Nesting

Okay, I'm not making babies, but I am feeling an intense "nesting instinct." Steve-o is totally making fun of me. I can't blame him. It is actually rather amusing since I've never been much into things like coordinated dishtowels and household "extras." I usually think - The white towels I've had for three years are fine, why buy new ones? I'm rather practical about most house stuff. But now - it's nuts. I've decided I want a bed skirt, curtains over the blinds, new colored towels, an actual shower curtain to cover up the plain vinyl one I've got, and I want to move furniture. I go shopping, and I'm drawn to skirts and dresses and high-heeled shoes. This girly-ness must stop. I think my estogen is out of whack!

Perhaps it is my brain trying to make a last ditch effort to get my house in order and not in a constant state of flux. Steve-o and I had pondered moving, but the $ side of things just didn't make sense. So, maybe my brain is trying to make me feel better about staying in the hobbit hole. That doesn't explain the dresses, but hey - it's something.

By the way, re-moving in never really got off the ground. I think it was too daunting. The new plan is re-moving in to one room at a time. More manageable chunks=greater potential for success, right?

On a side note, Steve-o and I need a vacation. Badly! One of those do nothing, relax, drink frosty beverages, and forget what day it is - kind of vacations. Hola Mexico!

Bambi strikes again

So, there I am, in my garden plot yesterday when I see the tell-tale sign of a deer trespassing in my plot - hoof prints. Then, I see that my bean plants have been eaten, and the tops of all my pepper plants, and the rascally thing ate 1.3 tomatoes, too. And then, I saw the worst part of all - after it snacked in my plot, it pooped in my plot. Yep, Deer poop. Thanks for the present, Bambi. Now, get out and stay out!

I've never had this much trouble, before. Supposedly, tomato plants are their favorite, but my deer seems to like beans and peppers. The beans are probably a total loss, and I'd only gotten 2 handfuls so far. They're fast growers, so if I re-plant now, I might still get some more. The pepper plants - he/she/it left the bigger peppers that were forming, but ate off all the new tiny pepper buds and the flowers, so what I've got now may be all I get. Boo-hoo. Plus, it munched on cucumber leaves. They're kinda spiky, so I don't know why it kept eating them. 15-20 leaves were missing, not just one or two.

So tonight, back to the garden I go - armed with more fencing!

Oh, and for those of you curious about the re-moving in.....well....Steve-o is probably submitting his essay tonight, so he will be "free" to go back to the re-moving in effort. As long as I can drag him away from his new laptop long enough to sort through some boxes and move furniture. Okay, so we're about a week late, but off we go!

You guys need a picture post. Here's a blast form the past - remember this? No? It's a picture taken the day of "the incident." That's my living room and kitchen....stacked 6 feet high with all the stuff from the apartment...in the only dry floorspace we could find. So...even if re-moving got a little side-tracked, I've come a long way.

Re-moving in update

So...we've hit some bumps in the re-moving in road. For starters, I've had migraines for the past two days. Yuck. And....If you didn't know, Steve-o is back on the applying wagon for med school. His personal essay is now the only thing keeping him from sending in his first round of stuff. So, he has to focus on that.

As a result, re-moving in is going slowly. Assuming he makes essay progress by the weekend, hopefully, we can still keep this re-moving in idea moving. hahaha. Ah-hem.

We're also toying with the idea of moving for real. More on this later. It's a long story. Just across town, but why unpack, just to re-pack? Actually, most of our unpacking is really just sorting and throwing stuff out, so it's a good idea anyway. Sorry there hasn't been much movement. I took tomorrow off, so I've got high hopes.

Re-moving in day 1 - we are bad

Umm, we didn't have a very successful first day of re-moving in. I told Steve-o that I had posted about it on the blog, and he groaned. I think he was hoping there would be no accountability in this effort. :) He fiddled with his computer, and I watered the lawn and did some yarn dyeing. Note that none of this would have occurred if we had actually been moving in. I realize that most people start strong and fade at the end. Maybe we're going in reverse? Today will be better - it has to be, right?

I took pictures of the two worst rooms so that we could feel that sense of accomplishment when we look back at them in a week or so. And oddly enough, it looks worse in the picture than it does in person. I guess you just get used to seeing the stuff, and when you photograph it, you see it in a different way. I don't think I'm prepared to show them to the whole internet world, though.

Okay, the day wasn't a complete bust. I did post some stuff on craigslist, got rid of one box of "stuff," and tried to put all of my tools in their proper place. And I successfully dealt with yesterday's mail. It's baby steps, people....baby steps.

It's like we just moved in

And that's the problem. Steve-o and I are still living in our house as if we just moved in. Last week, we went to a shindig at a friend's house. They had moved in only about a week earlier, and the place was in order. Labeled CD boxes, fruit in a bowl on the counter, things in their proper places! This happened last year, too. A party at a friend's house shortly after they moved, and that place was just the same. At the time, I thought they were just terribly efficient about unpacking. But now, it seems like this is a more widespread phenomenon. How long does it take you to unpack after a move? Is a year too much? hmmm.

Steve-o and I have a few problems which contribute to our inability to live like normal people. First, we are both sort of pack rats....okay, we are pack rats. (admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?). We (I'll stick to "we" to preserve some of our dignity) keep notebooks from college. We keep receipts from 6 months ago. We keep books we didn't enjoy and will never read again. We keep magazines because there might be something in there we'll want. We keep do-dads, thingies and other miscellaneous stuff just in case we need it. Of course, when you need it, you can never find it.

Second, we do not know how to put things "in their home." You know how things have a place in the house? Nail clippers go in the medicine cabinet. Scissors go in the kitchen drawer. Phone chargers go....well, somewhere other than the kitchen counter. But not for us. Things come out of their homes, but they don't seem to make it back.

Third, we do not deal well with mail. One of us gets the mail. We put it down in a different place every day. It is mostly junk. The other one can't find today's mail pile and weeks later, we find a mess of bills and junk under something else....or under several layers of something else.

Fourth, we have too much stuff. We have so much bathroom stuff that there is a bookcase outside the bathroom door that has been coined "the health and beauty aisle" because it seriously looks like the health and beauty aisle in the supermarket - soap, deodorant, shampoo, NyQuil, q-tips, toothpaste, razors, etc. All this stuff exists in the bathroom for our daily use; this is just more of it. I'm all for shopping at Costco, but I think we're out of control. How many months/years does it take to go through 6 bottles of shampoo?

Fourth, we are both procrastinators. We have good intentions. Then, we do something else. For example, "we" have been known to not unpack a suitcase for several weeks following a trip. We avoid decisions.

But....we have made one decision. This week....starting today, we are pretending like we just moved in. It's a do-over, if you will. We want to see if we can be like the rest of you and get our house in order. Yes, I know we have a head-start, since we won't have to do too much heavy lifting or figure out how to get the couch through the door. We already did that and the answer was to take the door off the hinges. But we will be moving the couch across the room and dealing with all the stuff we've been avoiding. Hurray for us. Check in on our progress, and offer encouragement. We procrastinators need it.