Dorothy Marley's Journal

Well, according to my own journal page, I haven't updated since the 28th of October. Can they revoke my geek card for that?

Needless to say, a lot has happened in the intervening three months, not least of which is that, yea verily, we have moved into the new house. That's pretty much the reason I haven't had time for LJ or e-mail or indeed the internet (today was the first day I had logged on in something over two months). After my last log, my days were spent packing, packing, packing. That or painting, painting, painting.

( Some Details in Brief )

Anyway, that's more or less the highlights of the last three months, probably most concisely summed up by saying: We moved into the new house and it's really cool.

Oh, yeah, and that I missed LJ a lot. I'm glad to be back!

Last spam of the morning, promise. I gotta get to work packing!

As an aside to all this house business, I can't believe that I've apparently not mentioned that one of my closest friends is gearing up to close on a house not a mile away from this one. It was one of those strokes of amazing good fortune, and I can't believe that I've not talked about it. Well, probably I was afraid of jinxing the deal, and I hope I haven't done it now. :) Anyway, when Jamie (not to be confused with my sister Jami) and I both realized that we were going to be house-hunting at the same time, we decided to join forces and see if we couldn't manage to live in the same area of town. I went with her the day she looked at the house she ended up bidding for, and I knew that the house I was looking at was in the same general area, but we'd driven around so much that day that it wasn't until I compared the addresses on Mapquest that I realized that we were a mile apart as the crow flies. I'm wondering if that's close enough to qualify for Trading Spaces....

Anyway, Jamie (again, not my sister) and her husband are planning to close around the same time as we are (she actually won the bid on her house the day after ours was accepted by HUD), but whereas we're not planning to move until mid-December, she's going to move that weekend. Needless to say, there's a certain packing frenzy going on in our households. One nice thing is that Albert is able to get good-quality used boxes from work, to the tune of about 30 to 50 per day. Even with all the books, and with both our households moving, I think we'll be okay on the box front, which is often the worst hassle of trying to move.

I have to say that this packing experience isn't nearly as arduous as I remember the last one being. Last time we moved, we threw out what I estimated at the time to be--no kidding--about a dumpster's worth of papers and other miscellaneous crap. So far, I've only disposed of five or six boxes of stuff, and I've already gone through most of the high-crap areas like my desk and the filing cabinet.

I did finally throw away all my bank statements of the last fifteen years, along with my cancelled checks and ATM receipts. I did keep my pay stubs from the early 90s, since the Social Security Administration is under the impression that I didn't earn any money in 1990 and I'd like to have proof to get that worked out, but the rest went bye-bye. Gosh, I hope I don't need that stuff one day.

One thing I found was the receipt for the movers I hired when I moved from Murfreesboro to Nashville some 13 years ago. They charged me $250, and after hauling my books up three flights of stairs in August, the movers politely asked me not to call their company the next time I moved. :)

Now for news about house-related matters.

The big news is that the inspector is coming tomorrow. To prepare for his advent, we've had to have the electricity, water, and gas turned on. After a week, we've succeeded in two out of three. We've tried twice to get the water turned on, but both times there were, apparently, taps still open in the house, so the water workers turned it off again once they saw that the meter was still pumping water in after a minute.

Now, not being idiots, after the first time this happened we went in and found out which taps were open and closed them, then called the water company again. Imagine our surprise when, two days later, Albert showed up for the gas turn-on and discovered that the water had, again, been turned on and then shut off because of open taps.

Investigation revealed that some idiot had apparently shown the house in the intervening 48 hours, either unaware or uncaring that we had a contract with HUD, and in the process someone had turned on several of the faucets and not bothered to turn them off again. Grrrrr. I'm just hoping we can persuade the water guys to come again in the morning.

I can't say but that I'm just a wee bit apprehensive about the inspection. I've been over the house myself a few times, and last week my dad came over and crawled around the attic and looked in the crawl space underneath and so on, but I'm nervous about what an intensive inspection is going to turn up. We already know there's a leak around the chimney, some loose caulking around some of the siding along the back, and the water heater may or may not need to be replaced, but I'm hoping that I won't leave the inspector tomorrow with a jillion-dollar list of repairs. We can still get out of the contract if it turns out that the place is riddled with termites or sitting on a pool of water or something, but that would really, really suck.

Yesterday, Albert and I went to our very first official house showing.

( 3 Bed, 1 Bath, Gimli not included )