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I Return Victorious, more or less
Monday, Aug. 31, 2009
4:19 p.m.

Didja miss me?

My computer has done its Jesus impersonation (broken power supply, I was right), and I'm writing to you from a brand new location.

Yep, we're all moved. The house isn't ours yet, but once we get things all taken care of with the bank, it will be. Um, no, the seller can't supply several thousand dollars because the seller doesn't have several thousand dollars. She is an old lady in a nursing home. The nursing home is clamouring for money because she still has this asset that won't allow her to go on Title 19, which is why the house has to get sold. My uncle is passively unconcerned with the nursing home's troubles, they have to keep her.

And here my troubles begin. About 50% of the stuff in the house was dealt with. We have the detritus. Unfortunately, most of that is still valuable or holds sentimental value for my grandfather. Why should this matter? Well, it means that I can't exactly throw it out.

We have a big scab dish. It looks like a big nasty scab. I pulled it out of a drawer and thought it had "Goodwill" written all over it. Then I turned it over. Majolica. Damn. I Googled it. Turns out it's a begonia leaf, not a scab, and it's valuable. Nothing that ugly has any right to be that valuable.

Craigslist, you say? Ebay? Nope. Technically, we can't sell anything because the money is still my grandmother's, aka the nursing home's. No one else wants the stuff, that's why it's still in the house, but I'm stuck with it. That and my father would probably be furious. If it was in the house and isn't junk, it was important to someone at some time. He can't bear to throw stuff out, and while I agree with him on principle, I'd kind of like the space.

The house has a full finished basement full of cupboards, and my first inclination is just to start filling them. The trouble is that they need to be cleaned out first, and the basement still needs to dry out. It's been nearly five years without the constant running of two dehumidifiers. The one we have runs pretty much constantly, pulling out about a gallon of water a day.

I await our first electric bill with trepidation.

So, that's the house. It's getting put together slowly. Hopefully it will be livable by Halloween and comfortable by Christmas, but I have some doubts on that score. Part of it is that I really need some help from The Boy who is terribly busy with work. If he's not terribly busy with work, he is recovering from being busy.

He was hired by the community theatre. He's been having something of a time getting everything built and put together, he needs capable volunteers and they're sort of scarce. He gets a lot of people who want to help paint who are scared of saws. Or he has a bunch of older fellows who are good with carpentry, but not so much with heavy lifting. It's coming together, but it's wearing him out.

My job transferred. I wonder if they think it would've been easier to hire someone entirely new and go from there rather than fix all the things I was either not taught at all or taught incorrectly. The manager here is a trainer- she knows how things are supposed to be done, and it's very, very obvious that my previous manager was phoning it in the entire six months she was there. The subsequent manager never had manager training. (From what I hear, things are falling apart back there.)

But it's not bad. Once I stop having nightmares about things going horribly wrong, everything will be fine. They're not really nightmares, just crappy dreams from which I wake up uncertain if it was something that really happened or not. The only jobs about which I haven't had dreams like this have been theatre related. Apparently, I'm confident in my abilities there.

Well, it's late sweet corn for dinner tonight. I understand that the fields here are 12 days behind schedule. There's no way to catch up from that kind of thing, especially since the weather has turned cool and overcast and the rain keeps coming. Mowing the grass weekly this late in August usually doesn't happen. I've noticed leaves already starting to turn.

I'm really hoping for a mild winter; our driveway is probably 300 feet long and we have one shovel. I don't know how much my grandparents paid the guy with the plow to do the drive for them, but I don't like to guess.

The pizza delivery guy said he was jealous of the lawn when he drove down the other night. Then I told him that all he saw was the front half, and he changed his mind. I intend to plant most of the gardens with perennials so that it doesn't need a lot of babysitting. Then a huge swath of yard is going to be vegetable garden. I intend on sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, maybe potatoes, possibly cucumbers for pickles, maybe jack o lantern pumpkins. Stuff that will either freeze or keep.

I've argued for a goat to keep the lawn down, or at least some chickens (eggs, chicken!), because we certainly have the space, but I can't get The Boy to agree with me. What kind of fun is he, anyway?

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