I've been a ba-a-a-ad blogger lately. Eesh--June 16.
Lots has been going on. Josh and I have been working madly to get his house ready for sale. While it's been going well overall, things are, uh, happening. It's like the house knows what we're doing, doesn't want him to leave, and wants to get me out of the way. Seriously--it's like a bad horror movie I saw once about a house that killed the family that lived there! With all the flooding a couple months ago we've spent a fair amount of time in the basement; we've installed two new sump pumps (impact drills are a BLAST!), and Josh, mostly, cleaned and painted the floors and walls.
JUST when we got done cleaning the floors I go upstairs to get ready for a shower. I use the toilet and flush it. I hear Josh yell downstairs. The capped-off drain has water coming out of it. What the... We thought maybe we broke the cap with the stuff we used to etch the basement. Josh paid a plumber to come in to put on a new $4 cap. ;-) However, he suggested the cap wasn't the problem, as there shouldn't be enough pressure to force the water out. He suggested the line needs roto-rooting.
During all this time in the basement, I was continually attacked by venting. Josh has a low basement ceiling and ducts that hang even lower. I have numerous scars on the top of my head now. I guess you could also consider that I'm just too stupid to learn to bend down enough.
Yesterday Josh put in the last piece of trim, completing the last wall upstairs. And not without a fight. The last piece needed to be cut at an angle, and of course the miter needed to be flatter than 45°, so we had to do lots of improvisation with the chop saw. My visual mind comes in quite handy for stuff like this, so it turned out pretty well--it just took an inordinately long time.
On my way out the back door at one point I caught my ankle on the corner of the storm door, and it put a nice little gash on my right ankle. Great--the house has already tasted my blood in the basement, and apparently wants more. Will I get out of there alive?
We met our Realtor, Connie, a few weeks ago. She's great. We planned out all the stuff we want to leave in the house for staging, and what's going--either into the garage, to my house, or St. Vinny's. I did all kinds of cleaning this weekend while Josh worked on other projects.
And this brings us to the big change: Josh is moving in to my house tonight, along with his two cats, Feliz and Maggie. So I'm doing something I've never done before at age 41: living with a partner. And we have to do the whole protocol on combining feline families; his girls will have to stay in a bedroom for a full month.
I've been so looking forward to out living together, because I'm really tired of having to cross town to spend time together. And I realized last week that there's some anxiety about that as well. I've been used to living alone (maybe with a roommate, but that's not like a partner) for many years. What will this be like? Add the stress of combining cat households and it gets more significant. That didn't go so incredibly well when Raja came to live here, and he and Butterscotch never were truly friendly--the formed a sort of detente.
So, after church we go back over to Josh's house to do more cleaning and moving stuff. There's more to write, but I'm starving for pancakes.
