Plastic Porkbone

Neighbors on the Move

I never knew how interesting it would be to move into a house from a people-watching standpoint.  The truth is, this house has a lot of windows, and outside those windows are a lot of strange people.  I already briefly explained who my weird neighbors are, but just to recap we have Boo Radley next door, the strange Republican women, and the white trash family across the street. 

Well today it's the crazy white trash family in the headlines.  This family consists of a wienerdog, a pair of breeding attack dogs, and a minimum of four people:

• An older man who dresses all in black, who we call Johnny Cash. 
• His wife, who doesn't wear shoes.
• A daughter (we assume)
• A boyfriend

When we first moved in, we heard some people screaming at each other in that house, and the next day a pickup truck was being loaded with boxes.  Apparently the daughter and boyfriend had a big fight and someone was moving out.  A couple days later, that person moved back in.  Over the past few months, someone has moved out of that house, then back in, on two occasions.  The fights continued, and one day the daughter got so mad she was trying to push her boyfriend into oncoming traffic.  Exciting!

Today, someone moved out again.

Seriously, how many times do you allow this to happen before you put your foot down?  O, Johnny Cash, why don't you just tell them to get out and stay out?  Oh well, it makes for some good drama.

Monsoon

Holy crap. 

Last night around dinner time it started raining.  And for my friends in the Seattle area, I don't mean Seattle rain.  I mean INDIA rain.  BANGLADESH rain.  Which is not a huge deal, because I have seen such rain before.  Except for the fact that it kept raining like this for about 6 hours.  This was some serious monsoon action!

This morning I looked out at a bucket which I had left on the deck, and saw that we received over 8 inches of rain overnight.  Many people at my work had flooded basements; we were lucky enough to only have a little water in our basement.  At least I know this: if it didn't flood last night, that basement is never going to flood.

The Joys of Homeownership

So far we love owning our house.  Sure, we aren't fully moved in yet, and it doesn't really feel totally like "home" until we do... but it's much, much better than apartment living.  That having been said, we are now faced with our first house problem: wasps.

First let me say that whenever I am around wasps, yellowjackets, or bees, I generally run around screaming like a little girl.  Once I had a bee in my car and I thought I was going to die.  There is really no reason for this; I am not allergic or anything.  It's just that bees seem to want to sting me, and I would rather they not do so.

Now that we have that out of the way, I think we may have wasps in our attic.  It's hard to tell, but if you are outside our house in the sunny afternoon, you can see MANY wasps flying around the south side of the house.  And by many I mean too bad wasps don't make honey, because we could sell it by the jar. 

Problem is, we can't see a nest anywhere.  The only clue is that a higher number of them seem to be flying in an around the attic vent, which makes me think they are in the attic.  This little journey will probably end with me on an extension ladder, spraying wasp-killer into my attic vent.  The real question is this, will I walk away victorious, or jump off the ladder in fear of my life?

Neighborhood

We have been here long enough now to figure out a little bit about the neighbors.  We essentially have 4 immediate neighbors:

1) Across the street we have a house with 3 women living in it.  At first I thought I had the relationship figured out, until I saw George W. Bu$h stickers on one of their cars.  That threw me for a loop there.  Maybe Log Cabin Republicans?

2) Next to the three women is a house which I thought would be the most interesting.  Let me paint a picture: 5 cars in the driveway, one of which does not start.  Several guys sitting on their porch without their shirts on, drinking and smoking, staring at you.  As my father-in-law said, "the only thing missing are the banjos."

3) Our neighbor to the left seems to be quite normal.  They have foreign cars (a very telling fact in the Midwest) and an anti-war sticker in their window.  It seems the lady in the house is a professional artist of some sort, and I am told they are extremely friendly.  Haven't met them yet.

4) Perhaps the most interesting at this point is our neighbor to the right.  We call him Boo Radley.  They have two broken down cars (that's it) and for a week we thought they were on vacation, because there was no sign of life.  That is, until some guy came out one day in his underwear to take out the trash.  It appears to be a man and his teenage daughter, except they don't own a running car.  The daughter mows the lawn and the man gets rides to the store by some sort of shuttle service (for the disabled?)
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Anyway as my mom said, "Neighborhoods are interesting."  What we really have here is a town that has been here for a very long time, and has only recently become a highly desirable place to live.  So you have a melting pot of new and old.  Wealthy people 100 feet from our house living on the lake, and right across the street are the Good Ole Boys. 

The funniest part about all this is that even with the strange neighbors, it is 1000 times better than living in an apartment.  It's hard to put into words, but it's true.  So break out the banjos and pull up a chair, we've got some people-watchin' to do.

The First Hit is Free

Someone asked me the other day, now that I own a house, had I been to IKEA yet?  I told them no, I am an IKEA addict and cannot allow myself within 300 yards of the building.

So the other day I go to my new mailbox: lo and behold, the 2006 IKEA catalog.  Yes, like the heroin dealers that they are, IKEA knew that I had a new house, and needed to remind me of how lovely and affordable their things are.  So literally the next day, we went to IKEA.

It was going to happen sooner or later, we really were just postponing the inevitable.

We purchased a couple of chairs and a few other things...  The only reason we didn't buy more stuff is because the vehicle we were driving didn't have enough room in the back!  I have planned a second trip to the megastore of loveliness next week, this time by myself so I can fit more boxes in the back of the car.

You know, I was looking at this map from the IKEA website and I noticed something: IKEA stores are pretty much only found in Blue states.  Except for those 3 in the south.  Why is that not surprising?  Oh well, we have one here, and that's all that matters.

BTW, if anyone wants to get us anything, ever, an IKEA gift card always works!  (1-800-434-IKEA)  Now if you will excuse me, I have some furniture to assemble.

Basement blogging

Well, here we are.  Still in the basement, standing on cold concrete, but thankfully in a cool environment rather than outside in the sweltering heat.  I'm still standing at my wooden workbench, but I am about to break out of this cellar and move upstairs.

Today I finally received my wireless PCI adapter from newegg.com (the best website in the world for computer shit, btw).  I say "finally" because I didn't order it until Monday.  Only newegg turns around your order in 6 hours, then sends it FedEx 2-day shipping to your house for FREE.  That's right, free.

Anyway tomorrow I may actually be sitting at a desk, testing out the new wireless connection.  As for today, the basement will have to do.  My wife's parents are here (you know, the in-laws), and that's a good thing.  Father-in-law is helping out around the house, painting rooms, filling holes, pulling weeds, etc..  Mother-in-law is helping watch the baby as well as assisting with the house cleanup.

Turns out the people who lived here before were slobs.  Not the obvious kind, but the kind where you notice when you open drawers and stuff. 

The bottom line is this: the house is still full of boxes, we still have no furniture, and the old place still needs to be cleaned.  But really, that's fine.  Because we have a house.

Post-Move Chaos Period

Whew!

Let me paint a little picture:  I am standing in the basement of my new house.  I am standing at a wooden work shelf, which was probably once used to build and paint things.  On this shelf is a computer, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and several routers, etc.  I am standing here because I don't have any desks set up anywhere in the house, and I don't have any wireless adapters for my PCs.  Yet.

In addition, upstairs is a mess of chaos known as the "house that has just been moved in to."  We all know it: boxes everywhere, inevitably in the wrong rooms, stuff that needs to be carried somewhere else, but your arms are too tired to lift it.

I got some help from three guys on Saturday to move all our junk... they were friends of mine from work.  After getting totally screwed over by U-Haul (more on this story later), we ended up moving in 90+ degree heat.  Woo!  I have never had sweat drip into my eyes so many times in a day.  It was disgusting.

Anyway, we're here.  It is glorious and yet still chaotic at the same time.  As soon as I find the camera, maybe I can take some pictures....

17 Hours to Homeownership

Or, Apartment Living is a Bitch.

Here I sit in my apartment, the day before we are scheduled to close on our house.  It hasn't sunken in yet -  the fact that we are actually buying a house.  I think with the new baby and everything else, it has all gone too fast.  I think our first night in the house it is going to really hit us.

Anyway, right now I can hear some people shrieking and giggling outside.  It sounds like little kids playing, but I know it isn't.  It is probably teenagers or young college kids, drinking heavily and blaring R&B out of their shitty car stereos.  There are a few apartments in this complex which have been rented by large groups of kids like this, which is annoying.  But it's not the worst I have had to deal with.

In fact, to our right is a family full of crazies (remember the lady who tried to kill herself, and her sister had to use our phone in the middle of the night to call an ambulance?), and the other side is a family with a giant dog that shits everywhere. But really, for full effect, I should back up.  I want to briefly talk about the neighbors we have had in the past:

Poulsbo, WA:
The first apartment I ever lived in, back when I was in high school.  There was a guy next door who was physically and mentally disabled.  Okay, the guy couldn't help it.  But he moaned and paced around all the time, and sometimes stuck his head out the window, making crazy sounds.  Not too bad, but a good way to start this story.

Boulder, CO:
First apartment in Colorado.  Outside the kitchen window is a vent of some sort.  The top of the vent is a flat screen.  The screen is used by pigeons as a nest, and they shit everywhere all over it.  The result is bugs all over our kitchen, coming in through the window.

Denver, CO (Montbello):
We moved into what we thought was a nice apartment.  The rent was unbelievably high, so it should have been nicer... anyway every neighbor we had was horrible.  At it's worst we had a 2-neighbor combo.  To our side was a man who was obviously abusing his wife.  We heard screaming, yelling, and eventually hitting.  Had to call the police several times. 

Downstairs at the same time was a single mom with a couple kids.  She was being stalked by (we assume) the father of her children.  So he would come to the house, but she wouldn't let him in.  So he would scream at her from outside the window.  Finally she would let him in, and they would fight for hours.  I have never heard the words "motherfucker" and "bitch" so many times in my life.  Had to call the police weekly.

Side note: nobody knows how to fight like black people.  Those two downstairs neighbors would just go OFF for hours on end.  I was both horrified (you should have seen the size of the guy) and amazed at their ability to vocalize their hatred for each other.  It's an art, really.

Menomonie, WI:
Believe it or not, we had a pair of lesbians for neighbors.  Sure, no problem there, except they would have sex and make so much noise you could hear it from outside the building.  Sounded like they were trying to make a p0rno flick every night.  At first it was hilarious, but it started to get annoying.

Hudson, WI:
You know the story here...

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So the morale of the story is this:  I know when I buy a house I could have crazy neighbors too, but I don't have to share a wall with them.  There's just something about getting the hell out of apartment living... I can hardly wait.  We move Saturday.

Where Will the Cats Crap?

Now that we are moving into a house, and better yet, a nice house, we are now asking ourselves a stupid question:  Where do we put the litter boxes?  Our cats have two litter boxes - we are not sure if they really need two, but as Irene says, do you really want to find out the hard way?  Anyway, two boxes filled with clumping sand and poo.

This has never been an issue for us before: either we have always lived in a lame apartment or there has always been an obvious place for litter boxes.  In our new house, it's hard to say.  There are hardwood floors everywhere, (not one piece of carpet in the entire house).  The most obvious place would be the basement, but it's currently unfinished and our cats might get into shit.  That, and it's a really long way from the top floor of the house to the basement.  And one of my cats has a very tiny brain and gets lost.  Whatever.

We thought of putting one on the landing of the stairwell, sort of between the main floor and the upper floor, but that's sort of lame because the stairway is so nice and attractive - nothing like a big plastic box with a cat shitting in it to greet you as you climb the stairwell.

In the end, I don't know what we will do.  However, I will post a picture of this kitty litter cake (yes, you read that correctly) just for fun.  Since we're on the topic.  Styro had a picture like this on her website but caved to the pressure and took it down. Enjoy!

Recipe!

Inspector Gadget

Today we had our house inspection.  Well, we attended the house inspection at the house we are buying.  Or, however you say it.  Everything went well, which is to say that there were no surprises.  As a big bonus, we had a most ridiculous rainstorm last night - and there was no flooding or anything.  Sure, there are some things that need to be fixed, but we pretty much knew about all of those things. 

Now we just have to wait wait wait wait wait wait...