Might be nice if they’d let us sit here once in a while too.

(Click the image for a larger view – there’s three cats in that picture. Hint – one of them only has the tail visible).

Updated to include new picture (from Richard) demonstrating that the size of the couch is actually ‘four cats’ wide (from left to right: Azzie, Tangerine, Sebastian, and Rosie – Checkers and Zucchini tend to hang out mostly downstairs).

So. Harry Potter. I have read book seven (Deathly Hallows – and I will not spoil a single detail of the plot on this site, so don’t panic) . And I am satisfied. Not necessarily surprised by anything in the book, even the parts that were probably supposed to be big surprising twists, but I didn’t mind simply having all my hunches confirmed.

We’d debated waiting til Saturday morning to get our book, but we both decided that the chances of us going to a midnight book release party again (or, for that matter, caring enough about any other book to even consider a midnight book release) were pretty much nonexistent. So Richard picked up our armband for our place in line to get our pre-reserved book Friday morning at the Borders in Davis. By the time he got there, at about 11-ish, we were #281 in line. By the time we got there at shortly before midnight, people were still picking up armbands, and they had at least six groups of 150 people each already assigned. It was kind of a mob scene. Not as many people in costume as I’d expected – although there were a bunch of (very sleepy looking) kids in wizarding robes, so that was cute.

Anyway. We got our copy by about 1 am. I started reading while standing in line waiting to pay, and continued reading on the drive home. Richard went to bed, and I stayed up and finished the whole thing by a little before 4:30 am. Considering the longest of the series took me about 5 hours to plow through the first time I read it, 3 1/2 hours isn’t bad at all.

Richard’s been reading it on and off ever since, and I am doing my very best to just stay out of his way (although I admit to occcasionally wandering by to ask how far he’s gotten). Unfortunately for him, he didn’t get to just sit down and read it Saturday morning. I’ve been pushing pretty hard to blitz through as much of the remaining flooring as possible this weekend, because I am so incredibly sick of it not being done, so we spent about four or five hours yesterday afternoon finishing off the guest room, the guest room closet, and most of the hallway. We also discovered just why it is that they claim laying laminate flooring yourself is so easy. If that’s all the square footage we wanted to do, we could have slammed that down in less than a day. It was all the weird angles and curves and the sheer size of the space in the master suite that made all the previous floor-laying so annoying. There are only two small areas left to finish, and those have to wait until we figure out what to do about transition strips between laminate and tile, but the bulk of it is done, and it is finally feeling as if maybe there is a light at the end of this tunnel after all.

In between reading and flooring, we also went and got haircuts, and then finally swung by the Sacramento Food Co-op on the way home, since we’d yet to go there since we moved in. It looks like it’s got the same kind of stuff as the one in Davis, which is nice, and it’s definitely within biking distance (when we ever emerge from the quagmire of flooring and unpacking enough to inflate our bike tires and track down our helmets and actually purchase some baskets and locks). And it provided dinner in the form of lowfat hummus and naan, with a side of edemame from Trader Joe’s just to round things out.

Today I am really hoping that we can unpack and/or rearrange enough of the remaining boxes and random stuff so that the living room, dining room, and kitchen can be cleaned. The kitchen is especially important since we’ve got people coming over Tuesday afternoon to look at it and (hopefully) give us some ideas for how to transform it from its current state of ‘quite horrible’ to something far more functional in the near future. I am also returning the table saw to my knitting mom, because she’s going to be starting a new flooring project of her own later this week. I have conveniently arranged a little impromptu knitting meet-up with her and a few other knitting friends to make this happen, thus giving me an excuse to get out of the house, try to catch up on my lace knitting, and most importantly, leave Richard alone so he can finish reading Harry Potter in peace.

In all the excitement over Harry Potter, and the drive to deal with the laminate flooring, it probably has not been the typical sort of weekend one might imagine if one were going to celebrate a wedding anniversary. But in a way, getting that flooring done, and finally finding out what happens to Harry and Hermione and Ron and all the others in that little world, is just the kind of celebration I wanted. Six years ago yesterday Richard and I were married, and through all the craziness and drama of jobs and house stuff and cats and health and and everything that we have gone through since then, I still know with absolute certainty that it was the very best thing I have ever done.

Shortly after we moved in, we had a contractor come out to take a look at the house – the same guy who did such an awesome job installing the porch railings and fixing the interior cracks in the wall and ceiling and redoing all the warped trim on the old house. One of the things we discussed with him was what it would take to take care of all the old single pane windows on the second floor. The downstairs windows are all new double pane windows, simply because the lower floor is newer anyway, but most of the windows on the second floor are still the original rope pulley single pane type, and we were worried about energy efficiency, especially heat loss during the winter. So he went off to calculate out some estimates for all the work we want him to do (which also includes another high priority item – repairing the rotting portion of the back deck) and to figure out what would be involved in replacing the windows with custom built retrofits, which would minimize the impact on all the gorgeous molding around all the windows.

It just hasn’t been sitting right, though, this idea that we have to get rid of all those gorgeous vintage windows for the sake of energy efficiency in the winter. So when I realized that, aside from those few days during the first week of July, when it was over 100 degrees and we were working on the floor downstairs and really needed the extra cooling, we have yet to turn on either air conditioner, I started to ponder whether we really needed to do this full window replacement, or if there was some other alternative. And then I turned to my very best internet friend – Google – and discovered that, in fact, there is most definitely another alternative: internal storm windows. Turns out they’re a fairly popular item among people like us – owners of old houses who really want to preserve the integrity of the house and avoid losing any of those classic features, but still would like to stay a bit more cozy inside when it’s cold outside.

So at this point, swapping out all the windows upstairs is no longer on the agenda. It’s possible that at some point, we may change our minds – as windows break, or worse, if one of the rope pulley systems ever fails – but Richard and I are feeling a huge sense of relief right now that there’s a way for us to hang onto at least one more part of the house’s history.

(Warning – entry is image-heavy. Click thumbnails for full sized versions of the pictures.)

We learned something very important this year, my sisters and I. In the past five years we have done this, some of our Sisters Only weekends have been extremely well planned out; others have been no more planned than having a place to stay. And the ones where we have no plans other than where to lay our head at night have been, hands down, the ones where we have the best time, and where we are most likely to end the weekend barely speaking to each other.

This weekend was one of those kinds of weekends. Our only plan for the weekend, prior to the three of us actually showing up in one place, was that we would go camping. When we found out that you can stay in a yurt in the campgrounds and parks in Washington, that pretty much clinched it for us. Yes, the sole reason we stayed in a yurt was simply to be able to say we were staying in a yurt (or rather, we were ‘yurting’). In case you are wondering, a yurt is nothing more than a tent cabin that happens to be round. But still, it was fun, and because it was a bug-free space with actual beds and electricity (even though the bathrooms were a short hike away and we cooked all our food over an open fire), we decided this was about the level of ‘roughing it’ we liked.

My older sister drove down Thursday night and picked me up, and the two of us then went directly to the airport and hopped on a plane to Seattle. My younger sister met us there, with our niece, who was pretty much bouncing up and down with excitement – a combination of getting to see her aunts, plus getting to stay up way past her bedtime to go to the airport with her mom.

Thursday night we spent at my sister’s house, and Friday morning, after a breakfast of homemade scones, we loaded up the car and the three of us waved goodbye to her husband and her daughter, and we were off. We stopped twice along the way – once to get groceries, and once at a rather picturesque restaurant for lunch (where we took the picture to the right – one of my favorite pictures from this weekend), but otherwise we pretty much drove straight down the freeway until we reached the park where we were going to stay. Because the park was right across the road from the Mount Saint Helen’s Visitors Center, we decided that this would be the Year of the Volcano. And so the Fifth Annual Sisters Weekend began.

It was a wonderful weekend. We slept in late on Saturday morning (and woke to this gorgeous view through the skylight of the yurt). We learned that there are some things that should never be cooked over an open campfire (Jiffy Pop popcorn, and Poptarts) because the added smokey flavor is *not* a tasty new treat. We were completely chewed out by Douglas squirrels. We made a note to bring along a camp stove next time we do this. We had s’mores two nights in a row.

We drove up to Johnston Observatory, stopping at a few other interpretive centers and visitors centers along the way and were awestruck by the sheer amount of the devestation from the volcano, plainly visible even after 27 years. This picture looks, at first, like a rather unattractive river, until you realize that it only *used* to be a river; that the massive volume of lava and mud literally boiled away all the water and filled the river bed, effectively creating new lakes where rivers used to be.

We saw the volcano, which is still active and still smoking, and working through the interminably slow process of dome building. It lost nearly 1000 feet in the explosion. They estimate it will take over 100 years for it to regain its height. Considering this is as far as it’s gotten in 27 years, it looks like 100 years may not be long enough.

The mountain itself is surrounded by landscape that looks more like we should have been looking out over a desert than over land that was once green forests as far as the eye could see. They’ve reforested a lot of the blast zone, but there’s a lot of it that’s been left just to recover on its own. The hills are littered with fallen trees that were scorched white from the heat, and even after a quarter of a century, the land is still more gray and empty than green.

Because we had decided that this was the Year of the Volcano, and because we have made it a tradition to do something a little crazy each year, Sunday morning we decided to go hiking through a 2000 year old lava tube: Ape Caves.

The picture to the left shows the entrance. Notice the distinct lack of anything resembling lights. There is a little ranger station next to a parking lot a very short hike away from the entrance to the lava tube, but aside from a few signs posted reminding people to wear warm clothes and bring flashlights or headlamps, visitors are on their own.

We got up early Sunday morning in order to have enough time to explore the lava tube before having to head off to the airport, which meant we only had time to do the shorter Lower Cave route (that link shows a few better pictures, and maps of both the upper and lower legs of the lava tube). Luckily we had two headlamps and a flashlight with us, although none of those lights were particularly strong, so it was kind of odd to be traipsing about inside the cave with only dim light to see where we were going. We pretty much relied on the flash of the cameras to illuminate the pictures we were taking and hoped they’d turn out. Not many did.

The Lower Cave goes in about three quarters of a mile and then narrows down til you cannot go any further. We got there pretty early in the morning, and thus had the cave pretty much to ourselves, which was a bit on the spooky side. We met two or three other groups of explorers as we headed down, but for the most part, we were on our own. It’s quite cold in the caves, and the flooring was pretty uneven for most of it, and we very quickly all agreed to one important rule – no one was allowed to twist their ankle or otherwise be unable to walk until we were on our way out and the entrance in sight, because when you are down there in the dark, you feel very, very, very alone.

There was a lot of traffic on the freeway driving back to the airport so we were a little nervous about time, but it turned out just fine. We hugged my younger sister goodbye, and my older sister and I zipped through security and checked in and found our gate and boarded our plane, and the flight home was thankfully uneventful. And I arrived home to discover that Richard had been very busy while I was gone, setting up our computers in the office (since the DSL *finally* kicked in Thursday afternoon), and unpacking enough of the dining room so that there is space for us to walk, and to sit and eat at the table like adults. It was a lovely weekend and my sisters and I had an absolutely wonderful time and I think maybe we might try this whole camping-in-a-yurt thing again (although in a different location, just so we’ve got new stuff to do), because it worked out so well.

I lost it last night. Just a little. It all kind of hit me at once, standing there in the bathroom trying to unpack at least one damn box for the day – the fact that the flooring is taking a lot longer than we’d anticipated, and we’ve barely managed to unpack anything as a result; the fact that there is just so damn much to do on this house that’s on the list marked ‘high priority’; the fact that we have not yet sold our old house; the fact that most of my clothes are still in bags and suitcases in a pile because I still don’t have the shelves installed in the closet; the fact that the house is a complete and utter disarray and I cannot find anything because it’s still in a box somewhere and I just cannot stand living in this kind of condition for long periods of time. And what makes it even worse is that my hands and my arms are so sore from dealing with installing flooring, and cleaning the old house, and lifting and hauling boxes and on and on, that I can barely lift anything at all right now – even the lightest of boxes requires two hands because if I use just my right hand, my wrist starts screaming at me. It is all getting to be too completely overwhelming and every time I think we might have an evening to focus on just one thing, something else pops up that gets in the way, and the end result is that it just doesn’t feel like we’re making any progress; and what progress we are making just seems to be taking far too long to accomplish.

Last night I went back to the old house to paint several walls and do a little bit more touch-up on a few others. I got to play with painter’s putty because that little piece of baseboard just refused to go back on straight and I simply did not have it in me to fight with it anymore. So instead I used putty to fill in the cracks and cover up the holes where we’d bolted that bookshelf to the wall, and what do you know, after a coat of paint, you’d never know what a crappy job I did putting that stupid piece of baseboard back on.

I was supposed to go to a Church Council meeting last night, but by the time I was done with the painting and puttying and everything else, the last thing I could think about was having to go sit in a meeting all covered in paint splatters, without falling asleep from sheer exhaustion. So instead I went home, where the electrician was installing the pipe on the outside of the house that will act as the conduit for the two dedicated circuits he’s installing in the room that will be the office, and we put down another section of underlayment for the flooring and Richard tried again to reattach the door strips, with not much success, and eventually we just gave up. There was a program on PBS last night about synchronized swimming, which was fun to watch because it brought back all sorts of memories, so I scrounged up something from the freezer for dinner – good thing I tossed the remainder of the burgers from the Fourth of July in there – and we sort of collapsed on couches in the living room and watched TV and tried to pretend that the chaos in the house would maybe somehow take care of itself.

*(brownie points to anyone who can identify what song the title’s from, considering the song sums up pretty much how I’m feeling at the moment)

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.

The move is officially done. I have lost track of the number of trips it has taken, back and forth, and it wasn’t until the car was loaded with the last pile of random crap from the old house that it finally occurred to me that we could have saved ourselves a tremendous amount of time and energy by just renting a truck and doing it all in one shot. Ah well.

Still no DSL at the new place, but I suppose it’s just as well, considering I don’t know when we would have time to be poking around online anyway. I did not get home until nearly 9 pm last night, because after the house was emptied I stayed behind to do some cleaning. Looks like we’ll have someone in to give the house a top to bottom scrubbing later this week, but I knew it couldn’t be left as is in the meantime – not as long as we’re still trying to get the darn thing sold. It’s amazing the amount of dust that can accumulate behind large, heavy furniture pieces over the course of six years. So I vacuumed and I dusted and I wiped down all the bathroom counters and scrubbed out a few toilets and mopped the obvious scuffs and smudges on the floor. And then I dragged out some paint and the only paint brush I could track down (that hadn’t already been packed) and spent about half an hour trudging around the house doing some minor touch up. Not, mind you, that even this means that we are finally done with the place – the real estate agent has suggested we take down the paperback bookshelves in the master bedroom (I’m actually glad about that, because we’ve already been talking about building similar shelves in the sitting room of the new place, and I’ve pondered aloud a number of times that it would be nice if we could just take that shelf with us, so this saves us a lot of time and effort), and noted that we may want to consider painting a few walls where there were some very visible scrapes and smudges from years of being bumped or rubbed by large pieces of furniture.

So…sigh. Tonight we’ll do a few hours of flooring while the electrician is here finishing up the last of the wiring issues he wasn’t able to complete on Saturday, and then we will drive back to the old house, armed with our trusty tool box, and we’ll do our best to take down that built in shelving unit without doing too much damage to the wall behind it. Tomorrow night I’ll make yet another trip back, this time to see if I can get another gallon of paint to match the stuff on the walls, and also to meet the guy who’s going to come haul away the small mountain of trash in the garage, and while he loads up his truck and does his thing, I’ll spread copious newspapers all over the floor and see how far I can get on that painting. At some point one of us will also have to figure out how to reattach the molding and baseboard to the wall once the bookshelf has been removed – still not sure how we’re going to manage that – and I am sure that these are not the only things that are going to crop up on the old house in the next few days, and since I am flying out on Thursday evening and we have what promises to be a fairly long meeting on Wednesday evening, there is going to be very little in the way of sleep in my life for the foreseeable future.

We are moved in. The answer to everyone’s burning question, of course, is “no, the flooring is not yet done”, although we did finish off enough of the bedroom to have places to stash all the furniture that needed to come in, and considering all the weird angles and little jutting corners that had to be painstakingly cut around, that’s saying something. There is still a ton of stuff left in the old house; we didn’t get everything packed, but even if we had, the moving truck was packed so tightly I’m not sure they could have found room to stuff another box in there. I’ve lost track of the number of trips one or both of us has taken back and forth between the two houses since Thursday morning, but it’s been a lot. And we are not even done yet; tonight Richard and I finally finished the floor in the master bedroom closet, which had to be done before we emptied out the closet in the old house. So we’re in transit as I write this; first some online time, and then off to the old house to see how much more stuff we can cram into both cars before turning around and driving right back to Sacramento. We’ve stopped at a local coffee shop to take advantage of their free wireless and catch up on three days of email and internet activity, since AT&T, in their infinite suckitude, dithered around so our new ISP (who is thankfully *not* AT&T) couldn’t get our DSL set by Thursday, like we’d previously arranged.

The flooring is taking a lot longer than I’d anticipated. They show you how to hook the pieces together, and they sell you the flooring and a little kit that, they claim, has everything you will need. Everything, that is, except for a table saw, about two more boxes of little plastic spacers, and a whole lot of time and patience. Since the new house is nearly 100 years old, and thus the floors and walls are not so much straight and true as they are ‘close enough’, that means that wall edges are often problematic – either there is space under the baseboards for the boards to slip through, necessitating a small amount of swearing and the careful placement of lots of scrap wood, or the wall is just off-line enough to require endless shaving off of tiny bits of board to get just the right angle that will fit in the space without leaving a gap so large all the rest of the boards unhook from their cleverly engineered connectors. Thankfully my knitting mom has done this before, so she came over the first day and showed us all the little tricks the instructions never mention, and left us her table saw and flooring kit. A friend of Richard came over Sunday to help with the removal of all the carpet and tack trips and random nails embedded in the cement slab, and best of all, my dad has been here Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and Friday with gadgets perfect for figuring out all those pesky angles that had to be cut in the far-more-complicated-than-expected octagon shaped sitting room, and special drill bits needed to install the door strips in the cement slab, and the experience to be able to man the table saw and whip out boards in just the right length and width so Richard and I could focus on the task of scootching around on our hands and knees, snapping boards into shape, collecting random scratches and scrapes and bruises, and working ourselves until we are close to popping ibuprofin like candy from being so exhausted and sore.

It’s all been kind of a whirlwind since Sunday, quite frankly. It hasn’t just been the flooring; Monday evening the electrician came by and spent several hours crawling over every inch of the house (and the attic) figuring out what needed to be fixed or replaced, and this morning he was back, bright and early, and spent ten hours working on a huge list of stuff that needed to be done. Monday evening the contractor also came over and took a lot of measurements, mostly of all the single pane windows upstairs that are going to have to be replaced. Wednesday was the Fourth, and since it was our last in the old house, we had both families up for the traditional barbeque and watching of the fireworks from our back porch, and Thursday – a day so hot rumor suggests it might have even broken some records – was the day of the actual move, an effort which involved bringing the heavy armoire down from the second floor of the old house, and worse yet, moving the upright piano up an entire flight of stairs to the second floor of the new place. The fact that all 1300 (this is not an exaggeration) of our books had to also go to the second floor of the house probably did not help matters much either.

It’s been an exhausting and overwhelming week, but I’m starting to see a little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, now that the worst of the flooring is over and (I am hoping) there’s only about one more day of it left. I did a little bit of unpacking this morning while Richard and the electrician were off doing a marathon electrical supply shopping trip, so now at least there is enough unpacked in the kitchen so that, if either of us had the energy, we might actually be able to cook something. I suspect that every evening this week is going to be at least some version of the same crazy busy this past week has been, but Thursday night my older sister and I will fly off to Seattle to meet up with my younger sister for our annual Sisters’ Only Weekend and maybe, if the rest of the flooring is as straightforward to lay as it looks like it should, and if we can manage to clear every last thing out of the old house by the end of the day tomorrow like I promised the real estate agent we would, and if no one finds any additional surprises (like the burnt out wires on the hot water heater, or the discovery that all the phone jacks on the bottom floor are on a separate line, necessitating one of us to manually swap the wires over by ourselves to correct the problem, or discovering that when attaching the pipes of the washing machine to the wall, the faucets leak), maybe, just maybe, we’ll have managed to get more stuff unpacked, and more things arranged, and the house feeling a little less like a place in extremely discombobulated transition, and more like our actual home.

There is a small mountain of nearly 70 boxes of wood laminate flooring panels sitting in the downstairs bathroom of our new house, which was delivered this morning, and over 800 square feet of carpet that needs to be replaced between now and the end of the week. If we’re going to make the back upstairs bedroom the library we really ought to rip up the carpeting in there before we move heavy bookshelves in, plus that room is badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. We have appointments with an electrician and a general contractor on Monday to discuss some general work we need to get started (like that pesky knob and tube wiring, oh, did I mention we have that?), and I’ve got stuff I have to go into the office to do, and Richard has a big project at work that was unexpectedly dumped on them on Wednesday that has to be finished, and all this adds up to a whole lot we really need (or want) to get done before the moving van shows up on Thursday…..

…..so now would be the perfect time for me to come down sick with a cold, wouldn’t it. Why yes it apparently would!

Class ended a little early on Friday, and I helped that along by finishing all my labs during lunchtime, precisely so I could zip out of there as soon as possible and catch an earlier train home. The trip home was uneventful and Richard picked me up in Davis and we went home and I whipped together a sort of Shepherd’s Pie concoction for dinner, which turned out quite yummy (after three days away from home I was more than ready for any food that I didn’t have to order from a menu), and things were looking like they were getting back to normal, until my throat started hurting. By the time I got up this morning my throat was on fire; by this afternoon my nose was running like crazy, and the rawness in my throat was making me cough. Luckily we had some cold medication at home, which tided me over until we could pick up another box.

I cannot help but laugh at the irony of this (even while crossing my fingers that this stupid cold will clear up very soon); getting sick at a time when I need my full strength more than ever, but I am at least grateful that if one of us had to get sick, it was me. This may settle in my sinuses, and even if it is just a little summer cold, it’s going to be annoying to work around, but at least it isn’t Richard this time around. I can still heft boxes and lay flooring while coughing and blowing my nose. Hard to do the same when you are glued to your nebulizer and can’t breathe.

We are now the proud owners of two houses. If you look at that from a total monetary value (and ignore the fact that the bank actually is more of a proud owner than we are!), it seems quite impressive. However, as excited as I am to now be in official possession of the house in Sacramento, I’d be even more excited to be, at the very least, in escrow on the first house. Still, the adorable Craftsman bungalow in the wonderful neighborhood is finally ours, and that’s enough to make us a little bit giddy, despite any lingering stresses like ‘holy crap if we don’t sell this thing soon we’re going to be paying two mortgages’.

We had the final walk through Tuesday afternoon, an event which took some complicated scheduling, since we had to work it around jobs, meetings, and the ability for at least one of us to get to the veterinarian in time to pick up Azzie and Tangerine (who spent the day there getting teeth pulled and/or cleaned and costing us a rather astonishing amount of money in the process). I wasn’t expecting to get the keys Tuesday night, so it was a bit of a shock when the real estate agent showed up, handed us our keys, and said ‘Congratulations!’. We went back over after dinner, with my parents this time so they could get the grand tour. We’re already rearranging which room will be which, from our previous plans. Considering the official move date isn’t until next Thursday, we’ve still got time to do yet more virtual rearranging between now and then; however, if we now make the turquoise room the library, this means my plan to take my time ripping out the carpet and repainting the room have gone kaput. Ah well – the good part about the carpet is that I don’t have to protect the floor when I’m painting in there, and if we’re truly lucky, underneath it will be the original wood flooring (although that carpet is tacked down pretty tight, so I suspect it’s not going to be as easy as it might sound).

And speaking of ripping up carpets and putting down flooring, we tracked down the nearest Lowes to our new abode and went there on Saturday, and picked out the flooring for the entire downstairs. We’d been thinking of bamboo (more sustainable) but bamboo isn’t so easy to install yourself, and the flooring plus the installation came to a bit of a nasty sticker shock. Plus we know we love the laminate we’ve had in the current house, and when we started checking out their laminate selection we found not only a style we both really like, we managed to pick one that is on clearance. And the guy helping us – who happened to be a floor manager – discounted it even more, just to be nice. Of course he also noted that there is no reason for us to not install this ourselves, and got us to promise to come to his laminate flooring installation class next Saturday so we aren’t attempting this completely blind, and then set it up so nearly 70 boxes of flooring and all the acoutrements will be delivered Saturday afternoon. So guess what *we’ll* be doing starting Sunday morning? Luckily my knitting mom has had experience in this, having installed the flooring in her home office, so she’s volunteered to come over and bring her tools and her miter saw, so I figure our chances of at least getting the bedroom floor redone (and really, that’s the only room that *has* to be done before we move in) before Thursday are pretty good.

As for our current house, the contingent buyers have reluctantly backed out. They had 30 days to try to sell their house, and it just didn’t happen. I feel bad for them, since I’m sure the anxiety I’m currently feeling about selling our existing house isn’t half of what they’re feeling, not being able to close on ours, but now that the contingent deal has expired, we’re back on the active market. And the fact that there’s someone coming over to look at it tomorrow afternoon is a good sign we’re doing the right thing.

Anyway. Richard is so far the only one getting to traipse back and forth to the new house, since I rather inconveniently scheduled myself for a three day software training in San Francisco this week. Richard drove me to the train station in Davis at far too early in the morning on Wednesday and I took the train, and then the light rail, down to the city, where I was able to disembark just about right across the street from the class site. Very convenient and, despite the short delay right outside Richmond due to a fire somewhere near the BART station, it took me about the same amount of time to get here that it would have taken if I’d driven my car, but with far more time available for sock knitting, and far less rush hour traffic and associated swearing. My hotel is about a fifteen minute walk away, past oodles of snooty and expensive sort of stores and right around the corner from Union Square. The room is small, but it’s just me in here and I don’t need much space, so it’s perfectly cozy. There’s free WiFi, and a table low enough so I can use my computer without being reminded (like I am in most hotels) that desk chairs and desks were never designed with short people in mind. The bed is comfy and my room is nice and quiet and I have my choice of any sort of pillow I could possibly want (no really, they have a long list of pillows available, including one that plays music). There’s even a little lending library on the floor below me, so I managed to pick up a fluffy and mediocre mystery to entertain myself with while eating dinner last night.

Despite the coziness of the hotel, and the fact that the class has been mostly informative and somewhat useful, I am looking forward to checking out tomorrow morning, and then zipping out of the classroom the second the training is finished, to get back on that train and go home. We’ve managed to get a lot taken care of over the past few weeks, in preparation for this rather big transition that’s happening in our lives, but the number of things that still remain to be done to get us through this is feeling a little overwhelming and it will be good to have the work week done and behind me, and be able to focus only on our uncomfortable abundance of house.