Thursday, March 31

Home Sweet One Home

We officially don't have two homes anymore. We turned in the keys to the rented townhouse, told them thanks for 9 decent years, and that was that. They didn't ask for the penalty we were supposed to pay for breaking the lease, but they have our new address so I don't doubt we'll be hearing from them. I'm prepared for it, so it's OK, but they'd better not ask for any more money. We did leave our mark on the townhouse, that's for sure, but how can you not when you live there for 9 years? Yes, the walls are filthy and the carpet is trashed, but they were going to repaint and recarpet anyway, so we didn't go to much trouble to clean it up.

I worry that they'll try to claim that our cats did damage. This is the truth, but then again, we paid a $40 pet fee along with our rent every month. That adds up over time. I don't think our cats managed $4000 worth of damage!

Sickies

I stayed home from work today to take care of Faith while Rick worked on the final once-over of the old house. She's sniffling and coughing -- in fact, Thea and Rick are too. I'll likely be next in line.

What Not To Wear

We have a serious shortage of clean clothes due to the fact that we don't have a clothes dryer and there haven't been enough dry days to hang clothes outside. So today, despite the overcast sky, I hung a load outside on the line. An hour or two on a cool cloudy day doesn't do a lot to dry your clothes, but just look at how pleasant the scene is. I got a kind of silly thrill out of seeing it.

We're picking up a dryer from a kind Craigslist person tomorrow.

Playing In The Dirt

Since it wasn't raining and I had an hour or so of daylight to work with, I dug up a border for my future garden. I'm hoping to borrow a tiller from someone so I don't have to do the entire thing on my hands and knees, but if I do... oh well. The ground is wonderful and soft and diggable. I'm pretty sure that the place where I'm going to plant is where the garden was when the sellers lived here, since it is covered by a layer of a spongy flowering weed that comes up easily and there's no grass underneath. Instead, underneath is damp and sweet-smelling soil, full of worms and looking excellent for growing. We'll see.

I planted tomato seeds indoors on Sunday, hoping to get good strong seedlings to put in the ground by the end of April. According to U of MD's Home and Garden Info Center, I can go ahead and put the peas, carrots and lettuce seeds into the ground now, so if we have any non-raining time this weekend and I've managed to till a spot for them, I'll plant them.

My fingernails are still filthy, after multiple washings, and I don't mind at all.

Tuesday, March 29

Flood part II, part II

The basement water we expected to start drying up today, our first sunny day in a while, hung around thanks to the sump pump quitting working. In one corner of the basement we have a drain, and the pump in the other, and so Rick has been sweeping water towards those two areas, but now the corner with the pump is just full of standing water.

The sellers left us a wet/dry shop vac which Rick used to suck up some water during our first flood, but then after he emptied out the water and sludge, it didn't work anymore.

flowers and neighbors

On the bright side, since it was our first sunny day, the girls ran around the yard a bit and we planted some pansies in the concrete planter at the end of our driveway. It felt great to dig my fingers into the soft, thick dirt. And two boys from a couple houses down came and knocked on the back door to ask if the girls could come out and play. The older one said to me, "Welcome to the neighborhood." Leave it to an 8 year old.

trains, planes and police helicopters

The sounds are different here than they were at the townhouse. There, planes flew over us on their ascents from and descents to BWI airport, but here the main sounds come from the trains that go by beyond the end of our street. Sometimes it sounds like one train goes on for miles, and sometimes it sounds like they are coming one right after the other.

The other common sounds are of sirens. With our view of the city, if we hear sirens we can usually look out the window and see exactly where they're coming from. I've watched fire engines driving along I-95 and police cars speeding down through the neighborhoods. On Saturday night the sirens were joined by the thudding of a helicopter as it circled the area shining its spotlight down to the ground. For about two minutes it hovered over my street and scoured the area over the hill behind our house where a lake used to be. Then, it flew away.

crime and punishment and burritos

It's interesting, the sounds at night, when the kids are in bed and the TV is off. Any sharp noise I hear, I immediately think is a gunshot, which is obviously an overreaction, a stereotype of the city. But on the other hand, reading the crime log in the paper and recognizing the street names leads to those conclusions. Baltimore isn't a low-crime city by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn't feel especially safe just walking down my own street at night, let alone walking out to the cross street. Just a block down the cross street you'll come to your first abandoned house, the first of several on the way out to the main road. At the corner of the main road is a Taco Bell that we went to the first weekend we were here. The food was good, but the atmosphere was weird -- you place your order through bulletproof glass, like at a bank, and you receive your food through a revolving door in the glass. Even the Taco Bell is afraid of gunshots, it seems.

Monday, March 28

Easter

We had family over for Easter yesterday, and I realized that I love having people over! Quite a change from the little townhouse that was always crowded with junk and smelled like cat and to which I hated having people come.

I made lasagna -- put it in the upstairs oven but after an hour it wasn't done, and we had to put it into the oven downstairs to finish. It still tasted good. We put out the lasagna, vegetables and bread on the buffet, so the dining room table wasn't crowded up with serving dishes. I felt like a kid playing house. It was nice. :)

Flood Part II

Last week Wednesday was the wettest March day ever recorded in Baltimore. Our basement had finally dried up when another wave of torrential rains came through today and soaked it again. We can see where the water is coming in between the wall and the floor -- and even up THROUGH the floor in some spots. We don't have a true basement; it's more of a cellar, and so we're not too worried about it. I guess we'll just deal with some wetness in the spring, and as long as it stays dry after that we'll be fine.

Cellar Dwellers

On the other hand... maybe the water will send a few unsavory residents of the basement off to seek drier homes. We have at least one spider in the basement that I'd rather not see anymore. We first saw him in the corner, and Rick wanted to spray Raid on him, but I pleaded for his life, saying that if he was surviving in the basement it likely meant that he was keeping us free of other smaller insects. I'm not afraid of spiders, really... as long as they don't come near me.

On Saturday Rick spotted our friend sitting on the hockey pads Rick had stored downstairs. But the too-close-for-comfort moment came Sunday night when Rick was loading the washing machine with clothes that had been in a laundry basket on the basement floor for a few days. He pulled out some white clothes, and a spider plopped out of them onto the floor. We're all very lucky it wasn't me loading the washer, or I'd have probably screamed loud enough to get the police called on us.

We're not sure we can peacefully coexist with spiders this large that don't stay way out of our way.

Saturday, March 26

Pizza

I was never so happy to cook a pizza as I was this evening when I did one in the upstairs oven. During the home inspection the upstairs range and oven did not heat to a high enough temperature to cook anything, and the upstairs refrigerator made a horrible screeching noise that drove us insane. The downstairs appliances worked fine, even the little old RealHost oven (which I adore) so we weren’t going to kill the deal over it or anything, but still, it’s inconvenient to have a kitchen without those things. Well, the day after we closed on the house, I turned on the refrigerator to demonstrate the screech to a friend, and the screech didn’t come. It’s been running now for 8 days just fine. And this evening I turned the oven on out of curiosity, and to my surprise it heated up perfectly. Thus the nicely cooked pizza.

This is a picture of my tiny downstairs kitchen, with its red-orange wallpaper and red and gray tiling and white-washed cabinets. I love it! Starting late in the morning and continuing until sunset, the sun shines in and makes it the brightest room in the house (as well as the only room, besides the bathrooms, not covered in paneling).

Wednesday, March 24

Locked Out

Part of the fun of having the locks changed is getting home after dark and realizing that you never got the new keys from your husband. Then you can call the hockey rink and have someone from the front desk run back and give your husband a message to call you immediately. Then you can sit in your van out back with the doors locked and the kids running around inside it like maniacs because they're hungry and should be headed to bed shortly, and turn on your laptop and sulk and wait for your husband to call, knowing he's going to be pissed that you got him out of the game he was playing and he's going to be annoyed that you didn't get the keys from him even though you had no idea where they were and even if you did, you didn't know which of the four keys went to which of the deadbolts and doorknobs on which of your four doors. While ignoring your children, who've found a pen and are drawing on each other, you can hope against hope that you won't have to drive the 20 miles back to the rink to get the keys from your husband, even though you're pretty sure you will.

Then he'll call and sure enough, there goes another hour from your evening, as you make the round-trip to the rink and back.

It was 22 miles to the rink, to be exact.

Wheeeee!

River

The man who sold our house to us said that in heavy rain, the basement would sometimes become “damp.” Well today we had torrential rain, but the basement did not become damp. No, damp to me means the floor feels wet to the touch, not that I'm standing in an inch of water, like I am in my basement. Water, water, everywhere. Everywhere but near the drain. I wonder how many calories are burned by sweeping water towards the drain with a giant broom? Hopefully enough for me to have a piece of cake tonight.

Cause For Alarm

And speaking of burning calories, my heart pounded and the girls freaked out when we set off the alarm system by coming in the front door instead of the back. Since when you set the alarm, you have 80 seconds to get out of the house or whatever, I mistakenly assumed I had 80 seconds to turn off the alarm after coming in. I guess I should consider it a test. I now know what the siren sounds like. And a friendly lady called from Texas to ask if everything was all right, although she did not believe me until I gave her the secret password.