9 gardens

Remember Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller, and the "your son has been absent niiiiiine tiiiimes"? Well, we have niiiiiiiiine gardens. We have 4 hands, one dog who poops as she walks, and 9 gardens. This can't be a good combo. Anyone who has seen our paltry plant collection knows that the fate of the countless plants and flowers in those 9 gardens is uncertain. I don't prune. I don't really get off the couch. Which is why this whole home ownership thing is going to be a challenge. I crunched the numbers a million times over - we can afford it (JUST barely)...but I didn't think about having an 80-year-old furnace, or pruning 9 gardens, or shutting off exterior water lines to prevent freezing in the winter, or paying $459 for ONE gas bill, or actually having *an electrician*. I kind of like the notion of breaking crap in someone else's house and having someone else pay for it. This whole personal responsibility thing eludes me.

But I'm looking forward to having a party!! Come visit September 1 -- hurry, before the air conditioner craps out!!

Wanna live in Arlington?

Nope, not really ready to move yet, we've gotta fill our lease. Bethany and I just did a bang-up job on the basement this afternoon. We went thru boxes that we've been hauling around from house to house for years. This is a process that has been going on for awhile now, I think we had originally started it about a month ago and always seemd to procrastinate finishing the task. Though it probably isn't done yet, no; it's not done, it's a lot closer than it was earlier. Both of us weeded and pitched a ton of stuff, crap we'd accumulated over the years. Vicki had given us a bunch of Sterelite bins to store stuff and we put all of them to good use. As a matter of fact, the reason we're not really done with the basement is because we ran out of boxes to put stuff into. Anyhow it looks great, but we've got a bunch of other rooms to go thru and pack as well. The storage area outside of the kitchen still needs to be packed up not to mention all the things in the living room, books and knick knacs all over the house. Anyway, we made some progress but there's a lot more to do.

Anyhow, Bethany and I got some good photos of the apartment that we need to rent before we move into the place. Bethany seems to think that we'll be moving into the new house the day after we close; Saturday, August 4th. That may be true but we'll still need to clean and disinfect the apartment before we leave. Hopefully we'll have a renter by that time. We put up some photos of the apartment on a FLIKR account I set up today so anyone intrested that we know can simply log onto it and check it out. If you're interested you can click here. I've also placed in the links pages. I'm hoping we'll get someone to fill the place, if we don't we've broken the lease and will need to pay a complete months rent to our landlord. Also, he doesn't want just anyone renting the apartment, he'd like to see it go to someone that is "in the family" which means that we can't advertise it on Craigslist or anywhere else; the person that we find to take over our lease needs to be a person that we have some kind of reputation with.