matching tracksuits

Saturday Ritual

Saturday 13 August 2016

Saturday is for the house, and while we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time and money on one part of the house — namely, the kitchen, we’ve neglected other parts of the property. With all the rain of the last few weeks, the yard had gone absolutely crazy, and there was much cleaning and rearranging still to be done in our downstairs.

K started with some final painting — the baseboards in the living room. The Boy, of course, just had to help.

“Daddy, you can’t touch this paint because it will just hurt you, okay?”

I tackled the yard.

It was finally not all that hot, but the humidity was stifling. Despite the discomfort, the Boy came out to help mow. This means he walked beside me for a few minutes, pretending to mow the steep section near the ditch.

After a shower, I checked out our oven.

The burners work, but the oven doesn’t ignite. In the end, the Boy and I decided that we should just call the experts who sold us the equipment and let them decide if it’s something I just didn’t do or there is some defect in the appliance.

Cooking in the Rain

Tuesday 09 August 2016

Just a few more days of this. The backsplash goes in tomorrow, so the stove will follow shortly after that.

Breakfast

Monday 08 August 2016

New and Old

Sunday 07 August 2016

Slowly, we’re returning to the old within the new. The grandparents were over for lunch yesterday, eating in our new kitchen at our old table a meal that was cooked in our soon-to-be-outdated field kitchen.

Afterward, we had quiet a rain — unlike any we’ve had this summer. The ground was so hard and dry that puddles formed immediately, giving me a chance to walk around the house and see how our filled in trench from our unexpected sewer renovation was draining. A few problems there, but the rain didn’t last quite long enough for those problems to actually materialize (i.e., start to flood the crawl space). Which means we still don’t know how our sump pump works, whether or not it takes care of the problem.

Moving In

Saturday 06 August 2016

Three, maybe three and a half weeks ago, we reached a point in our kitchen remodel project that everything more or less looked like a kitchen. The counters and tops were in, and while the floor wasn’t finished yet, it was installed and looked like a floor. And yet there was so much to do — trim around the windows and doors, baseboard trim, final plumbing (including fixing problems the sewer line in the front yard and with the newly-installed gas line), lights, and the like. So it looked like we were almost there, but we were still so far away. All the changes from that point on were so small in comparison to ripping out a window and door to rebuild the header.

Finally, we’ve reached a point that we’re almost to the point that we can say, “We’re almost done.” “Almost done” because the under-the-cabinet lighting installation has been put off for some time, as has the final venting of the microwave through the room (right now, it’s just popped into the attic). So even when the back splash gets completed next week, and we finally move in the stove — the final appliance — we still won’t be complete done. And then there’s the new dining room furniture we’ve ordered so that every little thing in the kitchen, except for the coffee maker and toaster oven, will be new.

So today we made the final little adjustments and started moving in. L and I filled all the trim nail holes with spackling while E and K cleaned all the windows. Then I set out with the caulk gun to caulk the trim before it gets a coat of paint.

K, in the meantime, prepared all the new shelves with liners and began running all our dishes through the new dishwasher. We quickly discovered the enormous difference between the old dishwasher and the new: the old sometimes cleaned; the new is so powerful that it knocked the finish off a couple of items that we’d put in the bottom.

Tomorrow, the table migrates back to the dining area, where it will stay for a few weeks until the new furniture arrives, and we begin moving food to the kitchen, reverting our basement to just that. We’ll tear down the field kitchen in the backyard, move the grill back onto the deck, and begin to forget the work of the summer and just live.

Stone Mountain Vacation

Saturday 30 July 2016

Georgia Aquarium

The first stop was the Georgia Aquarium, reportedly the biggest in the world with over ten million gallons of water in their various tanks. The kids were fascinated with most of it, but the highlight was the dolphins, both in their display and during the dolphin show. With the way the trainers were hugging and kissing the dolphins between the tricks, it was surprising the kids were begging for a pet dolphin afterward. Instead, they were begging for a stuffed dolphin at the over-priced gift shop.

"We can order one online and it will be cheaper," K and I explained to no avail. They had already decided: they would split the cost between them and buy the dolphin, sharing it for all eternity.

We all knew where that was headed...

Stone Mountain Day 1

We arrived at Stone Mountain on Tuesday, which would have technically been our first day, but we spent the evening setting up camp and fixing dinner, so I don't count it as day one here. The first full day at the park was packed: the line park (such as it was -- nothing in comparison to the challenge of the line park in Babcia's region) followed by a train ride, a trip to the top of the mountain (which is the largest deposit of granite in the world, with only 1% visible -- the rest of the deposit stretches ten miles into the earth and spreads to five states under the visible ground), and the famed laser show in the evening.

Stone Mountain Day 2

The second full day got off to a slow start due to the late hour we all made it to bed after the laser show. But somehow, I look at the pictures I'd loaded earlier and think, "Wait, these are from when we returned Friday, the final day, day three." So what of day two? Not sure -- such is the nature of a good vacation: it all blurs together in one's mind.