Crossing the teas

I have packed up the tea cabinet.

This is a feat precariously balanced between AWESOME! and SUCK! because if I run out of my carefully set-aside packets of green tea in the middle of this move, I will not be held responsible for my actions. While I can wake up as early as the next bird to start working, I often crash at about 3:00pm and need just a bit of caffeine to jump my batteries back into action before I decide that the whole moving thing is just too much of a hassle, and maybe we could just live in the rented U-Haul for a couple days? (Not too much caffeine, or I’ll start acting like a five-year-old after Halloween candy, but with more tweak.) There is the easy way to move house, and then there’s the way that keeps Kathy from her mildly caffeinated elixur of goodness.

Things are moving along. I am sorting as I go, so as to not haul a bunch of crap I don’t want into the new house. I’m taking this as a sign of maturity and forethought, as it’s something I’ve never done before. In all my previous moves (seven of them, from going away to college at 18 up to moving into the current apartment at 24, once a year for seven years oh my god) I just threw stuff in boxes at the last possible minute and thought I’d sort through my crap when I got to my new place. Of course I didn’t go through the crap, I just stuffed it under the bed or into a closet or whatever passed for storage space wherever I lived. I was too excited to live in my new space and to hang my pictures and to put away my underwear to deal with boring stuff like the notes from past classes that I will never need but that I brought with me.

Not this time (for the most part).

Despite my essentially clutter-friendly nature, I’m really trying to keep my belongings out of my space and in whatever space I allow them. Following that, I’m really trying to keep the crap out of my belongings. If I don’t love it, it’s getting kicked out of the house. Posters that I got at a college poster sale? Gone. Picture frames I received as a gift that are not my style? Outta here. Notes from college classes? Seriously, I’m not going into politics or history, so I’m not keeping the PoliSci 341 notes any longer. My hope is that now that most of the crap is gone I’ll be able to better store my Actual Stuff neatly and securely, so that it doesn’t take over the living space. Any suggestions?

This is a mug shot.

I plan to document my … um, plan as I put it into practice, so maybe that will help keep me working on the clutter-free lifestyle I’ve heard is so fabulous. Watch for pictures, especially the early ones because this house we’re moving into has some fantastic wallpaper. And by fantastic I mean wacky-approaching-hideous. It’s going down.

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As usual, the universe has great timing

Things that have stopped working in my apartment, just before the big move:

The vacuum cleaner. It’s been dying a slow death for a while, but a week or so ago it finally gave up any pretense of functioning and filled the room with the smell of burning rubber. It wasn’t worth fixing, according to the repair guy, so of course we went and bought a shiny, spendy new vacuum cleaner. Because spending money is exactly what you want to do when you buy a house.

The microwave. It worked for me twice on Sunday morning, and by the time NinjaHusband got up to microwave his lunch, the damn thing was unresponsive. Makes me feel better about being an early riser. We’ve been going to our friend’s apartment down the hall to use his microwave this week, and the new house has a microwave already in it, so it hasn’t been too bad. Not laugh-a-minute fun, but not bad.

The computer. About a week and a half ago I was doing Things of Great Import on the computer (Raveling, probably) and the damn thing shut itself down and restarted itself 3 times within 10 minutes. Oh no. It continued to give us problems and I was convinced we would lose everything (what is this “back up your files” of which you speak?). Fortunately, our friends were getting rid of their damn good laptop that has like a million more GB than our desktop does, and we were able to transfer all our files off the desktop, onto the external hard drive, and then onto the laptop. I say “we” but it should be known that NinjaHusband did all the hard work. I just stood on the sidelines worrying.

The internet connection. I have no explanation for this one. The new laptop won’t recognize the … thinger. Cable? Ethernet? I don’t know. It does recognize wireless signals, so that’s a plus. I can internetize at work, at Panera, apparently at McDonald’s (though there are very few reasons I would set foot in a McDonald’s, and free internet isn’t one of them). Oddly enough, Borders makes you pay for their wireless, to which I say BOOHISS and am encouraging my Stitch-n-Bitch group to not pick Borders for our meetups again.

My digestion. Yeah. Stress hits me in the stomach, and has been for a couple weeks now. Can’t imagine why that could be.

The air conditioner. Birds nested in the air conditioner in late May and we, being the oversensitive vegan earthlovers that we are, couldn’t bear to forcibly evict the helpless little baby birds. The little baby birds grew into noisy, smelly bastardous birds and we told our landlords that yeah, maybe it’s time to kick them out and let us have our air conditioner back (not that it really worked that well in the first place). That finally happened after bugs started streaming out of the air conditioner unit, which was followed by the liberal application of Raid all over that wall. Landlords cleaned out the unit but haven’t installed a new one. So it’s hot. That’s the end of that story.

It strikes me as funny that the month of July should be so busy. Not just this year’s July, though it’s full of everything, but the month in general. Youngest sister’s birthday, NinjaHusband’s birthday, Mom’s birthday, wedding anniversary, blogiversary, we moved in together in July 3 years ago, we’re buying a damn house this year… and so forth.

Yeah, I missed my blogiversary yesterday. Hooray three years of blather! I was going to have a contest to celebrate, but my apartment looks like this:

and there is no way I’m digging through the boxes to find the prizes I have in mind. Maybe I’ll have a I-just-moved-into-a-house contest in a few weeks, when things are settled.

For now I’m going to keep packing and cleaning and hope that nothing else in my control stops working.

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We Said Yes.

Happy Anniversary, sweetheart.

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I had my suspicions

But I didn’t think I had this much yarn.

I started with this box …

… which holds the sock yarn and the laceweight, and some other stuff.

After it started peeking out …

… I started using garbage bags.

Witness:

And that’s not everything. I also have these bags full of projects…

(minus one bag with one project in it and my “knitting bag” with perhaps four projects in it)

And this stuff which somehow missed out on being put inside a bag:

Good god.

I know I said that my Ravelry stash wasn’t everything, but I didn’t think it all took up so much space.

I did find the following:
– my high school class ring, among stitch markers
– 5 different stitch holders
– my recycled sari yarn
– my metal 4.0mm 36″ circular needle
and
– a whole lot of scrap yarn. WHY DO I KEEP TINY UNUSABLE SCRAPS OF YARN??!!

Does anyone else find they keep extremely odd quantities of the tiniest scraps of yarn?

The remainder of the craft stuff (the dyepot, the dye colander, the dye, the needle-holder jars, the sockyarn basket, the purse handles, the needles, the random doilies, and the canvases) shall wait another day. I am tired and I deserve a shower.

Two more weeks.

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In which much is revealed

So, you know how I said before that I haven’t been knitting much and I didn’t know why? And you know how I’ve been kind of absent from the blog lately?

Yeah, I know why I haven’t been knitting or posting. I just haven’t told you about it.

We’re buying a house.

That is why.

The story goes like this: We’ve been looking at houses for months and months, finding lots of houses out of our price range and lots of houses in our price range that need to have lots of work done or be completely gutted because it’s vacant/it’s older/someone let the 20 cats use the house as a litter box. I was getting a bit depressed about the whole thing.

Then we started looking in the town just north of our town (they’re practically the same town, really) and were finding some nice homes that were in our price range. We found a townhouse that was recently vacated, needed a bit of work and was, mirable dictu, affordable. This house had been on the market back in April and had gone under contract, but the buyers’ financing fell through and the house went back on the market. So we offered. The same buyers from before were back in the mix and could (a) offer more AND (b) close faster. We offered a little more, but the other buyers trumped us (it’s not hard, we have nothing) and the pretty townhouse was on its way to being owned by these other people.

Or so we thought! We found out on July 3rd that these other buyers’ financing fell through again and that the seller was ready to accept our offer (not the original offer, of course, the one we bumped up to in order to compete with Non-Financed Buyers)! So now we’re in the process of getting our loan finalized, negotiating with the seller for a credit for some things, and zooming toward a closing date of July 31st-ish. Zooming, I say.

This is what the living room looks like:

And I am slowly coming to terms with how much crap I own. It’s ridiculous. We’ve set aside roughly 150 – 200 books to donate to the library’s upcoming book sale…
as seen here

and STILL have lots of boxes of books. I have packed about 1/4 to 1/3 of my yarn stash into a huge box (bagged first, to avoid dust and critters!), filled another 13 gallon garbage bag, and still have tons of yarn left to pack up. (If you are interested in helping me defray the costs of moving, avoid moving yarn I don’t want, and if you like mohair, please see my Ravelry trade/sell page for more information.) The coolest thing about this new place? I get a yarn room.

Any tips on packing? Moving? How to remove wallpaper (seriously it’s hideous) and choose paint colors together without ruining your marriage?

I’ll be posting sporadically through the rest of this month, and probably into early August. We’ll be getting a new internet service provider when we move so we can stop paying Comcast $70.00 a month for internet (“But it would be cheaper if you only purchased cable TV as well!!!”), so we’ll see how that goes.

Another goal to cross off the list. It feels pretty good.

And I forgot to say Happy Birthday to NinjaHusband. Happy Birthday!

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Happy Long Weekend

I’m heading out of computer range immediately after work today, so I don’t have much time to say anything other than the following:

One. I don’t have any new knitting pictures, but I have been knitting. Mostly the same stuff. And I have been rather spectacularly not finishing that baby blanket I mentioned… so I’ve got that going for me. Where is my creativity?

Two. We are hosting a passel (yes, a passel) of friends for the Fourth up at my parents’ house over the long weekend, and the past week has been full of preparations, procrastination, packing (thank gourd I typed that… I have to throw the camera in the bag), and purchasing groceries. I’m tired, but most of the busy work is done and all that’s left is to hang out with awesome folks and relax.

We’re camping in my parents’ backyard, but we’ll be using the gas grill and occasionally the kitchen to do our cooking; I meant to make vegan cheezymac and the delicious pie before we left, but other things got in the way and there we are. I’ll make them at my parents’ house tonight, before loads of people arrive tomorrow.

Three. Things of a nature which cannot be described adequately at the moment due to superstition and timing and not wanting to piss off whatever gods may be… things are getting better. There is light ahead. That’s all I’m saying.

Four. This is our new couch, which is comfortable and delightful and was generously given to us by my wonderful mother-in-law:

Five. If you celebrate it this weekend, I hope you have a great Independence Day. If you don’t, I hope you have a great weekend this weekend. I will be whooping it up with my friends, making them participate in an American Revolutionary War Trivia Tournament and an Indian Leg Wrestling Tournament for fabulous prizes! It is likely that I will also be feeding the mosquitos native to my parents’ backyard.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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