Napping

Little Corwin wasn't feeling so well on Sunday. At one point I picked him up when he was whining and he fell asleep on my shoulder. So I curled up on the couch with him and took a nap too. Somehow he managed to sleep with the sun shining on him through the window.

Truck

Saturday morning I took Mom and Dad's old battered truck (In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I did a bit of the battering to it myself. With a boat.) to get some cabinets for the garage. But first I had to shovel snow out of the bed. The cabinets were stored in a barn down a snowy hill in Iowa. But said battered truck climbed up and down the hill in 4 low like a billy goat. I was a bit surprised and impressed how easily it handled the short off-roading trip. Having the truck here has been really helpful the past couple of weeks. Thanks Mom and Dad.

The cabinets that I picked up are rather nice. Anke thinks that they are too nice to put in the garage, and wants to place them in the laundry room instead. I should have gotten the ugly cabinets.

Robin

I saw what must be the first robin of spring yesterday. Or a bird that was simply too stupid to fly south for the winter. It was perched on a branch outside the kitchen window, puffed up like a little gray and orange ball. The robin says it is spring, but the snow on the ground says it isn't.

Pictures from Home

There are deer sleeping in my back yard

I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Anna Nicole

I was besotted with Anna Nicole Smith in my precocious youth. When she was still young and sexy. Back when she was the Guess Jeans girl and Playmate of the Year. The first Playboy I ever purchased was her PMotY issue. I had cut out several of her Guess Jeans adds from Rolling Stone tacked them to the wall of my bedroom. This was when living in that little house in Ottumwa, dating girls that were no good for me or to me. If only they could have been Anna Nicole.

Unfortunately fame didn't agree with Anna Nicole. In the end she looked like a caricature of herself. I don't know if it was too much plastic surgery or too much hard living. But the past 10 or 12 years weren't kind to her. One of the many advantages of not having cable is that I never saw her reality show, which I have heard was horrible and not very flattering. This makes it easier for me to choose to remember her as the buxom Guess Jeans Girl that I had a crush on.

Moving is not a pleasant experience

96.5% of my possessions are now at my house. Hunter's cage and Hunter still have to be moved from the apartment, along with my tool box that I have left there for the dismantling of his cage. I have 8 wheels and tires in Maurice's garage that are to be moved. And also some speakers that I'll take out of his basement. Oh, and my weights are still in his basement too. But everything else is there.

We got most of it moved on Saturday. Special thanks go out to Maurice and Matt for helping load and unload the U-haul. It was bitter, freezing cold and I'm sure there were lots of places they would have rather been. Especially Matt who spent the entire night fixing a cycle problem at work. He only got 2 hours of sleep. Thanks, guys. After moving multiple boxes consisting of my burgeoning book collection, Matt suggested that I invest in a library card. Who knew paper was so freakin' heavy. Thanks to Mom for watching Corwin during the move, that allowed Anke to pack and me to load and unload. I had intended on documenting some of the move with pictures, but I was too busy actually working and at some point the camera got packed into a box somewhere. I'm still not sure where the damn thing is.

On Sunday Anke and I went back to the apartment to finish packing and moving stuff. We did three pickup loads and two Vibe loads. All loading and unloading done by your faithful blogger, due to Anke's delicate health situation. There was more stuff after the U-haul load than I thought. I did get the TV hooked up and found my bunny ears right away, so was able to catch the second half of the Super Bowl. On the plus side TV reception is much better in Bellevue than Dundee.

On Monday there the house was still a wreck and there was still more stuff at the apartment. Two Vibe loads and one pickup load later, everything is nearly moved. Thanks to the guy that lives above the apartment for helping me carry Loki's cage out to the pickup. Thanks Guy Who Used To Live Above Me. Maurice and Bernie stopped by Monday evening to help move Loki's cage into the house. Bernie got there just in time to see the 10 deer in the forest behind the house. I wish I had known which box the camera was in. Bernie had never seen deer before- having grown up in Hawaii and all. She was excited.

All in all, it was pretty exhausting though. Going back to work on Tuesday was a relief. But then I have to go back home and continue unpacking.

But the house is nice and I'm happy being there.

Live from Bellevue, NE

Welcome to the first post from Casa de Parker. I'm sitting in a mostly empty house waiting for the gas and water guy to come and read the meter to show up, typing on my bare bones PC that's only real purpose is for logging into work when necessary. The cable and phone guy clearly came first as I do have Internet access to post this.

So anyway, I am now a 20% homeowner as of yesterday. And that number will start climbing by ever so minute amounts monthly. And I have the joy of paying property taxes. The property taxes in Nebraska are rather high, too. Especially when the redness of this state is taken into consideration. But Corwin and Baby will be going to public schools and I want them to be nice schools so I'll pay with little bitching involved. But getting to this point made it an interesting week.

On Sunday we did the final walk thru on the house, with our buyer's agent Galya Leathers. If you do any real estate transactions in the Omaha area, I cannot recommend her enough. Anke and I couldn't be happier with the job she did for us. So we get to the house and it is COLD inside. Like really cold. We check the thermostat and it is set at 40. I guess the stupid sellers decided to save themselves a couple of dollars and turned the heat down now that the house was sold. We go to the kitchen and there is ice formed on the tap. Damn. We turn the heat up and call the seller's agent. She comes buy to check the house later and sure enough, the damn pipes between the kitchen and the garage broke. They get a plumber in to fix them that day and promise to have the ceiling of the garage, which sustained substantial water damage, fixed by Friday. Gayla has her own plumber come and check out the work done by the buyer's plumber on Tuesday just to make sure. I would have preferred that disaster not have happened, but it's been taken care of.

So the plan is to go ahead and close on Tuesday. My lender phones and tells me that everything looks good. But my documents have to go through some sort of "quality control" by the underwriter before everything can proceed. And that won't happen today. What the hell is going on I think. They've known for 5 weeks that we are closing on the 30th. What do they think I'm a terrorist, needing to check all of my documents? Damn Bush and his Patriot Act. The sellers are now freaked out too, because this is the second time that the house has sold. The first deal fell through at the last minute, too, back in June. Tuesday comes, and they still aren't sure if they will get to my documents today. Well after much hand wringing my Indian lender finally calls at around 3:15 to tell me that the underwriter finally signed off and we can close tomorrow on the 31st. Hooray! Everything finally comes together and I can stop stressing.