Tag: house and home

nothing that a little Christmas music won’t fix

So yesterday wasn’t about Elliot, it was more about me. I woke up feeling terrible (managed to catch whatever the kids had), and Greg ended up staying home from work to take care of the kids. I was able to sleep for about three hours during the day, and laid low for most of the rest of it. Thank goodness for caring husbands with flexible jobs.

I’m feeling much better physically today, but woke up still feeling a bit blue. But I just spent the last hour hanging out with Amy and listening to Christmas music. My house may not look anything like Christmas, but it sounds like it! It improved my mood.

Greg and Elliot put the outside lights up yesterday, and I hope we can get a tree up in the next few days.

I unfortunately missed my office Christmas party last night due to being sick, which was disappointing. But hopefully this means I won’t be sick at Christmas.

lox-flavoured cream cheese, ham and dijonnaise

I purposely didn’t blog yesterday because I’m OCD enough that I thought it might lead into a whole how-long-can-I-keep-this-daily-posting-going thing, which would just stress me out. I even googled “world record blogging”, which wasn’t too helpful, but I was curious.

However, I actually enjoyed posting every day (except the one time I forgot and had to get out of my warm bed), so I’m going to try to post more often. I’ve discovered that I can usually come up with something to say, and this move has certainly provided some content ideas. Plus, three of my readers have voiced how they will miss my daily posts, and since that’s probably half my readership, I may as well listen to them. Although I’ll have to ask them again in a month if they’d still miss me if I disappeared into the ether.

So…on with today’s post. Today I took Yoshi for a neighbourhood walk with Amy in the backpack. I wanted to check out Highrock Park (also referred to as Cairn Park).

My first nice surprise was how warm it was out. The thermometer outside our house read a balmy 17 degrees. I actually took of my jacket before I even left the house.

My second nice surprise was the park. Wow, Esquimalt is good to it’s dog-owning residents. Highrock is an off-leash park, and it was beautiful. It’s small (just under 12 acres), but there is a path to the top of a hill (elevation about 235 feet) that provides a 360 degree view of Greater Victoria. The link above provides some pictures that give you some idea of the view.

Most of the paths are paved, so very stroller-friendly, but there are lots of side paths with little rock outcrops that Elliot will have lots of climbing over. And there’s a big open field as well.

My third nice surprise was how close the park is to the house. I had walked to an entrance that was about a kilometre from the house, but as I explored the park I realized there were multiple entrances, one that is just a couple of blocks from our house.

I’m thinking I won’t miss Macaulay Point quite as much as I thought I would.

Oh, and the title of this post has nothing to do with the content. It’s just the ingredients to a bagel sandwich that I made for Greg tonight for dinner. We walked down to “town” tonight to watch the Esquimalt Christmas parade, so we did sandwiches for dinner. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I made his.

good thing the second list is longer than the first

What I will miss about this house:

  • Having the sunroom to use as a dumping ground and as a place for Yoshi to get his paws clean before coming into the house
  • The garage
  • The short walk to the dog park
  • Both our kids were born while living here, and it’s the first place Greg and I lived together

What I will not miss about this house:

  • None of the doors work properly
  • Having one bathroom
  • Nine stairs to the front door
  • Carpet in the bedrooms
  • Having to walk across cat litter to get to the washing machine and dryer
  • The leak in the sunroom
  • The broken seals in practically every window
  • The lack of wall space to hang pictures
  • The rats (okay, they are long gone, but the memory persists)
  • Drunk people on the street in the summertime, swearing at each other as loudly as they can
  • The loud furnace

T minus 25 days

I’ve officially started packing. I think Greg started a few days ago. We move in 25 days. Scary!

I packed 2.5 boxes tonight before Amy woke up. That girl’s been waking up about two or three hours after she goes to bed and I have to say it’s a bit annoying! She’s going to cut into packing time if she keeps this up.

Tonight we also wrote down a more detailed list of things we have to do in each room, which, if nothing else, made me realize the amount of work we have ahead of us.

It’s going to be FUN!

it does have a happy ending

The saga of the washing machine continues. It turns out the new washing machine drains a LOT faster than the old washing machine, and water was spewing out because the drain pipe was plugged. This wasn’t apparent until the new machine was installed.

I had Roto-Rooter come this afternoon to snake the pipe. He couldn’t snake it, so he ended up replacing it. All seemed fine, and he filled up the machine to test it. I opened the lid while he was still here, and the machine was filled with brown water. He insisted it wasn’t anything he did, which seems plausible as he wasn’t messing with water coming into the house, just out of it.

I called the city, and they had me run the tub for 20 minutes. I did that, and it’s now mostly clear. Clear enough to wash clothes, anyway. I’m not sure I want to drink it yet.

I guess it was just a weird coincidence. Makes me realize that I sure take clean running water for granted.

not quite there yet

It’s been two weeks since I’ve been able to do laundry in my own home. Our washing machine bit the big one, major symptom being water spewing out the back of it. Thankfully the basement has a concrete floor (and thankfully this is not our house).

We had a repair guy in who said it was the transmission, and wasn’t worth fixing. So we arranged to buy my sister-in-law’s extra machine. But that meant waiting a bit for it. The first weekend I went to the laundromat. Efficient but expensive. The next weekend I took six loads of dirty clothes to Nanaimo and spent Thanksgiving Sunday doing laundry.

We arrive home after Thanksgiving with the new washer, and Greg and Jim were pretty quick to install it, thankfully. Tuesday night I’m totally psyched about doing laundry in an almost new machine. I get it started, only to realize the drum is off center and I can’t use it. BUMMER. Greg and Jim didn’t know what was wrong, so I called the repair guy again.

He came this afternoon and got it fixed up for us. Woohoo! I got a load going and Amy and I oohed and aahed about how big the new washer is, how carefully it agitates the clothes, and how quiet it is. Okay, Amy didn’t care, but I was sure excited.

Twenty minutes later I decided to check out how things were going. I got downstairs in time for the rinse water to start draining, just before the spin cycle. I heard an odd sound…a sound of water gushing. Hmmm…not good. I checked out the back of the machine, and sure enough water is spewing out. Not out of the machine this time, but the hose. And yes, you have to wonder at this point how much water is already on the floor from the wash cycle draining.

Can I just say SHIT! at this point? I’m so frustrated. I’m pretty sure it’s just an installation issue, but why didn’t I get the guy to check it while he was here? Now I’ve got a washer full of clothes and water (again), and I’m back to not being able to do laundry.

Do you suppose a third service call from the repair guy would be free?

bustin’ out

I’m currently sitting in our office/spare bedroom/room-for-Amy-to-sleep-in-so-that-she-doesn’t-bug-Elliot-and -he-doesn’t-bug-her.

To get in and out of the office chair, we have to suck in our stomachs. And Amy is officially out of her bassinet, which used to be tucked into the corner. Now her playpen is in here, which of course doesn’t fit in the corner. So it’s set up for tonight, perched precariously on the futon until we go to bed, at which time we’ll place it on the floor. Because when it’s on the floor we can’t get to the desk.

There are alternatives. We could just leave Amy in her bedroom all night (she currently sleeps in there until her first wakeup, at which time she moves to the multi-purpose room so she’s not as disruptive to Elliot). But then we have to suffer the consequences of a grouchy slightly-sleep-deprived Elliot. Or we could move the playpen into our bedroom, but there’s not much room in there either, and she’s still kind of a noisy sleeper.

I want a bigger house.

it’s a freakin’ project, and I need a project manager

Greg and I have been discussing changing our grocery shopping habits. We’d like to try buying more local foods, and we’d like to eat a bit more organic, especially when it comes to produce.

I’ve spent too many hours over the last few days trying to figure out the best options, keeping in mind the above two goals, and also weighing the financial impact and the time impact (i.e. I don’t want to shop at four different places). It seriously should not be this hard.

The first version of the plan is to start buying produce and a few other items from spud! and start buying our meat from Glenwood Meats. These two places don’t fully meet the local and organic requirements, but it’s a start. The beauty of spud! is that I don’t have to leave the house. And we’ll try to go to Glenwood Meats once a month, when we do our Costco trip to counteract our positive impact buy disposable diapers for two kids. The remainder of our groceries will likely come from Fairway, because Greg works above one. Since we currently drive to Thrifty’s at least once a week, hopefully this grand plan will reduce our gas usage.

I just don’t know if it’s worth the time I’ve been spending menu planning, ordering food, writing grocery lists and scheduling our grocery shopping. If you’re going to go organic, shouldn’t you go entirely organic? Or does eating somewhat organically help? Ditto for local food. I suppose it does, but I still struggle with figuring out what the right thing to do is — ethically, environmentally, financially, practically, and from a health perspective.

birds

There seem to be way more birds in our yard than in previous years. It may just be that we are noticing them more because Elliot points them out to us, but I really don’t remember there ever being this many.

I’m not a bird fan — I’m actually scared of them — but there are these small grey ones that have beautiful red heads, and I’m actually going to do some research to see if I can figure out what they are. They are quite pretty.

There are also lots of little all-grey ones (swallows? starlings?) that take dust baths in our back yard, and then the usual crows and seagulls. And this morning I happened to be looking out our front window when two bald eagles flew right in front of it, followed by a bunch of seagulls chasing them.