May 28
[ Taken May 20, 2009 | Pink | Centerville, OH ]
T-Minus 2 days and counting at this point...
Today was my first day of "vacation" before the whole shindig gets under way, and I pretty much spent it cleaning the house and doing all sortf os little getting cready chores.
I have the dress. It is hanging in the closet in my home office.
I have something old (Grandma's pearl earrings and her sapphire ring), something blue (said sapphire ring and the clips for my hair), something borrowed (Mom's diamond studs), and something new (the dress, of course).
The party rental people delivered (and set up) the tent, the chairs, the tables, and the linens.
Tomorrow, the relatives start to show up and congregate at the house.
May 18
[ Taken May 1, 2009 | Raindrops | Centerville, OH ]
The carpet and foam padding is all out of the basement and is now contained in a large number of smelly, drippy, industrial-strength garbage bags in the garage. The basement floor has been scrubbed with bleach. (With the 10% bleach solution that John insisted on and not 50%-to-pure bleach solution that I would have preferred… in my mind, for something like this, the more bleach the better.) We have decided that we don’t want to wait for garbage collection day to get rid of the debris, so a trip to the dump (a.k.a the Montgomery County Solid Waste Disposal Facility) is in short order.
In between bouts of cleaning we discovered that our favorite Thai restaurant does take-out orders as well as the standard eat-in. This is dangerous knowledge.
Today or tomorrow or the next day or over the holiday weekend (one more item on my already miles-long "To-Do" list) we will put everything back in some kind of reasonable order.
Later this summer we will re-paint the basement walls and paint the concrete floor. I would like to paint both a nice off-white, and then go all Jackson Pollack and just fling paint all over the place. Since John doesn’t care for Jackson Pollack, we will probably not do this. Later this summer we will also rip up the deck and see what we can do about the drainage problem. John has some ideas, and seems confident that he knows how to solve this so that it will never be a problem again. We will also replace all of the deck boards (because frankly they need it at this point) and paint the deck.
I am glad that I started going to a Sunday morning Yoga class a couple of weeks ago, partly for the stretching and partly for the relaxation techniques, because I really needed the relaxation this weekend.
May 16
[ Taken May 1, 2009 | Daffodil | Centerville, OH ]
There are all kinds of hells.
One kind of hell is where your basement is so flooded that water squishes up out of the carpet and puddles around your feet when you walk across it.
That is the hell that John and I currently inhabit. And we have decided to point the finger of blame straight at the incompetent DIY types who we bought the house from. Right before they sold us the house they put a nice deck in the back - it is a very nice deck and we use it a lot – but in doing we have discovered (when we pulled up some boards on the deck and took a good look at what was going on underneath it) that they created a little slump, a down-slope, a depression, that funnels rainwater and runoff right at the back wall of the basement, which situation has been getting progressively worse as time goes on.
Previously we have had a little bit of dampness in the basement, but no big deal. Just put a couple of fans down there and that took care of it.
This spring has been very wet, and we have been having monsoon-like rain and thunderstorms the past week, and the camel’s back has been broken, and our basement is now a marsh.
Do you know how much water carpet and that padded foam under-carpet stuff can hold? Do you know how foul-smelling and wretchedly filthy the water that you can squeeze out of said carpet and foam padding is? It is a horrorshow down there.
We are pulling up all of the carpet and foam padding… stripping it all down to the bare concrete, and shifting the shelves and boxes and other stuff as we go along. We got a dehumidifier and put that down there. We have fans and the space heater running. We have industrial strength garbage bags and terrycloth rags (which will all get thrown out when we are done) from Home Depot.
Our garbage men will hate us on Wednesday when they see the piles of carpet and foam padding (bagged, for the most part) that we will be stacking on the curb. I hope that there is no limit as to how much stuff that they will pick up from an individual house at one time…
Hopefully by the end of the day we will have all of the carpet and padding up and out, and the concrete floor down to being only slightly damp…
May 11
[ Taken May 1, 2009 | Rain drops | Centerville, OH ]
My birthday was this past weekend. I am now halfway to the (suggested) retirement age, almost 1/3 of the way to 100, and almost a record (as in vinyl) speed. I am not a big party person, and everything was very happily low-key. The day before the day John and I went to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, and the day of we went to Baron Wars.
John gave me a waterproof camera case so that when we go to Maui we can take the (older, less expensive) DSLR right into the water with us when we go snorkeling. He also gave me two 16G memory cards so that I won’t have anxiety attacks about running out of memory while underwater. He really gives the best gifts… Honestly. The best. I am not a very good or inspired gift giver and always suffer mild gift-giving anxiety and feel that what I get him never quite measures up to what he gives me…
I would have gotten another “gift” at Baron Wars if John and I had decided to stay around for court instead of bailing early. (I figured that since there wasn’t going to be a Gryphon court, that my presence was not required, and John wasn’t all that interested in hanging around either.) Shortly after we got home, I got a voicemail message from one of our friends saying that I needed to call him back right away. It turned out that the urgent matter was that I had been called up in court to receive the Cavendish Knot, but hadn’t been there. John and I totally would have stayed if someone had hinted to us while we were saying our goodbyes that we ought to… but apparently it came as a surprise to pretty much everyone else as well. So. At some point in the future, at some court during an event, I will be called up to receive my award. Now I will have something to frame and hang up next to John’s wall of scrolls…
I would almost say that hearing on my birthday that I was going to get the Cavendish Knot was the best birthday present ever… except for John’s mad skills with picking out presents. Maybe this was just the best birthday ever?
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I had to go to the BMV today to renew my plates and registration. Normally I get the auto-renewal form in the mail, fill it out, write the check, and forget about it until I get the new registration card and sticker. I didn’t get the auto-renewal form in the mail this year, and that fact didn’t register with me until this morning, when I happened to see my registration card in my wallet (as I was cleaning out the wallet) and noticed that it had expired two days ago. It turns out (thank you Google + some exploration on the Ohio BMV website) that you can renew your registration online, which cheered me up because I hate bureaucracy and waiting in lines, and think that you ought to be able to do most things over the internet anyway, but it turns out that the BMV “doesn’t recommend” that option if your registration is already expired or about to expire. So I had to go to the local BMV and deal with the people there after all.
I did manage to find out that the reason I never got my renewal notice in the mail was that there was some unspecified problem with my address and the notice they sent had come back as undeliverable. I have no idea what the problem might have been, since they haven’t had any issues with my address before now… So I had to “update” the address that the BMV had (which was my current address) to my existing address… the address that I have been living at for the past four years… *shrug*
Still the lines at the BMV wasn’t as bad as feared.