Tag Archives: moving

Sep27

One Of My Favorite Pictures of Joey

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One Of My Favorite Pictures of Joey

This Sunday, Joey performed his first baptism.  It went off quite well, too.  (He’d practiced on The Kid when we were all in in the hot tub the night before, which I think helped a lot.)

Unfortunately, we forgot Joey’s nice, conservative brown swim trunks at my grandparent’s house after we went swimming.  So Sunday morning, Joey realized he was going to have to wear his wild Hawaiian flower ones with the cargo pockets that always fill up with tons of water and then go ooshing everywhere when he gets out of the pool.

Because everyone was in town helping us get settled in and helping the grandparents pack up for their move (which will take place later this week), pretty much my entire family excepting The Kid was at our church on Sunday morning.

Gramps managed to snap this quality picture on his iPhone of Joey and The Brother.

Many things should be noted about this picture:

  1. Joey’s outfit is amazing.  Red shirt, white striped button down, khaki blazer, wild swim trunks…and Simple slip ons.  A true class act.
  2. Joey looks extremely nervous and stressed.
  3. The Brother is drinking a LOT of coffee.
  4. He also looks kind of stressed too (probably from drinking all the coffee?), but likely not for the same reasons that Joey would be nervous and/or stressed.
  5. The sign directly above their heads reads MEN, which is appropriate considering only men are in this picture.

And now I should do what I came to get on the interwebs to do, and that is figure out what kind of interwebs service we will have at our house.  It’s super hard to do research on a service provider when, like, you don’t have internet at your house yet.

Sep25

A Backhoe

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A Backhoe

This afternoon as I was sitting in a comfortable chair at Casa de Grandparents, Gramps walked by and said, “It was a backhoe.”

I was all, Um, WHAT was a backhoe…?

And Gramps just crossed his eyes at me and he was like, THE THING FROM YOUR EARLIER POST THAT YOU DESCRIBED AS A BIG YELLOW SMASHING MACHINE.

Oh, that.

Guys know the names of all kinds of heavy machinery implement type things.

I just googled “backhoe” because I wanted to see what it looked like again.  Someone had earlier suggested that the device I was unable to name was a “front end loader”, so I googled that too.  Internet.  They look exactly the same.  Please advise how these are different.

This is a backhoe.

This is a front end loader.

See what I mean?  Basically the same machine.  OH WAIT.  Maybe it’s because the backhoe has an extra claw on the back of it?

Well, I’ve had about as much fun as I can handle.  I’m going to go back to my earlier campaign to see if I could get my grandfather to give us his hot tub.

So far it’s not going well for me.  Or Joey, he’s trying too.

Sep25

The Dump Run

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The Dump Run

If there’s one thing my Pops is really skilled at it, it’s loading up the truck and taking a bunch of garbage to the dump.  Just about every weekend when I would come home from college, Pops would come wake me up at, like 7:30 and say, “I’m making a dump run and you’re coming too, get up.”

So I’d get up and brush my teeth and get in the truck and off we’d go.

Dump runs were way more exciting back in the day when we had the actual dump truck.  It was this old-timey truck (ok, maybe from the 80′s) that had been used for railroad maintenance (ever seen those driving on railroad tracks?  so cool) and some guy from Kirkwood had turned it back into a real truck in shop class.  Anyway, Pops got it on the cheap and we used it for our “farm truck”.

Basically that meant we went to get rock from the quarry in it, and used it for dump runs.

The dump truck was coolest because we never had to unload anything when we got to the dump, Pops would just get it all lined up to the trash pile and then stand out there and holler to me, in the cab, “PUSH THE HANDLE”.  And when I pushed the handle in, up would go the dump bed.  It was hydraulic, as if you care.  All the trash would go falling out into the pile ‘o dump garbage, and then off we’d go.

Pure excitement.  Especially when we stopped at the gas station on the way home for breakfast.  (Read: Pepsi and a Snickers.)

Fast forward, like, ten years to when Joey and I bought our first house.  The day after we closed, we started ripping out trim and carpet.  We threw it out back in the yard.  After three weeks of this, the pile kept getting bigger and bigger.  Eventually, a destroyed refrigerator and mangled up dishwasher were added to the yard.  Oh, and let’s not forget the massive pile of broken down boxes and styrofoam filler that were overflowing off our front porch.

If ever the term “white trash” applied to Joey and I, it has been over the last week.  Because we are white, and our yard was full of trash.

In fact, I have seen one of our neighbors walking the fence row between our yards, inspecting the growing piles of trashes in our backyard looking stressed about the low quality kids who moved in next door.

This morning though?  Pops showed up with a U-Haul trailer.  He drove that trailer back into the yard and we filled that entire thing up with all the trash in our yard, including the dishwasher and refrigerator.  Then we took it to the dump.  They made us pay $100.00 to get rid of that junk, but it is gone and done and smashed by the big yellow smashing machine that has a name, and I can’t think of it.  It’s not even exclusively used at dumps, they use it to dig holes in the ground. (HELP.  Does anyone know what those are called?)

I tried to pay for the dump run, but Pops said, “why don’t you just buy us doughnuts later.”

So then we met up with everyone at Dunkin Donuts and everyone else tried to pay for the doughnuts.  But I prevailed, I tell you.  I slapped down my Amex and told the lady behind the register (who looked like she could not wait to see us leave her restaurant we had caused so much trouble) that she would be taking MY card and no one else’s.

It worked.  But it was only $16.00, so I think somehow I still came out ahead on this somehow.

Now it’s lunchtime.  Everyone else is eating and they’re like, “Where’s Jenna anyway, she was the one who was hungry…” and the reality is I am here, sitting in the comfy chair blogging this post before all the words fall out of my ears and I forget what I was going to say.  Blogging for me is like expensive chocolate. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I think it’s all out of my head now.  And I look at this and I think it really wasn’t worth holding off on eating lunch for either.  Absolutely 0% of it is profound in any way.

Par for the course.

Sep21

We’re in!

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We’re in!

906 miles, 2.5 months, 1 temporary residence and we are finally moved in to our house!  It is weird.

We’re unpacking boxes that were packed, in some cases, three months ago.  I’m pulling things out that I put in while packing with friends; I am remembering where we were, what we were talking about, and I keep getting all sentimental and teary-eyed.  Sometime I just miss Dallas because even though Joey and I both grew up in Iowa, Dallas is what feels like home.  We had to do more growing up there, in some ways, than we did in Iowa.

I didn’t really get “homesick” much until we started getting so much closer to actually moving in and getting reunited with our things and our memories.  And ya know, it’s not bad.  I’m glad to be here in Indy, I really am.  I just wondered when I’d get homesick and I guess it took this long.

Sunday evening, we were in an unpacking frenzy.  We set up enough furniture to sleep in beds and be able to eat breakfast in the morning, and then we all crashed.

And it was then that we discovered that the blinds for our bedroom window were AWOL. There had never been any on the baby’s room windows in the first place, which was where poor Mom was staying.  So there we stood, Joey and I, hiding in our bedroom hallway and trying to figure out how to get into our bed whilst wearing pajamas (which, incidentally, I had not been able to locate so I was wearing Joey’s Mountain Dew t-shirt, which really doesn’t fit so well at all anymore) without crossing in front of the big window that faces the street.

We decided it was impossible.

Joey slid across the wood floors to his side of the bed and dove under the covers while cars zoomed by outside.  I could see their headlights tracking patterns across our walls and I figured they were moving so quickly they wouldn’t have time to notice we had nothing whatsoever covering our window.

I followed his example, only much more awkwardly since I am rapidly losing my ability to slide and dive.

We decided to let Henry sleep with us since it was a special occasion and all, and we three lay there watching the car headlight patterns on the walls.  Joey was about asleep, but I coudln’t shut my brain off.  The last time we had seen this bed, these sheets, the down comforter, we were in Texas.  Granted, the mattress was on the floor in the dining room, but we were in Texas.

“It feels weird to not be in Texas now that we are reunited with our stuff,” I whispered.

“I know,” Joey whispered back.  ”But we’ll get used to it.”

He’s right, we will.  I already like my Indy kitchen 100% better than my Texas kitchen, and the bedroom is growing on me daily.  It’ll feel more cozy once we can put area rugs down, but we can’t until Friday since we had the wood floors redone.  (Henry keeps diving off the bed and wiping out when he hits the floor, and I feel super bad for him.)

Alrighty then.  Mom and I need to go to the store to buy toilet scrubbers because I threw mine out in Texas.  I just felt like the level of disgusting would exponentially increase if I packed them and then stored them for several months, and I was pretty sure toilet scrubbers would be sold in Indiana.  So…yeah, my toilets are gnasty but I can’t clean them because I’m not putting my hand in the toilet water.

No sir.

I’m not doing it.

Sep17

A Lucky Break

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A Lucky Break

About 3:00 this afternoon, I headed over to the house to start working on painting cabinets.  I had a bunch of stuff in the car that has been banging around in the back since, like Monday, so I started unloading as soon as I got there.  Unfortunately, there was this gargantuan bee resting on the top of the doorframe to the house, so I kept freaking out that he was going to fly down and sting me whenever I went in with a load.

I forgot the new bathroom mirror, toilet paper holder, and sack of light bulbs outside the car.  Whoopsie.

I worked and worked until about 10:30, when I decided neither I nor my tailbone could handle scooting around on the floor any longer to paint the outside of the cabinets.  I had already painted the kitchen (Joey did the ceiling) and Angel had been helping me with the cabinets so tons of progress had been made.  Enough so that I felt good about leaving and then coming back tomorrow to finish.  Or, at least get closer to the end of the project.  I am finding that the word “finish” is a totally relative word when it comes to home improvement projects.

So at 10:30, I dragged myself out to the car and carefully backed up so as not to hit the large tree that both Joey and I have nearly backed into at least once each.  I crept forward so I could turn around easier, and it was then that I felt like the wheels on my car were crunching things.

Weird.  The more I went forward, the more crunching I felt.

I decided I should get out of the car and make sure I wasn’t smashing a kitten or something like that.  Horrors.

No, no, it wasn’t a kitten.

It was the mirror, the toilet paper holder, and the sack of lightbulbs.

My first thought was OH CRAP, I AM SO DEAD WHEN JOEY FINDS OUT, and my second thought was, Wow…for having just been run over, they don’t look so bad.

I gingerly picked them up and carried them to the front porch where I laid them out and examined them.  Oddly enough, nothing seemed broken.  I shook the mirror (the most expensive thing we’ve bought for the bathroom) and didn’t hear any broken glass.  The toilet paper holder wasn’t too smashed, and the light bulbs were intact.

I love styrofoam.

And then, out came Joey.

“Um, all that stuff there? I just ran over it on accident.”

Joey rolled his eyes and tried not to laugh, and he and Chang started pulling things out of boxes and bags.  Chang discovered one broken light bulb, but the mirror (THANKFULLY) is fine, and so is the toilet paper holder.

“We needed that light bulb,” Joey said.

I know.  I know we did.  Next time I will try not to run over anything we buy.  Really, the goal is never to run over anything again.  It could have been way, way worse though.

Sep17

Energy…I have it.

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Energy…I have it.

Having the week off from being able to do anything to advance our goal of moving into the house on Sunday has been a mixed blessing.  First of all, I’m going bonkers because I haven’t painted anything since, like, last Saturday.  That feels wrong.  Realistically, the only room left to be painted is my kitchen, and we were waiting until some repairs were done to it before we slapped the paint on.  But it’s still driving me nuts.

The wood floor guys finished up on Tuesday afternoon, so Wednesday (the 24 hour mark listed in all the material), Joey and I drove over to have a look at it.

Guys.

The polyurethane still smelled SO BAD that I couldn’t even step foot in the house.  My eyes burned the second Joey opened the front door, so we both decided I would stay outside, hold my breath and just look in the windows, all of which were closed up and locked tight.  The lovely aromas were percolating around in the house with no where to escape.  We needed to open some windows now that the floors were dry and wouldn’t get dust particles stuck in polish.

Joey grimly decided he would take one for the team and run (RUN!) through the house and open as many windows as he could before his eyes caught on fire and exploded from his head like tiny supernovas.  He held a sock up to his face, took a deeeep breath, and DOVE through the front door, slipping and sliding around on our freshly refinished (and quite nice looking, as far as I could tell from looking in the window) floors.

A minute later, he burst out the front door, coughing and sputtering, and then did this nasty spitting thing all over the ground cover right outside the front door.

“Ewwwww,” I said, grimacing and looking at him with chagrin.

And then he looked at me with a look of, I don’t see YOU in there opening any windows while your eyes burn out of their sockets.

It’s true, he didn’t. And he woudln’t.

He took another deep breath, and whizzed back inside.  He managed to get two more windows open before calling it Good Enough For Who It’s For and coming back outside to repeat the gasping and spitting thing.

I said, “ewwwwww” again, just for good measure.

Also I patted his back and told him that I was proud of him for taking one for the team.

Joey informed me that yes, the floors look very much better than probably they ever have in their entire floor lives.  These floors are older than we are.  Heck, they’re older than our parents are.  There are still some stains on them, but they’re old floors so this gives them “character”.  And, when you think about it, most old people have stains on them too.  (Not saying our parents are old.  These floors are OLDER than our parents, so our parents are clearly YOUNG.)

Yesterday, Joey went back and opened up every other window in the house to continue airing it out so that our daughter won’t be born with three eyes and fourteen toes because we’ll have to keep smelling it once we move in.  I know, I know, most of that kind of development is already done, but if you had smelled that polyurethane stuff…it smelled powerful enough to grow extra digits and eyeballs on a fully formed anything.

He informed me that having a few windows open the night previous had made a huge difference, so I’m quite eager to get over there this afternoon and start my priming of the cupboard doors and maybe paint the kitchen.  It should be smelling fresh and clean and mostly just less toxic in there by now; I can’t wait to check out the floors and unload all the loot that I have been dragging around in the RAV-4.

(Concerned Relatives:  DO NOT WORRY.  If it smells bad still I will not go inside.  I know better than that.)

But all week long, I have been dragging around like a snail who upgraded to a larger, heavier shell a few months too early.  It takes me twice as long to go up stairs, to walk around, to make dinner, basically to do anything.  I’m still waiting for that stupid iron pill to kick in, plus the whole lack of sleeping thing is a bad combination.

HOWEVER.

Last night, Joey was like, “Seriously, you are a mess.  Go to bed at 8:00.”

And I was like, “8:00 is for geriatrics and small children.  Let’s say 9:30.”

So 9:30 it was.

I stopped drinking water about 7:00 (torture!!!) and was in bed by 9:30, just like Joey said even though he wasn’t home to monitor my behavior.  I fell asleep immediately and slept until 7:00 when his alarm went off.  And it was then that I realized I had only gotten up ONCE in the night.

ONCE!

That’s, like, NINE HOURS OF BASICALLY UNINTERRUPTED SLEEP!!!

I felt great.  I feel great.  And I’ll feel even better once I eat my breakfast.

Hopefully this level of awesome feeling energy continues throughout the day.  I want to knock out some serious work this afternoon and evening to get a jump on tomorrow.  I need to clean out all the window sills before we move in.  Can you believe the people before us appear to have NEVER cleaned out their windows?  It’s quite gross. They are covered in dust and dirt and full of dead things and cobwebs.  (I feel like I could write a reverse Raindrops On Roses song just about some of the things we have found in this house.)

But, first things first.  This morning, I am going to an orchard to pick apples and hopefully peaches.  And then I will eat about three peaches for energy.

Sep13

Impressive

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Impressive

I just have to brag on my husband here a little bit, guys.

In the last two weeks, since we closed on the house, Joey has embarked on about eleventy-billion DIY projects to get the house up to snuff.  I mean, it was livable before, it just hadn’t been cared for quite as…fastidiously as we would have liked.  And Joey felt like the kitchen was a dark hole and he wanted to have it be a more uplifting space, since I spend so much time there baking cupcakes and making dinner.

The projects we started tackling will make your brain spin.  (Makes mine spin anyway.)  We painted all the ceilings, all the walls, and ripped off all the trim work along the floors and doors.  Some of it was really banged up, and some of it wasn’t even properly adhering to the wall.  Turns out, the walls are all this old-timey plaster stuff, and there were big holes behind the trim.  So…Joey patched those himself.

There was old carpet in the bedroom we had considered replacing, but one of our friends discovered that there was hardwood underneath of it.  So…Joey ripped it up himself.

Without having never put any trim on any walls or any doors before in his life, Joey did research and figured out what he needed. We bought it at Lowe’s, painted it ourselves, and with some assistance from Gramps and another friend of ours, Joey installed all that trim…himself.

The kitchen?  Well, we did hire someone to tear out the soffit above the cabinets, because the ceiling needed to be re-textured and the wall behind it needed some attention too, not to mention the finish work on the cabinets so you couldn’t tell we ripped it out.  Joey could probably have done that himself too, but it seemed to make more sense to have a professional deal with ripping out parts of the cabinetry.

Today, though, Joey is sanding down the rest of the cabinets so he can prime them and paint them white.  DO NOT WORRY, we are not painting over gorgeous wood.  On the contrary, the wood is definitely solid…but it’s not pretty wood.  It’s just kind of brown.  So when they are white, the kitchen is going to be so fresh and bright and inviting.  YAY.

Incidentally, there is this product called Liquid Sand or something, and when I was doing a bit of sanding on the cabinets a couple weeks ago, I mentioned it to Joey.   It really speeds up the cabinet sanding time.  Joey said, “no way, let’s make sure we do this right the first time.  No Liquid Sand.”

Well.

This morning, the kitchen contractor mentioned the same product to Joey…AND HE WENT OUT AND BOUGHT IT.  He called me all excited to tell me about it, and I was like, Dude.  I told you about that two weeks ago and you shut me down.  What gives?!

(Honestly, I don’t even care.  Whatever will get the job done quickest at this point.)

I am just super impressed that Joey can figure all this stuff out.  He’s never had the opportunity to do any handyman type stuff since we got married, since we’ve always lived in apartments.  We called in maintenance to fix whatever problems we had, even though Joey always said he could probably fix it.  (We figured since we paid for maintenance, we were going to use maintenance.)

And after we move in on Sunday?  I like that whenever I look at just about anything in our house, it will remind me that Joey is 100% awesome at DIY projects, and he can fix up just about anything we need fixed up.

He’s a handy guy to have around, I tell you.

Aug22

Dear Blog,

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Dear Blog,

Hello.  My name is Jenna.  Perhaps you don’t remember me, and I can understand that.  IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME.  Since we moved to Indy, everything has been in flux.  The last thing on my plate has been blog-posting, which is kind of lame.  Incidentally, it’s about to get much worse as we are closing on our first house on Wednesday.

ACK!

YAY!!

A HOUSE!!!

I may or may not actually think to post pictures of the remodel process we go through over the next week or two.  I’d really like to, but I might forget.  Like all the other times I have been intending to post things on this blog and have forgotten recently.

Anyway.  That’s where I am.

I haven’t died. I’m just, like, busy and whatever. Oh, and I’m still pregnant too.  The end.

Love,

Jenna

Jul21

Two cars, two days

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Two cars, two days

So, like, we always are bragging on our Toyotas. “They NEVER break,” we gloat. And they never did.

On some other day this week, maybe Monday?, Joey called me from church and said I’d need to come and fetch him because…the car wouldn’t start.  POOR LITTLE COROLLA!  He’s only 4 years old!  HE SHOULD BE STARTING!!!  HE IS NOT OLD ENOUGH FOR THESE KINDS OF SHENANIGANS!

I had just gotten out of the shower and was making dinner prep, so I grabbed my makeup and drove up to church to rescue Joey.  On the way back home he drove and I systematically applied the layers of powder to my face necessary to make me not look quite so scary.

Apparently, the battery was dead on the car.  Like, not the kind of Mostly Dead from the Princess Bride where you can take a pill covered in chocolate and then slowly come back to health and vigor.  It was the kind of completely and totally dead where all you can do is go buy a new battery.

So yesterday, I was housebound.  Joey took the UHaul blankets that we had rented back to the store and bought a new battery.  ”$90.00!??!!!” he wailed to me on the phone as he was driving back to put it in the car.

Meh.  Ninety dollah.  Could be worse.

Joey changed the battery himself, something which I really hate when I think about because he always is telling me about how he can fatally shock himself doing said activity.  I really am not ready for him to fatally shock himself, or really do anything to himself hazardous.  Because he doesn’t have health insurance right now.

Oh, did I forget to mention that?  Yeah, we tried to get him a little policy to tide him over until after the baby is born and we can join up on our new insurance…but he got rejected.  (We are currently pursuing other options.)  He’s 27, not overweight, and quite healthy, actually.  If they reject JOEY…I’m not sure who they will actually accept.

Maybe kittens?  Puppies?  Pandas?

Obviously not humans.

This is off topic.  I am not discussing the woes of health insurance in the America, I am supposed to be discussing how our cars are being lame.

Summary on the Corolla: it works now.  Joey changed the battery and now everything is fine.  I guess batteries die after 60,000 miles, or so Joey tells me.

On the RAV4, which is still a brand new 2010 baby and only has about 7,500 miles on him…just about 2,000 of which were added driving to and from Indianapolis for interviews and/or relocation.  We’d been noticing over the past few months, though, that whenever we drive over a bump, speed bump, pothole, or really anything that’s not perfectly smooth, the shocks scream “HEY THAT’S NOT MY JOB!” and go on strike.  We go out of our way to avoid anything bumpy now.  And that’s kind of not the point of having an SUV, is it?

Also he has a whirring sound when we are braking between 30-20 mph.  (It could be the gear rack on top, but since we are both inside the car when it is driving at those speeds we can’t really tell.)

Since little RAV4 is still under warranty, I made an appointment with the dealer this morning.

I drove there and sat for an entire hour.

And then they told me that nothing was wrong with the car.  I guess it’s supposed to ride like that?  At least it didn’t cost me anything to have them tell me it was fine.

I related the diagnosis to Joey and he got all riled up and said for sure and for certain he was going to take it to an independent source.  We’ll see.  I mean, neither thing is a big deal at all.  Just don’t drive over bumps going fast.  And…turn the radio up to avoid hearing whirring.

Maybe it IS the gear rack not screwed down quite tight.  I’m too short to check it out though.

Totally weird.  We never have a second of any problem with any of our cars and then within the space of two days they both get all angry with us and start misbehaving.  Totally coulda been worse than $90.00, though.

Jul20

It made it!!

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It made it!!

Yesterday, our stuff made it to Indiana.  I was kind of shocked to see it, actually.  A week ago we had loaded it up on an 18 wheeler, locked the door and driven out of Dallas while glancing at it in our rearview mirrors.  It seemed kind of like magic that it was actually delivered and intact.

Just seeing my bamboo plant, couch and kitchen table made me feel better.  Since we have no home yet (well, aside from the awesome place we are staying until we find one!) we hauled everything into a back room at the church and are going to store it there for awhile.  The truck was unloaded in about an hour (compared to, what, the four it took to load it?), and there were so many people who came to help!

Once everything was all stored, it felt kind of crazy to walk around in the boxes of our stuff even though it’s not in a house.  It looked familiar, but not all at the same time.

Also, I was able to dig through some of the clothes boxes and locate two of Joey’s pairs of jeans…just not THE pair of jeans.  I still have no idea where that one is.  He’s wearing his second favorite pair today, so here’s hoping when we finally buy a house and unpack I’ll get a location on his actual favorite jeans.

I have a feeling my name is mud if I can’t find them at that point…

Anyway, it’s fabulous to have our stuff HERE!  Now I know that whenever we DO find a house, we will at least be able to have people sit on our couch.  And I saw my box of All-Clad, so my pots and pans made it.  I’m kind of dying to know if my Le Creuset pottery  survived…but no way am I unpacking those boxes until we move into a house.  Is too risky.

But yay!  Our stuff is here!  No going back to Texas for us!