The Median Sib

1. After several days of moving, I’m blogging again. I still don’t have my computer set up because I’ve got to have time to figure out HOW to set up my computer. I think I have to get a router so I can hook into PawPaw’s DSL line. Not sure how to do that - so I’ll go to the store later this week and ask. In the meantime, I’ll use PawPaw’s computer.

2. I’ve moved everything - except part of the kitchen. Moving is the pits. I’ll get up early in the morning and head back over to my townhouse and try to finish up the kitchen. I’ve got an ENORMOUS stack of stuff to take to Goodwill, a LARGE stack of trash, and various and sundry items to either take to the storage room or bring over to PawPaw’s house.

3. PawPaw had to leave this afternoon for Texas, and he’ll be gone until Thursday evening. That means I have four night at his house (guess it’s my house now, too) by myself. Quite honestly, his house is a little spooky. No security system, no deadbolts (at least none that work), and it’s off on 5 acres by itself - set back from the road. My son had promised to loan me his dog this week, but he never showed up with him. I was actually looking forward to spending this week with Hank. At least he’d provide a little protection.

4. One good thing about PawPaw’s house is that the waterfall, hill and field behind his house can be seen from the bed. First thing this morning, PawPaw told me to look out the window. There was a buck and doe on the hillside - just walking around munching on the grass. They were beautiful, and they wandered around for a few minutes. The buck’s antlers were very velvety.

5. This afternoon when I was unloading one of three carloads of “stuff” at PawPaw’s, there was a raccoon that came out of the woods and hung around the backyard. I had to shoo him away! I think he’s used to coming up on the porch to eat the cat’s food.

6. Tomorrow my daughter has asked me to drive her to the airport. That’ll be nice because we’ll have a good time talking on the way there.

7. I saved the big news for last. PawPaw and I are officially engaged! This morning we packed a picnic breakfast of bagels, cantaloupe and coffee and took it to the building site. While there, he proposed and gave me a GORGEOUS ring. At church later we talked to the minister about doing the ceremony soon. We haven’t set a date, but it will probably be within a few weeks.

It’s after midnight, and the movers will be here in less than 8 hours. I’m exhausted. My sister, Joan (Daddy’s Roses), moved last month, and she had everything ready to go three days before moving day. She said she was bored because she didn’t have anything to do those three days.

Unfortunately, I’m not like Joan. I’m NOWHERE near that far along. My daughter came over and helped me for awhile earlier this evening, but there is still so much to do.

Anyway - I probably won’t post again for a couple days. I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t close on the house until Tuesday. So after the movers are finished I still have four days to finish up all the little stuff. So I’m going to take a deep breath and go to bed. I’m too tired to stay up any longer. Just think - tonight’s my last night sleeping in this townhouse. I won’t miss it for even one second.

I’ve already packed my alarm clock, and I’m afraid I’ll oversleep tomorrow morning and won’t have time to shower and dress before the movers get here.

If anybody in my family reads this, give me a call at 7:00 Central tomorrow morning to make sure I’m awake! (That’s 8:00 Eastern - for all you Georgia folks!)

Stay tuned . . .

Note: It’s 7:15 a.m. Apparently no one in my family read this - because no one called. Sure glad I didn’t depend on that! But I was up at 6:00 anyway. It’s time to unplug the computer. Knowing me, though, I’ll figure out some way to post here before more than a day or two goes by.

Today is moving day for me.  Here are thirteen reasons I hate moving. 

1.  Everything is so JUMBLED.

2.  Boxes and bubble wrap and tissue paper are everywhere.

3.  I won’t be able to visit everyone else’s Thursday Thirteen because I have to unplug my computer and get it ready to be moved… well, and I will be running around nonstop all day Thursday.

4.  Even though I’ve gotten rid of so much junk, there is still more left.

5.  For the past few years, each time I needed to file papers, I just stacked them in boxes instead.  I figured I’d file them later.  I kept filling up boxes and setting them in the storage room.  Now I’ve got over TEN boxes of papers to go through - sort, discard, file, shred. I’ll work on that next week. 

6.  There are boxes on my bed that I have to move before I can go to bed for my last night’s sleep here.

7.  Moving is a lot of WORK.

8.  Moving involves a lot of TRASH.

9.  Moving is, unfortunately, a necessary evil at times.

10.  Moving makes me feel very unsettled for awhile.

11.  It usually takes me at least a week or so to feel at home in a new place.

12.  I’m moving in with PawPaw - and his mother is visiting this week.  How’s THAT for timing?

13.  I’ve cleaned out the freezer and refrigerator - so there’s no food to eat.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

I was reading a report about the best chain restaurants - the ones that have the highest rating of customer satisfaction.  I was astounded that two restaurants that I personally would rate “mediocre” at best made the list.  Carrabba’s was rated the best for Italian food, and Outback was rated best for takeout. 

I’ve only eaten at Carrabba’s twice, but both times I came away with a stomach ache and an awful aftertaste.  You couldn’t pay me to go back.  There are too many really good Italian restaurants to take a chance on Carrabba’s again.  Plus, their commercials with the two owners talking (i.e. trying to be cute and clever) are annoying.

I’ve eaten at Outback quite a few times - not in the last year or so though.  The blooming onions at Outback are good, but greasy.  However, I don’t know how you could batter and fry an onion without making it greasy.  Their other food, however, is merely okay - certainly nothing award-worthy - and at times it hasn’t even reached the “okay” level.  I’ve never tried their takeout, though.  Would a restaurant’s takeout food be better than their in-restaurant food?  I doubt it.  Maybe their takeout service is so outstanding that it compensates for the mediocre food - or maybe they’ve made great improvements in their food since the last time I was there.  I doubt if I go back, though, unless I just really get a hankering for a blooming onion.

All of which goes to show that people have different opinions because obviously some people think Carrabbas and Outback have good food - or else the restaurants padded the pockets of the folks doing the survey.

  Bonefish Grill was the winner for seafood restaurants, and in my book it deserves it.  I have never had anything other than an absolutely delicious dinner there.  PawPaw and I’ve been there a bunch of times, and everytime we’ve had a scrumptious meal.  The salads are so fresh and the seafood is wonderful.  It’s expensive (for us) but worth it.

PawPaw and I were talking the other night about how when restaurants first open the food and service is outstanding.  However, they start getting lax and after a few months both the food and service go way downhill.  It’s happened to Copeland’s and Stoney River and others as well.

The movers will be here at 8:00 Thursday morning.  That means I have one day left to get everything ready to move.  Sigh!  I’m making great progress, but there is a lot to do on Wednesday.  Right now it’s 11:30 p.m., and I’m so tired from all the 4th of July festivities and packing.  This morning I took one load of stuff to the storage space I’ve rented.  By the time I finished loading and unloading all those boxes, I was drenched in sweat.  So I think I’ll call it a day and go to bed.  I’ll start fresh in the morning.

I had some good news today.  This afternoon I tried on some jeans that I couldn’t even zip a few weeks ago. They were still a little snug, but I could zip them.  So my exercising at Curves and cutting back on food is showing some results.  Yea!  It’s absurd how happy that makes me.

I was sleeping soundly awhile ago and through the fog of sleep I became aware of a sound.  Very rhythmic.  THUD! pause. . . THUD! pause . . . THUD! pause . . . THUD!  This went on and on.  Was it coming from my house?  What on earth was it?  I determined it was coming from outside - but very close.  I got up and looked out the front window.  Across the street, workers are building a new set of townhouses.  A large truck with bricks is parked there.  One guy is standing on the truck lifting a handful of bricks.  Another guy is standing on the ground.  First guy tosses the bricks to the second guy.  Second guy tosses the bricks into a stack next to the townhouse - THUD!  He turns to accept another handful of bricks and then tosses that handful into the stack - THUD!  Mystery solved.  Sleep ended.

I’ve been amused the past couple days to see a comment on one of my Mary Winkler posts from someone who is either an adolescent posing as a married male, or a married male stuck at an adolescent mental age.  Later I looked at my site meter and followed the link to the referring website and found the funniest - and most pitiful - website.  I won’t give the URL here because I don’t want to give them any traffic.  The website is a “hate” website, and the object of their hate is American women. 

This is their view of the American woman.  They discuss my website as an example of evil feminism. . .  Which is funny to anyone who knows me.  They dislike me because I wrote that there was a possibility that Matthew Winkler might have had an overbearing “man is the boss and the woman had better submit” attitude - given his COC affiliation and knowing that church’s beliefs.  Just speculation, but apparently what a typical feminist nazi would write.  So they’ve posted my blog address for their readers to see how evil I am…and I’ve had a few hits from there today. 

The posts and comments I read are like tantrums.  Supposedly grown married men blaming American women for all their troubles - and complaining about how badly married men are always treated.  Reading a few posts, you’d think that American women were the cause of all the ills in the world.  The men who post belly-ache endlessly about what terrible and useless wives American women are.  It’s the funniest and most pathetic and transparent example of projection I’ve seen in a long time.  Maybe not projection - but a lack of taking responsibility for their own actions and lives.  It’s sad to see people use a negative experience with one person (usually their ex-wives) to label and denigrate an entire group of women.  Can you imagine being married to one of them? 

Apparently they go to other countries to find properly submissive wives.  These are men who have such overwhelming neuroses and insecurities that they’re incapable of maintaining healthy relationships with women, and their only perceived option (since they can’t accept responsibility or any blame for their failures themselves since that might mean they’re not masculine enough) is to blame American women. Yes, that’s it.  They were perfect in their marriages.  It was just those damn overbearing, greedy, immoral, feminist American women who were impossible to please.

And while it is sad, it is also funny to read the adolescent nature of their site.  My sister and I were talking about it earlier, and I’ve been chuckling about it all day.

I just paid $40 for a locksmith to spend five minutes repairing my front door lock.  As soon as he looked at the lock, he turned to his assistant and said, “Look at that!  It still has the plastic thing in it.”  The builder had left a plastic space-holder in the lock rather than putting a screw in it.  No screw - No wonder the lock was wobbly and turned in circles.

So that $40 added to the almost $400 I paid to the plumber last week to repair two leaks in the crawlspace that were most likely there since the house was built less than two years ago, along with $74 for the official termite inspection I had to do.  And don’t forget the AC repair.  This move is getting more and more expensive.

Everything (except the termite inspection) are things that the builder SHOULD have handled.  If you live in Tennessee - never buy a home from the Jones Company in Tennessee.  I don’t know if they’re in other states or not.  I’ve owned several homes and have had to deal with home builders and repair folks, and I’ve never seen any worse than them.  The absolute worst home builders I’ve ever dealt with - bad workmanship and complete failures in dealing with customers.  Plus, the guy who handled my initial walk-through when I bought the house and also handled my one-year punch list flat out lied to me - both times.  Apparently it’s a pattern with him, and he does it very convincingly.  They have so many people trying to buy their homes that they don’t care about the quality of their work or the satisfaction of their customers.

My only consolation at this point is that what goes around comes around.  It will eventually come back to bite them in the butt . . . I hope. 

A little levity amidst all the serious stuff going on.

Warning:  Consider yourself warned - Female problems post ahead! 

I wrote last week about going to the dentist and being on antibiotics - and how, for me,  antibiotics always lead to a yeast infection.

Well, of course, my body followed the usual protocol and so I went to the pharmacy and bought a one-dose “insert” (their terminology - not mine).  As I opened the package to extract the syringe with the medication, I noticed the warning in large print:  DO NOT TAKE BY MOUTH.

I won’t go into the mental image that evoked - but I’m still giggling about it.

Our family just got word today that my nephew, Andrew, who works for a youth ministry in Los Angeles, had a stroke this morning and is in the hospital.  He was bleeding from his brain stem, and they were transferring him to another hospital for surgery.  It sounds very discouraging.

My sister and her husband are on their way to L.A. - probably arriving about now (10:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time).  We hope to hear more soon.

If you happen to read this blog tonight, please say a prayer for Andrew.  He’s just 26 years old - one of my son’s playmates when they were little.

I just had a plumber give me an estimate on making the repairs necessary for me to close the house on the 11th - there were two leaks in the crawl space that had to be repaired.  His price was $850 to do what was needed - replace a cracked pipe and replace a valve. 

After I recovered from my shock at the price, I called my son who has his plumber’s license but who usually just works on irrigation systems.  He told me he could do the work for me for much less and that I shouldn’t pay that much.  So I told the plumber that I was going to have my son do the work instead.

He immediately said he’d call his boss and see if they could do it for less.  And guess what?  They can do the whole job for just $398.  LESS THAN HALF THE ORIGINAL ESTIMATE.  They are going to “throw in” a valve that was $450 in the first estimate.

I called my son.  He said he couldn’t do it for less than $398.  So, the plumber got the job and is working on it now.

Interesting sidenote:  As the plumber was writing up the work order he chatted with me about his son and raising his son right, and how he knew God would take care of things.  How just this morning he had to take money from his son’s college fund to pay the mortgage.  Was he trying to play on my sympathies?  Or maybe make me feel guilty for not paying the original quote?  I don’t know.  If so, it didn’t work.

Amazing, isn’t it?  Less than half the original estimate.  Most people would have just had them do the job and paid the $850.  Dishonest bastards!

I got to my townhouse this morning and discovered that when I finished cleaning out the refrigerator/freezer yesterday,  I hadn’t pushed one of the shelves all the way back in, and so it blocked the door from closing completely. Thus, with the door ajar,  the ice in the ice maker started thawing and leaking onto the hardwood floor.  Sigh!

I pulled the refrigerator out from the wall - swept/mopped/wiped up all the water.  Lord, I SURE hope I got it cleaned up in time and it doesn’t cause the wood floor to warp. One spot, in particular, looks a little saturated. 

Also, that means that the food I had decided to keep is now thawed out, too.  So I have more food to throw out.  In addition to being a lot of work, this move is turning out to be a food-waster, too.

My mantra for now is “In two weeks, this move will be behind me” - repeated over and over and over and over . . .

If I look at yesterday’s “to do” list without considering circumstances, I was an abject failure because I didn’t complete four of the items. However, I did get in my Curves workout, stuck to my diet, went through THREE hours of a home inspection (which was the reason I didn’t get to the other items on the  list - I had NO idea a home inspection was so involved!), cleaned out the refrigerator, freezer and pantry and and packed up my dining room (which was a MAJOR deal with all the dishes), and prepared a doggone good dinner for PawPaw and myself.  I also spent an hour and a half over at the land helping PawPaw cut down trees.  By the time we finished it was too dark for a bike ride, and we were exhausted anyway.  So while I didn’t finish everything on my list, I don’t think I could have done anymore.  As a matter of fact, I’m rather superwomanish to have done all that!

So for today, here’s my goals - a little less intense than yesterday:  (1) Curves workout, (2) Stick to diet, (3) Make all those phone calls, (4) Pack up two rooms, (5) Arrange for repairs that the home inspection discovered were needed, and (6) A quick stop to get more packing materials (bubble wrap mostly).

I’m headed out the door to get started on this list.  Wish me luck!

I’ve got my TO DO list for today:

(1) workout at Curves

(2) pack up at least two rooms of my townhouse

(3) ride bikes this evening with PawPaw on The Natchez Trace

(4) arrange for movers for next Thursday

(5) make at least four phone calls to discontinue/disconnect/transfer service - water, electricity, gas, DirecTV

(6) get the “termite letter” from the exterminator when he checks the house this afternoon - a requirement before closing

(7) be here when the buyer has the home inspection done this afternoon.

(8) stick to my diet

So far, I’ve completed #1 and I’m doing well on #8.  As soon as I post this, I’m starting on #2 and will PERSEVERE until I’ve got the two rooms completed.  I’ll make the phone calls when I take a lunch break in a couple hours.

My mother of Ruthlace wrote a story about me in her blog today.  Guess I’ve always been a scaredy-cat. 

This morning I had the dreaded dentist visit.  TWO (2)+ hours of work on my teeth - a root canal, build up (since there wasn’t much tooth left) and a crown.  I go back July 20 to handle the other two cavities.

Last night when I was obsessing with pre-dentist visit anxiety, PawPaw told me that I should request nitrous oxide (I THINK that’s what it is).  I had tried it once before and didn’t like the strange feeling it gave me. However, both PawPaw and our son, Scalawag, tell me they wouldn’t have any dental work done without it.  So I asked for it and got it.

I have to say, it DID relax me - as much as one can relax while the dentist and dental assistant have their hands and various instruments in my mouth - one instrument being a screaming drill.  It wasn’t a noticeable relaxation at the time, but I recall looking at my watch at 11:15 and being absolutely astounded that I’d been there for over an hour already. 

So, I’m on antibiotics (which means a yeast infection by next week) and pain killers.  I’m going to bed and sleeping for awhile.  My “dental experience” just wiped me out.