rake up the foot and a half of fallen leaves covering the yard, and get a compost pile going.

I can has interwebs?

Pardon my disappearance from the blogosphere—we’ve been busy moving into OUR NEW HOUSE, which until today did not have internet, as we had to wait on the stupid Verizon cable guy to come hook it up. Also I started my new job at MIT. Here are the salient points:


1. The house (which we’re renting) was clearly designed by a retarded person on crack. No offense to the mentally disabled, as I think they’re still smarter than whoever was in charge of constructing this house. The kitchen cabinets and closets were never finished (it’s bare plywood on the inside, and let’s not even discuss the closet doors), the dropped ceilings downstairs are too low, the vent fan over the stove hits at neck height, there are at least two extra doors to the garage that have no reason for existence, and the bathtub was never glazed (it’s ROUGH. Whoever heard of a rough bathtub?). And there’s a window in the shower—with a wooden sash. Which is already half-rotted. Nice work, genius.

Plus, the last tenants apparently never cleaned. The kitchen cabinets are all sticky. Really, really sticky. Ewwwwwwww. No one ever bothered to scrape off the price tags on the light fixtures, there were layers and layers of (uncleaned) contact paper stuck onto the unfinished plywood cabinets, the windowsills are filled with some unidentifiable sticky black gunk, and there was AN OLD USED CONDOM on the top bathroom shelf. Who throws their used condom onto the top shelf of the bathroom instead of, say, in the trash can? AND THEN LEAVES IT THERE?

And there was a dead mouse in the toilet on the day we moved in.

And the curtains are god-awful.

2. However, with a good cleaning, new contact paper, new light fixtures, new curtains and curtain rods, and strategically placed furniture/artwork (to hide the 1973 décor), I shall almost succeed in making the place liveable. If I can get over the trauma of accidentally touching the old used condom.

3. Our conversations are now things like, “What do you think of a big paper lantern to cover up this chandelier?” and “What sort of desks should we get?” But that’s a vast improvement over “Where the *%&$^ is the _____?” (insert common household object here). The decorating/furniture acquisition portion will take a while, but the unpacking part is 75% done at this point. So that’s definite progress.

4. Working at MIT is really cool. I like working in academia a hell of a lot more than working in finance, and it’s MIT, which is cooler than working at, say, a community college. Let me tell you, there is some serious nerditry on this campus. There are industrial-sized vats of liquid nitrogen in the hallways. Some of the labs have armed guards and eye-scan security systems outside. There are literal rocket scientists. There is a department of Planetary Science, in which one of the required classes is Molecular Biogeochemistry. And my MIT ID gets me into the library. Oh yes. You may touch me now.

5. The commute’s a bitch, though. I’m now a slave to the train schedule, which means I have no life outside of work and my house. Especially this time of year—even if I take the early train home, it’s still full dark by the time I hit the train station, which mean a mile-and-a-half walk home through dark suburbs and crunchy leaves and 45-degree wind. DH has been dropping me off at the train station in the morning; soon we will have to work out a system to pick me up at night, as well. The upside is that I don’t have to drive an hour each way on I-95 to get to work, like he does. Once his company moves to Providence, his commute will drop back to 20 minutes (still on I-95, though).

That walk will be nice in the spring and summer, though.

And boy, it’s the ‘burbs. We’re right next door to the country club. But at least there are sidewalks all the way to the train station.

6. My Thanksgiving plans are getting all screwy. I was hoping to go visit my sister in Gulfport, but I’m not sure that will be possible now. Stay tuned.

7. I’m going into New York this weekend to celebrate my birthday. It’s a fairly significant one, and even though I should really be spending my time/money on all things house-related, I can’t talk myself into spending my birthday unpacking and mopping. I’d much rather spend it with my friends.

8. That means my birthday is this weekend. Feel free to send presents.

The end is in sight!

We're moving into our new house on Tuesday, and I start my new job on Wednesday. Stay tuned for pictures and move/job details!

I has a job!

Whew. I was getting worried there.

I'm now working at MIT (yes! MIT!) for 50% more than I was making in San Diego. Take THAT, California. I'll start Monday or Tuesday; I'll report back on details as I get them (how sweet the benefits are, etc.). I plan on obtaining a whole new degree while I'm there, in rocket science, and using that in my ongoing quest to conquer the world.

And I can finally quit interviewing.

We're hoping to finalize the house this weekend, with a lease and various certified checks, and I'm also hoping we can get moved in there next weekend. Fingers crossed!

A place to live, but still no job

We may have just found our new home! That's the good news. The bad news is that I still don't have a job with which to pay our new rent. Still interviewing heavily, moving to the second stage with a couple of places this week. I'm sacrificing small goats to every god I can think of to get some kind of gainful employment. Hopefully someone will realize soon how awesome I am, hurry up and give me a paycheck, and then we can get moved in/settled down and finally put this move behind us. I'm ready to quit living like a refugee.

We'll have the housing details finalized later today, but if all goes well, we will soon be renting an entire house in Canton, MA. That's right, an entire 3 BR/1.5 BA house, with two floors, enclosed garage, woodburning fireplace, and at least a quarter acre of yard, for not much more than we were paying for a crappy 2 BR apartment in San Diego. I'm particularly excited about the yard; we can finally grill, garden, landscape, and let the cats frolic to our heart's content. The decor leaves something to be desired--split level with drop ceilings, and it looks like 1973 crawled inside and died. Complete with fake wood paneling. And it's way back in the 'burbs; it's not nearly as convenient to civilization and the train station as I'd hoped. But hey, it's a house, we can afford it (if I can get a &*$%ing job already), and DH has already been assigned all yardwork/snow shoveling. Plus we can quit hoarding quarters to do our laundry. Free laundry! Woo hoo!

Meanwhile DH is suffering through his first cold since moving back East. This past weekend, we saw our first Boston play, directed by one of my old chums from grad school. The play was great, and it was good (if disorienting) to see him again. I realized exactly how long it's been since I've seen him last, and it triggered a wave of "Jesus, I'm old," plus an onslaught of "Holy crap, what the hell am I doing with my life?" I've got a fairly significant birthday coming up, and while I was happy to see the beginning of this particular decade, I'm not so sure about reaching its midpoint. Therefore I will spend it in New York with good friends, and plan various housewarming/dinner parties.

I just realized--this will be my first ever opportunity to have a housewarming for an actual house. I haven't lived in a house (vs. an apartment) since I moved out of my parents' house, lo these many years ago. Yowza.

You're all invited.