Intermarital communication at its finest

Aaaargh! When I told Ken yesterday he should rent a car, I meant rent a car at LAX to drive home (rather than wait for the shuttle). He thought I meant rent a car in Portland—and he thought it was a really smart idea because it’s cheaper to rent a car there for a round trip rather than rent a one-way car here to drive there on Sunday.

So instead him arriving at LAX at 3 pm and being home by 5 or so, he won’t be home ’til the middle of the night. I have things I need to talk to him about before I leave at 7:45 am—things that are in the house. We have stuff to do.

We’re both laughing about it, really. Wow, we’ve never had that kind of miscommunication before. Guess there’s always a first time!  😀

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Things to Do Today (a scary list)

• move all the boxes around the living room so there’s enough room for a massage table
• get a loooooong overdue massage (like, two years overdue)

• do laundry
• pack clothes for conference and travel to OR
• box up rest of clothes for apartment

• filing
• box up everything on my folding table “desk” except what I need at the conference and on the road

• walk to eye dr for Ken’s medical files, and to dentist for both our files

• paint stair rail
• paint bathroom window
• paint media room wall where the sofa rubbed against it
• pull up tape and paper in downstairs office
• put up curtain on utility porch

• practice 10-minute reading for conference
• finish putting product into Square software for use at conference
• read workshop handouts (if time)

• work email
• ideally work on one of two stories due April 1

• (evening) point at everything left in house and tell Ken whether it goes to the apartment or into storage

• everything else I’ve forgotten to list here  O.o

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Weird Things Found While Packing, Part IV

Hot damn, I made it to Part IV!

What you see here is a GPS in the middle of the floor. The GPS in itself is not a Weird Thing Found While Packing, because Ken took fifteen of them to the electronics recycling place last week.

(For many years, he used this model for running motorcycle rallies. Because the GPSs were no longer being made, if one broke down, he’d pick up another on eBay and Frankenstein them together. Last long rally, he was running two simultaneously and had two spares in the saddlebags. So it’s not that weird that he had fifteen in various stages of repair.)

No, the really weird thing here is that the GPS is in the middle of the floor. It could not have fallen off the table and landed where I found it. It would have had to have leapt off the table, and those suckers are heavy, so I’m sure I would’ve heard it lemming itself to its doom.

Sadly, this story has an unexciting conclusion: when Ken got back from wherever he was that evening, he put the GPS there to remind himself to gather up the other fourteen to add them to the recycling pile

This is our clawfoot bathtub.

These are all the boxes that were in the bathtub when I got back from my workshop in Oregon.

The other night, Ken had been working super-hard moving boxes and whatnot, and he’d said on more than one occasion over the previous days that he wished he could take a bath. So while he was in the garage hauling large and heavy objects about, I took all the boxes out of the tub and cleaned the tub so he could have a nice soak.

And I found this:

At first I thought it was a piece of the old linoleum that’s under the new floorboards in the downstairs office, from when the house was used as the Jack and Jill Nursery. But then Ken looked at it and realized it was a puzzle piece.

I have never seen this puzzle before. I swear to you.

I don’t know where this puzzle piece materialized from.

Think about that. Sleep well…if you can. But if you hear the faint sound of children laughing…

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Help me, Internet friends; you’re my only hope!

I’m back home from my workshop, and house packing continues apace. Next week (I think), Ken will be driving a second truck up to Portland, leaving us with only what’ll fit in the back of an SUV (air mattress and bedding, clothes, laptops, etc.). Most of the dishes are already packed except for a few for everyday use; those will probably go and we’ll be down to paper plates, and of course pretty much all of the cooking implements will be going as well.

I’ve already been working through foodstuffs we have in the house, because anything in the fridge and freezer will have to be given away or tossed in the end. While we can take dry goods with us (we’ll be in a temp apartment for a few months at least), we won’t have the space to haul tons of ingredients, so I’ve been working through those.

Thus, I’m already having trouble figuring out meals. I don’t want to be ordering pizza and eating frozen dinners for the rest of the month, and I can get sick of sandwiches pretty darn quick. We bought some “fresh” Von’s meals and they’re okay, but waaaay too salty (and 3.5 servings really equates to 2 servings for us).

So I need suggestions. I’ll be making my usual vat of brown rice before the steamer gets packed. What else should I lay in like that? What are some simple meals that don’t take much cooking/prep, don’t need too many cooking implements, and don’t take a lot of ingredients…yet are still reasonably healthy?

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Weird Things Found While Packing, Part II

Yay! A Part II!

This is our grandfather clock, which never worked, but hey, it’s groovy. It is not a weird thing found while packing.

I don’t know why the photo is blurry, but I really don’t have time to take another.

Anyway, the stuff that normally lives on top of the grandfather clock—a big green ceramic pot with a squirrel on the lid from Korea, a brass bell from Korea, and a little gargoyle—have already been packed. I looked down from the stairs and noticed some small bumps where the gargoyle had been sitting. So I went down and ran my hand over the top of the clock.

This is what I found:

That’s right, a pair of googly eyes. We have been #vandaleyezed. Ken swears he’s never seen them, but how did they get on the corner edge where the little gargoyle had been sitting? Did the gargoyle poop out googly eyes?

When I was little, I was terrified by (and yet curiously attracted to) a book by John Bellairs called The House With the Clock in Its Walls). (I still own it, and it still freaks me out. The cover is seriously weird. Hang on, let’s see if I can find it online. Yes! This! Is that not creepy?) (On the plus side, the interior drawings are by Edward Gorey. <3 )

Anyway, now I’m wondering if the grandfather clock is watching me. We may have to leave it behind…

Weird Things Found While Packing, Part I

At least, I hope this is Weird Things Found While Packing, Part I, because I’m looking forward to finding more weird things.

I found this on my home office desk, but it turns out Ken found it in a book and put it on my desk, but it’s still weird. And hilarious. There’s a sticker on the back indicating it’s from Ex Libris Hay-on-Wye, a town in Wales of 37 (at the time we left) new and used bookstores. There’s a bookstore in the castle, and it was one of my favorite places in Wales. I took everybody who visited us there. I even had a favorite restaurant there. And the drive there was gorgeous.

I also found this on my work desk, and I have no idea what this is. I mean, I know what it is, insofar as it’s a Post-It Note with pairs of numbers scribbled out, until that final number. But I have no idea what those numbers represent. I feel like I should call a codebreaker. Or was I trying to break a code? It’s just weird, man.