The Watermelon Crawl

There is some truth to the saying "they grow up so fast". 2 weeks ago, Ashtyn was flirting with the idea of getting up on her hands and knees. Everyday a little more bold, working the arms, then the legs, then face planting into the carpet. By Monday of this week she finally put A and B together and came up with this.

Not too bad I thought. Then Auntie Kaylan stopped over and left her Coach purse on the floor one day and Ashtyn was all into that. Kaylan likes to think that Ashtyn is now into Coach. No Kaylan, her main focus at 6 months is eating, sleepin and messing up diapers in that order, but if you want to believe its the purse then so be it. Daddy won't be shelling out a truck payment on a purse anytime soon. Today, she'd really gotten into moving about. Evidenced by this video.
Crawling wasn't enough for her today. She decided to see how far she could pull her self up the stairs. She did make it up one stair before I grabbed her off.

Here is a pic of her pulling herself up on me.
We also had Thanksgiving at the condo. Here I am carving the turkey.

And a nice little family photo.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

The Snake Dance

Back in the day we used to do something at the football homecoming bonfire called the snake dance, where the high schoolers all joined hands and then ran down the streets of Sherwood and thru the businesses that were open. I think it was some kind of spirt/pep rally thing to get us ‘psyched’ for the football game on Friday and also gave us a chance to run thru the only 2 businesses that were open at that time of night. The Roughrider Saloon and the P&R Bar. I tried to explain the concept of the Snake Dance once to Katie, but she didn’t get it. I’m not sure I ever understood it either, but since I’m about 50 years older than her she doesn’t understand the concept of typewriters, rotary dial telephones or the US mail system either. Friends used to hate if your phone number was something like 990-0990 cuz it took forever for the dial to come back around and if you messed up you had to start the whole process again. Whatever. If it’s something that important you need to tell me, mail me a letter and I’ll get it in 2-3 working days……

Anyways, one of the things with buying a new, used house is that the previous owners often overlook things and live with it. Sometimes for decades. One of those ‘overlooked’ things at the condo was the drain system. Overlooked might be a kind term, forgotten or ignored might be better used in this sense. Someone needed to tell them that if Drano doesn’t work the first 7 times that more drastic measures were probably in order. Off to Lowes I go again to buy a drain snake!

Snaking drains is a bit of an art form and similar to the Fish Ponds at carnivals, throw the line in and hope you pull a good prize when it comes back – not the stupid Strawberry Shortcake temporary tattoo (it took me many years before I realized that the ‘bait’ for that game was a card that said boy or girl and that they were messing with me real bad).

I grossly underestimated the level of stink I would encounter the first go around although the fact that the plastic PVC pipe threads had literally fused together should have clued me in that it hadn’t been taken off in awhile or ever. Down the snake went though, hitting the bends in the pipes but still moving until a depth of about 12 feet, at which point I gave it a couple of twirls and started to drag whatever was on the end, up…….

Let me list a few of the things I would have rather smelled than what came out of that pipe.
1.) A rotting skunk carcass
2.) Raw sewage on a 110 degree day
3.) A rotting skunk carcass in raw sewage on a 110 degree day.

Needless to say the lid of the toilet went up just in case lunch needed to make a reappearance. It didn’t, but I did run down to stick my nose over Ashtyn’s week old diaper bin for some fresh air. I didn’t eat supper that night, or for the 12 hours for that matter and a new battle plan was in order. Gas masks, rubber gloves and if I could find it, that cream that homicide detectives rub under their noses before the go into a murder scene. Lowes didn’t carry that though. Too bad Engh’s Hardware in Sherwood isn’t closer cuz I bet Timmy could have found in row three between the Tupperware and the cattle prods.

Your "Bob Ross Memorial": Whiteboard pic of the month

Here is your November themed whiteboard pic o’ the month. Yes, maybe a turkey would have been a little more appropriate, but we’ve already done that. My apologies to faithful reader Rusty as he had suggested a Caribou, that may come next month instead. So in honor of deer season and the buck that I won’t be shooting this year here is a “Whiteboard Whitetail”.

Now the question – how old do you think this buck is? I actually took this from the ND Game and Fish calendar (with some rack embellishment). Here is the actual pic from the calendar.

Most people looking at him would assume, big rack, must be 6 or 7 years old. A few key features lead me to believe he’s not quite that old. He doesn’t have that ‘racehorse’ body of a 3 ½ year old, he’s lost a little muscle tone in the front shoulders. He does have the gentle slope to his back, indicative of a 5 ½ year old, but the eyes are still fairly well rounded and the chest line is even with the belly line, not sagging. The final clue is the legs, they don’t have the ‘too long’ look of a young buck or the ‘too short’ look of an old buck. This is a 4 ½ year old buck.

The hunting shows would tell you that he’s maybe a year away from his prime. Skeet will tell you to empty your gun and possibly wreck a truck over him.

The really long blog post

My original plans were to keep a running diary of the move out of the apt to the condo, but with the amount of work involved it was impossible, so you’re going to get blasted with one big blog post, a Novella of sorts. Feel free to get up now, go to the bathroom, get a beverage and maybe a 3 course meal before you start reading……….. Done? Good, now settle in for the journey from 4540 McKenzie Dr SE, Apt 9 to 1022 Pleasant St.

I’m going to break this up into ‘chapters’ so you can follow the flow.

Closing it down

2 months ago we set the closing date to be Oct. 27th and as that day got closet I started to wish we had moved it to be earlier. Getting packed at the old place with a 5 month old baby is tough, but at noon we were signing papers. The title company was nice enough to give a NDG&T pen to sign with and let us keep, so in essence it’s the most expensive pen you’ll ever buy. A ½ hour and 75 signatures later we were walking out the bank door with keys to the new place in tow. Harsh realities time had started in that we had now 4 days to get the new place ready and the old one cleaned out.

Different shades of Gray

After looking at the condo a couple months ago, we decided that we liked their painting for the most part and only needed to paint 2 rooms. Ashtyn’s room and the downstairs living room, 4 days later I think we had painted all BUT 2 rooms. We stuck to the plan for the first day and were just painting on the two we had decided on, but then Katie started noticing things that she didn’t like with the previous owners paint jobs, like the fact that most of the places only had one coat of paint on and you could see thru to the primer in spots, so every time I’d leave to go move stuff or pick something up from Lowes and come back, the drop cloths would magically appear in another room and the ladies were hammering away at another wall! The best was when Katie told me to go read the note in the kitchen. It was a 2 foot by 4 foot note painted on the wall in tan roller paint that said ‘heart U!’ (nice little painted heart). This was her way of saying “Love you and I’m painting the kitchen now too.” “Heart U too honey!! Have fun painting the kitchen on your own!!!”

I’m glad she got the stuff painted that she wanted tho, because it’s much easier to do it before you move in as opposed to after.

Our one ‘mishap’ occurred on Thursday. As some of you know and others may not, I’m partially colorblind. Mostly with greens, browns, reds and sometimes yellows. It’s not like I see the world like an “I Love Lucy” rerun and everything is black and white, it’s just that some colors run into others. The color that we picked out for the man cave was called Dark Sage and initially we were just going to paint a couple walls, but the previous owner was also fond of colors and at times it was like you were walking thru a game of Candy Land.

“I passed through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel.”

Anyways, we were moving right along with the Sage Green paint, but we could tell that we were going to need another gallon of it in order to finish up so Katie made (another) run to Lowes to pick that up. She gave the lady the card with the name and number of the paint, they mixed it up and we were off again. I was doing touch up paint with the last of the first can while they put a second coat on and they kept remarking how it was going on streaky and darker. Of course, I was thinking it would all dry the same – same color, same results right? When I got to an outlet to go around that they had just painted up to and I was doing the touch ups, even I could tell something was wrong……. The same types of wet paint should look the same, but mine was lighter. Yep, Lowes had given up a shade darker green paint and we’d spent the last 2 ½ hours painting with different color paints.

So back to Lowes I went and this time I was determined to get a refund on the wrong can of paint as well as a new can of paint in the new color on the house. At first the lady was a little apprehensive at the new free can. I can be persuasive. Especially when I explained that Lowes just wasted 3 hours of my day painting the wall the wrong color. We got the refund and the new free can as well. Sometimes good customer service needs prodding.

The Longest Day

Friday started early for us. We were about 75% packed at the old place and 80% done at the new place. It would have been nice to have someone come in and clean the carpets at both places, but there was only a room available for cleaning here and there so I ended up borrowing a carpet cleaner to do the rooms I could. Cleaning carpets can’t be that hard right? Wrong. It’s like trying to cultivate an entire section of land with a 12 foot cultivator in one day and your pulling it by hand. It’s not fun and you don’t get to listen to Paul Harvey tell the Rest Of the Story 4 times in the same day.

I did get the upstairs bedrooms, the hall and the guest room done, which is what I wanted to get done and then headed back over to the apt to finish some packing. This is where snag 2 comes in. When Katie had called in to have the utilities transferred to the new place they explained that MDU workers don’t work on weekend so we had to have power turned off on Friday. I found this out after I walked in to check my e-mail and the computer was powered down. Any idea how many times you flip a light switch thinking it will supply light, even though in the back of your mind you know it won’t. 112 times.

Scramble time!! Food in the fridge and daylight wasn’t going to last much longer. We did get the food moved over and as much as we could, got things packed. Determined to do more that night I had the brilliant idea of bringing over the trouble lights and the carpet cleaner to work as long as I could, couple extension cord and some power from the hallway would do the trick. Did I mention that the best landlord in Mandan and maybe the world had called us at 6:45 that morning to remind us to get the carpets cleaned? Chucky wasn’t going to get one more red cent out of me than he was worth tho, so I was doing this on my own- no hire outs for carpet cleaning!!!

I’m not sure why, but it was exactly 30 seconds before the breaker flipped that I thought that the trouble lights and carpet cleaner running out of the same outlet might do that…….. Darkness. Complete darkness. Don’t think I didn’t contemplate getting a propane lantern, but the carpet cleaner wasn’t going to run off propane so I grabbed a flashlight and stubbing my toes 10 times I packed and moved as much as I could into the living room. I promised everyone that volunteered to help move that everything would be boxed and ready to go at 8:00 a.m…… I texted once to change it to 8:30, then on the way home again to change it again to 9:00.

Out from the old, into the new

5:45 comes early and without much celebration unless you’re heading to a goose blind. At the very least when everyone showed up and I wasn’t ready I could say “Yeah, been up since 5:45 and had to work without lights.” Then they would know that I put in some kind of effort anyways. A half hour of working in the dark was enough for me and I started looking at outside outlets. The nearest one was the neighbors to the west on their patio, so at the risk of scaring the bejesus out of them early in the morning and having them call the cops on me I plugged into their outside outlet. All of the things that didn’t belong in certain boxes before, all got thrown into community boxes now and by 9:00 I was as ready as I was going to get.

Of course when you’re hoping people will be late, they show up 5 minutes early. Olney was the only one that did me proud. He had went out the night before and was hit by a beer truck so it’s good that we had a lot of pillows and seat cushions for him to handle.

Folks, it went like clockwork. Everything was in the living room, trucks were backed up to the patio, loaded and left. By 11:30 we were out of the old place and sitting in the kitchen of the new place eating sausage, laughing and drinking pop. Now we get to spend the next two years trying to figure out what got put in what box.

A Parting Shot

The afternoon was spent cleaning up what was left in the apt. Katie, Kaylan and their mom had done a good job of cleaning everything in there, so I figured I better do my best to clean the carpets. After the carpet cleaner flipped the test switch on that outlet for the 3rd time, I gave up and sat there and thought to myself “I’ve already shoveled enough snow, fixed enough faucets and cleaned enough cobwebs out of the common area hallway that he gets no more of my time. I’ll be writing a letter to Chucky with a bill attached for all the shoveling which I’m sure he won’t pay, but I’ve already warned enough potential renters to the place about the dude so maybe him losing a few months rent from people not taking the place will be satisfaction enough for me.

So that sums it up. It took me 36 years, but I finally have a mortgage payment to make. Thanks to everyone that helped with the move!! I’ll try to keep the posts shorter from here on out. Stay tuned for the white board picture with a November theme. Sorry Rusty, we didn’t do the Caribou this month.