le move

2006-03-13

Well, I'm back from my long weekend and was having a fairly good, if uninspired, work day, and then I got an email to inform me that our office is throwing a shower for our boss, because his daughter just had a baby girl. This email both dismayed and enraged me, for the following reasons:

1) HELLO, he's the grandfather! What the hell are we giving HIM stuff for?
2) We've already had 2 other showers for his grandfatherlyness, including one for his daughter, when she had her other baby.
3) How can one person in the office just decide for everyone that we're going to do something like this? If everyone is expected to bring a gift, shouldn't we be consulted?
4) He's the GRANDFATHER!! I'm not sure I can stress this point enough.
5) I have better things to spend my money on than to buy something for a baby I don't know, born to parents I don't know, with a grandfather I don't care for.

I got more and more pissed off about this today until I remembered that when rummaging through all my Project Supplies (this could also be called "craft stuff", but project supplies sounds more important) this weekend, I made note of having 5 white newborn onesies I had bought for someone's baby before realizing they were probably too small--I had already washed them when I had that realization, so I couldn't take them back. So there you go--I will print and iron words and/or pictures onto these onesies and call that my gift. Of course one of the words I iron on will be "illiterate", because I can't NOT use that one; it makes me laugh every time. I will think of words and/or choose funny pictures for the rest of the onesies, and I'm pretty sure it'll be the least cutesy baby gift my boss and his daughter have ever seen. AND it will get rid of the onesies I'd otherwise have to pack up and move across the country in June, which means this shower has become a win/win situation.

Speaking of moving across the country, two developments:

1) Francisco got a quote from a trucking company for the cost of moving our stuff out there (this wasn't a moving company, it's just a place that would rent us space in a shipping container), and it would cost more than $5400 to do it that way. Compare this with renting a 26 foot moving van, plus full trailer for towing the pickup, for $1600 plus cost of fuel, and you can probably deduce which option we have chosen. I think we'll be paying some guys to help us load and unload, though, because we've got some heavy stuff in our house.

2) Francisco has a friend who has a friend who owns a rental house in Ellensburg, and we don't know anything about the place yet, but Francisco sent the house owner an email to ask if, by any chance, the house would be free in June. She emailed back today to say that, as a matter of fact, it Would be available, and probably just around the time we'll be arriving out there. Francisco will email to ask for details about the house (location, amenities, rent, etc) and depending on the answers, we might just have ourselves a place to live. I would love it if that worked out; it would feel really good to have that particular detail taken care of. I know some people think it's weird to rent a place to live without seeing it first, but up until we bought our house, we had Only lived in places we'd rented sight unseen, and it always worked out great. So I'm willing to take our chances again and trust the Universe to not put us next to a crack dealer.

We've been thinking about our upcoming move a lot, if you couldn't tell. On Saturday Francisco rented us a storage unit (less than 1/4 mile from our house, so it's very convenient) so we could start packing stuff up and organizing ourselves for the move without having to have boxes sitting around the living room when we're trying to persuade people to buy our house. We've decided to have a yard sale, because we have tons of stuff we want to get rid of, and why not let someone pay us for it? The yard sale will take place sometime in early May. Yesterday Francisco and I (more him than me) took a bunch of stuff to the storage unit that we will definitely move, as well as stuff we'll definitely be selling, just to get it all out of our house, and it felt good to finally do something to prepare for the move, rather than just think and worry about it.

Otherwise this weekend, we hiked in the woods near our house:

branchy

...watched good television [if you don't watch Globe Trekker, you should], made food, including sushi yesterday, and oh, I finished that blanket:

baby blanket: done

You really can't see the detail of the blanket, but I'm not going to post the close-up pictures I took because they show how much cat hair was captured in the blanket during knitting, which I have to painstakingly pick out before mailing. This would not be necessary if our cats were red.

Song of the Day: Petra Haden -- God Only Knows, at Angels Twenty. I'm not a fan of the Beach Boys, but I'm Definitely a fan of Petra Haden; she's amazing.

I haven't talked much about Sharky lately, but it's a no news is good news kind of thing, in his case. He wasn't doing great in school for awhile, but through the magic of bribery he has improved his grades and is striving to improve them more to get the rewards which we're dangling in front of him. I used to think bribing kids to get good grades was Wrong somehow, but that was before I had a kid who really didn't care what grades he got and who was not motivated by any other means. Now I'm just fine with bribing him, because it works and doesn't cost us that much, so it's worth it. He's been practicing his soccer skills in the cul-de-sac just about every other day, and he's usually joined by all the other kids who live in the surrounding houses--he's like their King. He thinks he's really super good at soccer, and if he wants to think that, okay, but I have the feeling he'll get a rude shock when he actually joins a team. Sharky's still completely hilarious--he makes me laugh every day--and I love spending time with him when he's not being puberty-surly (puberty-surly is rare with him, but it does happen). He's happy today because a soccer jersey he ordered from ebay arrived, and Francisco just ordered him some new (apparently extremely cool) glasses this afternoon. The coolness, it is everything.

I go home now.

Love,
E |

cats-kittens

come over some time & see me - 2011-02-25
let's not say goodbye - 2011-02-23
the Rachel Zoe collection - 2011-02-10
I feel happy today - 2011-02-04
the tiny snow stalker - 2011-01-25

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