My favorite room in the house...so far.

Maybe it's the fireplace, or our new favorite thing, the "roman shade". Or maybe it's the delicious bottle of wine, whatever je ne sais quoi the living room holds, it's my favorite room. We wanted at least one room established so we had a place to rest, and the living room is it. I "finished" the rest of the rooms this morning, but they're no where near as interesting.

Yesterday, we got a clean bill of health from Uncle Gerry!! The importance of this commendation cannot be underappreciated. This man, this systems engineer for a major company here in ol' RVA volunteers his free time, taking new Habitat for Humanity homeowners on "tours" of their new houses, teaching them the basics of each system - the HVAC unit, the furnace, the washer and dryer, all the bathroom components, etc... and has a little pamphlet to leave them when the tour ends. He's great. Totally great. Plus, he's a marathon runner who's battled/ing cancer. Seriously. He's amazing. I can't adore him enough.

So for a housewarming present, he took us on our own little tour of our cute little home, and thoroughly blessed it. Even when yesterday morning, our dryer decided it didn't really want to dry the clothes, it just wanted to spin and get hot, but not do shit. I kept running the cycles, I guess partly from misplaced hope, and partly in disbelief. I don't know the first thing about fixing house stuff. Except maybe cleaning out a clogged sink drain. That's the extent. That's like, knowing how to boil pasta; it equals zilch. When Ben pulled the dryer out from the wall, he noticed the botched surgery job done to the dryer (after a little help from the world wide web, we discovered the problem could be a clogged vent hose, which Gerry later affirmed); the previous tenants? owners? had repurposed a PIROULINE can into a connector for the hose to the dryer and had an extra 6' of hose tangled up going into the wall!!!! It was ghetto NOT fab for about 4 hours yesterday.

Gerry swooped in and rescued our nervous emotions by exclaiming, No big deal! Go to Lowe's, get enough METAL hose to connect to the dryer and run it out the screen door. It's a working temporary solution, but I'll tell you, I'm tempted. I'm tempted to keep our makeshift dryer vent. It's kind of charming in a tenement building kind of way. Fits with the peel and stick laminate. YES!

Ben followed Gerry around for the rest of the tour and told me afterwards, He came alive! He was crawling into the attic, walking all around the basement and the half crawl space, checking everything out, and everytime he came to something new, he'd say, wow! this is great, look at this! At the end of the tour, right as he and Aunt Lynn were about to leave, he told us, You guys couldn't have done better for a first home. You could stay here forever if you wanted to. It's a great house. Lynn even told us on the way out, He keeps saying "It's a wonderful house!" I love it.

I love it because it's been an agony the past few months. Up and down with emotions, wondering if we'd find something, if we could afford it, if this really was a step forward or a misguided attempt at adulthood. We want to make it. We want it to be ours, to be a source of peace and calm, and I hope Gerry's affirmation is the beginning of something beautiful.

It is finished, or C'est fini!

And by the magic of the internet, we moved. If you just go by posts it wasn't a harried two and a half days at all! It's still amazing to me that once the new place gets established, the old place looks terrible. I kept moving boxes out of our little Manchester alcove and kept getting angrier and angrier at the neighborhood. I hated the slow drivers, or the fast ones, I hated the sound of those damned scooters' engines getting revved and repaired, I hated the fact that I was tired, hot, grumpy and generally felt terrible, and that the boxes and THINGS wouldn't end. I hated that the hallway light was out, that the banister came completely off the wall and that I couldn't just be at the new place.

But now it's over, we finished moving everything into the house just before the rain began and it couldn't have gone better. I woke up exhausted and nauseated Friday morning, but went into work anyway, thinking I'd put my nose to the grindstone and just concentrate on work. At 10 a.m. I had nothing to do, and just felt terrible and I discovered I lost my wallet. I left and without realizing it, drove to the apartment instead of the house! I sighed, turned around, drove to the house, picked up boxes and scoured the house for my wallet, and Ben came home early and we finished the remaining moving (One load! and that mostly trash) and crashed about 1. And we found my wallet in the Matrix. Yes!

An unnecessary play by play, and maybe I'll post some pictures later on this morning.

And so the packing begins....

As if we didn't move enough, we're adding a new one to the mix. A move into OUR NEW HOUSE!! The truth is, it is very exciting, it has a yard, it's going to add a sense of permanence to our lives, blah blah blah... but we just have to get through the financial shitfall first. Oh, AND the packing. The ever present now in my face in the form of liquor boxes packing.

Yep. I'm either planning for a huge ass shindig or I'm moving heavy stuff. Sigh.

My life in Mix Tapes

Sos, yesterday was my day of birth and since I couldn't afford to take the day off work, I brought all my old mix tapes in to listen to. I realized yesterday that my tapes moreso than cds or records have played important roles in my life, so much so that I teared up a bit while listening to some of the songs on them.

Fall of 1998 - the "Superhappy" tape. Aaron made it for me so I wouldn't be so homesick for my first year of college. It was a smattering of our favorite car songs played to and from high school, and all recorded from WVGO or the Buzz (during its one and only good year) or tapes left home by Jenni. Tear up moment: "Catepillar" by the Cure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBX8j1lZshE

Summer of 2000 - Innocence Mission "Glow". I listened to it religiously (pun intended) during my summer of Leadership Training in Surf City, NC with my college church. By day, I was a Kroger deli counter girl, and by night, I was supposed to be witnessing to people and turning them towards Christ, but all I remember are really lovely summer moments. My friend, Jody, and I hanging out with the guys downstairs from us (against all rules! As if I needed rules. Like Ben told me today in regards to how i spend money, "Your mother shouldn't be telling YOU to be frugal! She should be telling you to spend!!") sitting out on our little deck sewing triangles into the bottoms of my jeans to make bell-bottoms, learning how to play guitar on one of the worst sounding 3/4 guitars in the world, and generally believing and hoping that this would be the summer I found love. All with Innocence Mission as a soundtrack, that summer remains a dreamy blurry sequence of peoples' faces, silly me moments that I'm embarrassed about publicly, but really cherish that girl with the messy eyebrows and wonky glasses who thought she was every bit deserving of love. Tear up moment: "I hear you Say So". The song I learned on my guitar and wanted desperately to sing well.

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Innocence+Mission/_/I+Hear+You+Say+So

The living room in my parents house - The Cure "Singles" (Side A) Jenni also had the accompanying video cassette. The Cure was my one measurable sign of coolness in high school. I might've just as thoroughly enjoyed the Newsboys, or DC Talk, or the top 5 at 10 on Q94, but I also loved the Cure, and just about anything else Jenni or Aaron would play for me. I loved Robert Smith, and was completely honored by a senior friend of my sister's who dedicated "Bob and the bad boys in black" to me when she graduated high school. Coolest song I know: "10:15 on a Saturday Night".

I know all the words to all the songs. Whenever I'm feeling intimidated or powerless to change something, I put on those songs i love and I sing or if I can't, I mime the song. I sing songs in my head to people who annoy me, like Delta 5's "None of Your Business". I used to sing songs to guys I had crushes on (in my head) like Rachel Yamagata's "Worn Me down" or Mama Cass's "Dream a little Dream". I once sang Tori Amos's "Cornflake Girl" to the opposing team in a rousing game of Dodgeball in 8th grade gym class because I was convinced it was an amazing intimidation strategy. That 13 year old is alive and well most of the time.

P.s. Thanks to Gail for recognizing it. Yes, the quote on the bottom of that card says "You are the music" - T.S. Eliot

Sunday morning shenanigans

It's amazing what the lack of toilet paper can do to one's psyche. After discovering post-putting on pajamas/pre-getting into bed that the last roll of toilet paper was just about gone, I spent a sleepless mostly uncomfortable night waiting for morning when I could go get more. The situation was only worsened by two facts, one we shall call a "stomach issue" and one we shall call a "lady issue". Fun.

LandStagers has had an interesting past couple of days. We're working on a tree pruning project that was only supposed to take 4 hours to do, which with a rainy day on Ben's last "weekend" day, and then him returning to work fulltime, has evolved into 4 days, and now we're hauling away brush which we originally didn't have to. Sigh. I knew it was bad yesterday when Ben said, "I couldn't feel my upper body today". Always something you want to hear.

Plus, the housecapades continue. Rule #1: DON"T listen to people when they say things like: Buy a house, it's cheaper than paying rent! It's a great time to buy! etc and so forth. We have so far, (and we've just finished all our inspections and are impatiently waiting to see if the sellers will fix the things that need it) spent over THREE MONTHS RENT and we haven't even closed or have access to the house yet. Three months rent that we don't have and are graciously receiving from my parents. We also have already put in notice of termination on our apartment, and have to be out by August 31st. If all goes well (cross fingers, legs, rope) we'll close on Jenni's birthday (the 25th) and will have 6 luxurious days to move in. If not, well... we'll cry.

BUT, it's not all tears and sarcastic one word sentences. Things I'm really excited about are:
1. THE YARD
2. Walking around Lowe's pricing out dishwashers
3. Screen Doors
4. Not having to walk up stairs
5. Putting up different light fixtures
6. Knocking down a wall because I CAN
7. My very own parking space
8. becoming a DIYer

Generally, I just hope this house is worth it. We didn't and still don't buy into the idea that people HAVE to buy a house. It doesn't always make sense, especially if you don't have the fronting money to finance it. And if my parents weren't such enablers, we wouldn't be doing this right now. But, we're banking on the idea that this is an investment; that we bought a decent house in a great neighborhood, and it's going to be a step in the right financial direction for us.

Cross fingers.