We no longer have a car port.
We'd been planning to screen it in for ages, but the plastic netting we bought for another project once upon a time was no longer available at the hardware store, so it kept getting put off. Yesterday I picked up a slightly different kind and today while Bob was at work I put it all up with about 150 zip ties.
No more car port. Now it's a cat porch.
I have stuff I could post about tonight - sending 645 faxes at work (really), meeting a very charming (and tiny) little gecko, the video game I've been playing lately. But I didn't feel like writing about any of that, and when I walked into the bedroom the cat was all spread-eagledy on the bed and I took her picture and was going to post that.
On the to-do list for today:
-- Now with 100% more late-afternoon progress reports!
We´ll see about this not having Internet at home thing. I almost passed up coming in to the café today because I didn´t feel like going out in the afternoon, and by the time we finished diner and a movie (¨Star Trek: First Contact¨ - sorry, Spanish keyboard and it´s too much trouble to find the codes for italics), it was 8:30 pm and I didn´t really feel like going out again. But what with the Blog365 thing and everything, I decided to go ahead and do it. We´ll see if that sentiment wins out every time.
No word on the phone thing (prerequisite for the Internet thing), but assuming there´s no actual technical problem like there was in the other neighborhood, it should happen within a couple of weeks.
So we didn´t do all that shopping I said we were going to do yesterday; turns out New Year´s Day is a pretty serious holiday and all the stores were closed. Well, except for the ice cream shop. That was open :)
Today we did a lot of the hardware store shopping, including actual light fixtures to replace the bare bulbs in our four rooms, a shower caddy for our shelfless, towel barless, toilet paper holderless bathroom, and some wood for the first two projects: shelving over the toilet and a base for the birdcage.
By the time we got home, however, we were both worn out and spent most of the rest of the day hanging out and playing computer games (although we did install the first light fixture, which went well and works fine, despite Costa Rica´s approach to household wiring. [By which I mean, we made an educated guess as to which of the two white wires was the ¨black¨wire and got it right on the first try.])
So tomorrow will be the big Getting Things Done day - Bob building and me sewing - and today is...well, pretty much over.
We cleaned out the upstairs apartment and dismantled our personal Internet café yesterday, so in a sense the last night of 2009 was our first night fully moved.
I dropped the girls off up the hill after lunch, and we had a quiet evening at home. We watched The Sixth Sense, which I had never seen, and tried to play a couple of computer games together, but one wouldn´t work right, and one was too complimicated for me to learn it all in one night. We played around with The Sims for a while, then had some cookies and eggnog and went to bed around 11:30, secure in the knowledge that we wouldn´t miss the new year.
And we didn´t. Fireworks are legal here, and our little cul de sac didn´t hold back. They went on for a solid half hour, by my count, but maybe more because we did eventually fall back asleep.
This morning we took down the Christmas tree and decorations, so the living room is ready for whatever ends up being its first semi-permanent furniture arrangement.
We´re at the [public] Internet café now, and then heading over to the hardware store to get some minor construction supplies, some screening to see if we can´t fashion a cat-proof carport area, and maybe price some paint, because the landlord had the main walls painted, but they didn´t finish the edging, and they didn´t touch the bathroom or the aquamarine doors (and not the good kind of aquamarine), and there´s no molding around the ceiling, so there are roller marks all around the edges. We may need to tweak it all a bit.
We watched Wall-E today, and figured out which kinds of bags I'll be making for the girls, and that we'll make peanut butter cookies this evening.
Now I'm here to check the mail and check on the house & dog & guinea pig-sitting situation here on our old street, then off to buy peanut butter and stop by the thrift store to get some more jeans for with which to make the girls' messenger bags.
Looks like the garage area (yes, Dad, there is one) is pretty well closed in, structurally speaking, so we're thinking we may be able to put some screen on the wire and then we can keep the front door open without letting the cat all the way out. We all think that would be a good thing.
I texted our meter number to the phone company guy at the start of business today; no response yet, but I did see utility trucks out and about today, so at least they're open for business and whatever has to happen can now proceed to do so.
And, that's about all I have to say, what with it being vacation and all. Not a lot going on.
I keep calling our street a "country lane." Here's what I mean by that:
We're really not out in the country in any sense of the word, but the seven houses on our cul-de-sac (three adjoining across the end of the road, and four adjoining off to one side) are at the end of a single short block with a corn & coffee & squash field on one side and a grassy field with citrus trees on the other side. The only cars that ever drive down it are the five or six that live at the end of it, so the kids (I've seen at least 10, aged from two to eleven) have the run of it most of the time.
That's Julia, honing her newfound bicycle prowess.
Just a quickie, cause it's already past dinner time and there's nothing here for the kids to do while I skim my Facebook feed and toss a quick post up.
Julia had hesitated to go out and play with the neighborhood kids (I estimate 10 or 12 in our seven-house cul de sac), because she has a bike but never learned to ride it without training wheels. So today we took them off and taught her. I knew it would come quickly, because she's good at sports and physical things, so once she had a flat street and some time, it took about half an hour.
Then she made friends with the 9 year old next door, and spent the rest of the day with her.
We made our first batch of cookies this morning - just chocolate chip, nothing complicated - but there were enough to eat a bunch and share a bunch and freeze a bunch, and tomorrow or Monday we'll make another kind.
Kay, time to get going; more tomorrow!
Posting a few photos at last. Christmas, after all the hectic and tiring and overwhelming that led up to it, was lovely. The tree was...well, okay. The girls liked their presents, we sat around and watched A Muppet Christmas Carol and napped and played with the new toys and the cat (and made new toys for the cat) all day. Just like it's supposed to be.
Then we even found a grocery store open in the evening, so there are cookie ingredients for tomorrow and everything we need for dinner & breakfast.
Now we're here to check email and post (and say hi to the new neighbors starting to move in downstairs), and then back home.
Look! Space! Yes, the shelves in the bedroom and the space under the bed are packed solid, but the living space is totally livable. We actually have a table. At which to eat and do puzzles, even if other people are home and wanting to do other things. At the very same time.
...which is have all our stuff (except this here computer, plus a chair and small table) in the new house.
An added benefit to that is that I now know the new place won't get any more crowded with boxes and stuff. It can only improve from here.
We hung some quilts on the wall (provisionally, where there were already hooks) and it made a big difference in the bedroom especially, which had been starkly functional until now, and I don't mean that in a good way.
I'm not feeling very Christmasy, what with all the work we've done and still need to do, but knowing the move itself is behind us is, truly, what I wanted and I got it.
Now I'm back here at the online computer to do my Christmas shopping for the girls. It's not as bad as it sounds, though. I have their stocking gifts all bought and wrapped, but the other gifts I want to give them have online components.
One is a membership to an online computer game they love playing, so I need to find out the terms they offer so I can decide how many months they get, and also find something to print out and wrap up to actually physically give them.
The other is that they'll be home with me most of the next week, so I thought a good gift that I wouldn't have to deal with before Christmas would be to find simple sewing patterns for a purse (for Robin) and a tote bag (for Julia) and let them pick the fabrics from my stash and help me make them.
So I need to find some patterns for them to choose from and, again, something to print out and wrap.
And the final thing is to bake cookies together over the coming week, but I can look up recipes for that in my cookbooks (which finally got moved today), or online when the time comes. I have cookie cutters and some of the specialty ingredients (chocolate chips and sprinkles) so there's something for them to open in connection with that.
Bob's giving the whole Christmas Tree In A Land Without Tree Stands thing some thought, and we'll cobble together whatever he figures out when I get home. I bought some ornaments (Costa Rican grocery stores gather all their Christmas stuff in a 1/4 aisle and mark it 70% off several days before Christmas, it turns out), and we made some, and they can do popcorn strings if we all feel up to it.
So.
Gotta go gooping. (That's googling/shopping, you see.)
Merry Christmas, y'all.
Yesterday I got the call I've been hoping for; or rather, I got what at first appeared to be the call I've been hoping for from the phone company.
The guy asked for me, then said he was the one who had processed my application for a phone line back in July. He went on to say that, the following week, he had been involved in a car accident, and ... well, you can see where that's going. I'm a little skeptical as to how the absence of the person who took my application, entered it into the computer and printed out the work order for me to hang on my house, translates into the application not proceeding, but whatever.
He said he had heard that I went in to request a transfer of the as-yet uninstalled phone line to a new address, and that I was mad about it.
Now, I did request the transfer, and I did tell the guy that the line hadn't been installed, but I wasn't mad. Nobody in my neighborhood had phones installed, and many of them had been waiting longer than I had. Some of them years longer. I only put in the application because it looked like there was some utility work going on in the neighborhood back in July, but I wasn't surprised that it never happened.
Anyway, this guy apparently feels personally beholden to me, and while I did tell him I wasn't upset, I'm certainly not going to discourage him from doing what he can to get our phone hooked up in the new place.
He asked for the exact address and I started to give it to him - with no street names or house numbers, it's really just a description from a known starting point. So I told him, from a particular condo development, it's 50 meters south, 100 meters west, and 50 meters south.
And he said, "That can't be. That's not a paved road."
And he's right.
We determined that I do, in fact, live on an unpaved road, and that he knows exactly where it is. He said he'd just stop by that afternoon and get the information. Talk about personalized service. Or a small country.
Except, the one thing he needs, besides the address, is the number of the electric meter at the new place, not the number of the next door neighbor's meter, which is what I provided to them when I went in to request the transfer on the 10th.
It's not as simple as looking at the meter itself, because there are seven houses on our tiny little cul de sac, and all the meters are installed in a row halfway down our (unpaved) country lane. And our electricity is currently shared with, not the house next door, but the house next door to that.
I have no idea.
Anyway, the landlord said he'd stop by yesterday to show me which is our meter, but he didn't. The neighbor whose house shares a meter with ours (who, by the way, is very nice) says she doesn't get the bills directly, but that the landlord picks them up and either pays them or bills her or something; anyway, she couldn't help.
So now...who knows. I tried calling the landlord back today, but a child answered the phone and said the guy has a new number. And the new number wasn't available.
Anyway, I still think it's a net positive; getting a proactive call from anyone at the phone company shows that things are happening, and they're still installing phones all over the old neighborhood; in fact, they're done with this particular street and a couple of blocks closer to the new place.
So, here's hoping.
Had to come by here on the way to the office this morning to pick up the hand truck that I borrowed from work.
Well, okay, and because it turns out that all of my pants are still here, except for the paint-stained jeans I'd been wearing the entire weekend.
There's still just as much to do here as there was yesterday (except for one [1] carload of sixty gazillion [60Gz] books, that I moved yesterday), but now the kids are away till Christmas Eve (or Day) and work should be very low-key, and the roads are very clear (except for that one ambulance-worthy accident we passed this morning) and hopefully the next few days will be productive without being crazy-making.
I went ahead and got a Christmas tree with the girls last night, which I envisioned as being an extra-special, unexpected Making Christmas Happen thing for them, but in fact we couldn't see the tree in the dark, Robin cried because we were killing it, and Julia fretted that it would fall off the roof of the car and damage things.
Oh well.
But now we have it, and it looks pretty nice in the light of day, and smells good, and that's one more thing partially dealt with. Next up, figuring out how to stand it up and get it water in the Land Without Tree Stands.
Okay, off to work. I did take a few pictures of the wreckage of the old place and the Lovable Insanity that is the new one, so those'll be appearing eventually.
Happy Monday, y'all.
The new house is fine, the night was quiet, the cat and bird and children all seem to have adjusted quickly and with a minimum of difficulty. (The turtle too, I think. Communication is not her long suit.)
We got furniture and stuff and things into a very livable first-draft arrangement last night, and had pizza and A Charlie Brown Christmas and passable showers.
In fact, it was so livable that it makes it hard to see the value in coming back here (where we'll keep a computer hooked up till the last minute) to gather more Boxes O' Stuff to throw onto the currently almost manageable Piles O' Stuff at the new place. The sense of urgency and Must Have At Least The Bare Necessities that got things (like an evening run back for electrical tape and other Must-Haves) done last night is entirely lacking today.
Now I'm just looking at an apartment full of stuff that has to be moved from one place to another, with insufficient boxes and in the knowledge that it's going to be in the way as soon as I do.
Ah well. It does make the new place seem all the nicer, so there's that.
Just jumping in real quick to say we're moving and tired and I'll be offline the rest of the day. Maybe even the rest of the year; no telling yet how long it'll be till they install a phone and then the DSL.
I went over to the hardware store to talk to the transport guys and see if one of them could do our heavy moving later in the day or tomorrow, but the guy who said he could do it, said it had to be RIGHT THEN.
In retrospect, we were not at all ready to do it right then, but we went ahead anyway, and now the furniture part is done. I wouldn't do it like that again, but I'm really glad that the entire rest of the process is under our control and at our pace.
Now I'm going to have some lunch before I turn around and realize it's dinner time.
I stopped by the place on the way to work this morning and there was a little old man with a big long roller who had already painted half the walls by 8:00 a.m.
Bob stopped by on his way home from work just now, and he said all the walls are painted, so the guy will be doing the edging tomorrow.
He was really nice this morning, and I'm sure we can take the girls over to see it, and maybe run a few carloads over in the afternoon, once he's finished a room or two.
I carried a dozen boxes down to the garage while Bob was at work, but I can't really tell yet how it's going to go. There are empty shelves and things, but there's still a lot more to do.
The girls were all excited when I brought them home this afternoon, so I gave them each a suitcase and let them put things into them; that lasted about 15 minutes, but at least they have their part, and can do more of it if they get the urge.
For a family that's fixing to move less than a week before Christmas, we're ticking along pretty calmly here.
I took my commute on ... I think it was Monday ... to get myself from "How on EARTH am I ever going to get the girls presents they'll like and care about for Christmas?" to a simple, realistic and pleasing plan for how to do exactly that.
I shopped for stocking stuffers on my way home from work for the last couple of days, and I'm wrapping them this evening. I've also picked up a couple of immediate essentials for the new house, like an on-demand heater for the shower (most Costa Rican homes, including the one we're moving to, have no centralized hot water) and a pack of compact fluorescent bulbs. For the most part, the things we're going to have to acquire will come afterwards: curtains by me and some extra table/shelf action by Bob are the main ones.
We can't get a tree till after we move, so there's no dealing with that till next week. We've made a bunch of Moravian stars to decorate it with, we can string some popcorn, and I'll buy some lights and red balls. Voila, pretty, homemade tree.
The neighbor who sold us Bob's fridge when he moved here actually wants it back, so we don't have to figure out how to sell that or whether to move it.
I don't see doing a whole lot of packing until this weekend, since it's such a nearby thing and we can take the small stuff over ourselves either before or before and after the furniture goes on Sunday. Not like everything has to be boxed on a deadline for someone else to deal with.
The things I most want to have taken care of, aren't really in my hands. I was worried about scheduling with the girls while I'm off work, so I wrote the email that needed to be written, and now I just need to wait for a response. I'm a little concerned about the painting in the house, but it all sounded really good on Tuesday. Hopefully there's no problem there.
So...I guess I'll just get back to wrapping the stocking stuff and maybe make sure the wine from the other night hasn't gone off.
Came back to add:
I realized after I hit Publish, got the wine, and went back to the wrapping that the reason having a glass of wine while wrapping the gifts felt so right was that, nine years ago about this time, I was wrapping Christmas presents with Mom in my apartment in High Point, and she offered to pour us some wine. I only had a little because the big present we had for everyone that year (which Mom of course didn't yet know) was the news that I was expecting Julia, who was born the following August.
We tried a new restaurant this evening; they've been building it for ages, and we actually tried to go a couple of months ago, but it wasn't open yet.
It was brave of us to try, because this was happening again, and...well, let's just say you wouldn't want to be on the road if that were true.
ANYway, the food was good (mine was; apparently Bob's was VERY VERY VERY VERY good) and the ambiance was very nice, and Self Conscious Waiter was self conscious, but also very attentive and friendly.
Then we stopped by the house (which showed no signs of paint or pre-paint processes, but one must have faith, mustn't one?) and talked about where to put things and who gets what room and stuff.
And now we're home and Bob made dark chocolate pudding and we're waiting for that to chill while I talk myself into making the baked treat I had planned to make for my boss's birthday tomorrow, even though I'm all full and ready to just sit on the couch and watch Friends.
Well, the phone company is definitely making strides in and about this neighborhood - I passed sub-contracted phone company minion dudes working on the lines when I left for work this morning, and again when I got back home. I nearly had to forgo posting this evening because the Internet went out early today (Bob was offline by the time I got to work this morning), and only just came back on about half an hour ago.
Again, very glad we requested the phone line transfer before this started happening, and also glad it's going on, since the new house is less than a mile from the old one, and maybe all this Progress will trickle down to that neighborhood and result in us actually having a phone sometime soon.
And on that topic, we're now the proud renters of The Other House. The contract the owner prepared was entirely reasonable; I was taken aback to see "three years" in the first clause, but it turns out (which Bob actually knew and told me) that rental contracts are three years by law. But the owner added some more text that effectively made three years the maximum period (I'm sure it could be renewed if everyone were happy three years down the road), and he added a clause a the bottom that actually makes seven months the minimum, by stating that we would lose our (one-month) deposit if we move out within the first seven months. That's entirely reasonable.
So we signed the contract and paid the first month, AND, it turns out the owner is still going to paint. He said he has 10 houses he rents out, and the guy who works for him just finished painting one, and is ready to do ours starting tomorrow. So we told him "white" and let him know that we'd like to take some carloads over on Saturday and move the major stuff on Sunday, and we think that's all going to work out just fine.
We also ascertained that eight of his ten houses have three bedrooms, and asked him to let us know if a 3BR should become available at any point.
We also gave him a papaya, which seemed to go over well.
The dead dog was picked up today, the landlady found a half-buried cutoff valve that isolates the burst pipe so Bob has cold water at least, and the utility company (or minions thereof) were on the street today apparently moving toward installing the remaining phone lines in the neighborhood. This last makes me glad we already went down to transfer the phone line application to the new house, because if they showed up and installed here, then who knows what would be involved in getting it moved from here to a new location, plus there would be a transfer fee and stuff. The neighbor at the new house said that when she applied for a line (no idea how long ago), they came along and installed it really quickly. We're hoping that remains the case, since we'll be without Internet till the phone is installed, and then another week or so after the phone is in for them to send the DSL tech out. But it sounds promising enough that we're probably not going to transfer the cable over. I think. We sign the contract and actually take possession tomorrow, so we'll find out then if the owner painted at all. If he did, it all happened on Sunday (or today), so probably not.
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