Every night when we come home, since we have moved in, one or the other of us pokes at a few boxes and manages to get at least one or two unpacked. At this rate, we might have the entire house unpacked by Christmas. Ha. The problem is that we’re both too tired to do more than that, plus things are in such disarray everywhere that it’s hard to know where to even begin. Until we get the carriage house repaired enough to serve as storage space, all the stuff that used to be in the garage is sitting around in piles, while we try to figure out where to store it for now. All the stuff that will eventually live in the guest room cannot go into the guest room until we have finished the flooring in there. Most of my clothes are still in suitcases and large bags because they used to live on shelves in the closet at the old house (I do not have a dresser) and we only took those shelves down and brought them back to the new house a day or so ago. Amusingly, what has been unpacked the most are things for the kitchen, and knick knacks, only because we at least have places to *put* those things.

The electrician was going to come by on Monday night but postponed one day, so Richard and I drove off to the old house to take down the paperback bookshelf my dad built for us, while one of the gardeners showed up with his truck and loaded up the large pile of random crap in the garage to take to the dump. So now the old house is completely empty, and except for the painting and the reattaching of that little piece of baseboard molding (which I found in the garage, so at least that’s one thing we don’t have to to track down to replace), it is done. We borrowed some straps from my dad (and added them to the rapidly growing list of things we need to buy) and managed to strap the rather unwieldy bookshelf to the top of the Prius, and then drove slowly, with hazard lights flashing, all the way back to Sacramento. We actually only had to stop once along the way to readjust it, which is far better than I was afraid.

The latest news from our new ISP is that we should have DSL up and running by Thursday. Of course, this assumes that there are no further screw-ups by AT&T, so I am not holding my breath. However, if it really is up by then, I suspect that while I am off with my sisters this weekend, Richard will be spending the weekend happily setting up the office and hooking up all the computers and tweaking settings in Linux or whatever and generally keeping himself in nerd heaven. If, of course, it is up. We shall see.

Last night Richard took care of the slow leak in the water faucets and hooked up the washing machine, which was wonderful because I really needed to do at least one load of laundry before I fly out tomorrow night. Alas, the dryer is not yet hooked up, but luckily all my clothes can just hang dry, even if it might take them an extra day to do it. Unfortunately I did not discover this until after I’d already started another load of laundry – this one of towels and sheets that can not be hung dried (no where to hang them yet) so I suspect getting the dryer hooked up will be on the priority list for tonight.

In the latest news from the flooring front, the electrician had to turn off the main power for a few hours last night to swap out a number of outlets, so we didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped. But we did manage to finish out the rest of the bedroom leading up to the closet and the door, so our bedroom looks much less like a construction zone, even if there is still bare cement exposed in front of the bathroom sinks. We will simply not speak of the state of the guest room, where the table saw has been sitting, nor of the thickness of the layer of sawdust which is currently coating everything in there.

I discovered this morning that we urgently need some nonskid strips on the staircase leading up to the front porch, since it rained a little last night, and I cleverly tested out the slipperiness of the steps by falling down the last three and landing rather painfully on the bottom one. No problem – Richard’s been making just about a daily trip to Home Depot (since it’s the closest hardware store), so tonight, when he heads off to pick up the hose clamp for the dryer, he’ll also pick up some nonskid stuff for the steps. As for me, well, what’s a few more bruises when compared to the rather impressive collection I’ve accumulated all over my body during the past two weeks. And until we get those steps taken care of, I think I’ll be entering and exiting the house through the lower level, just in case.