We have a front loading washing machine.  Did you know that when you move them you need to have shipping bolts installed so that the drum doesn’t move in transit?  Neither did I until Wednesday.  When I looked it up and confirmed, sure enough they do (which I ought to note, I didn’t learn this from my moving company) — I called Prince in a panic.  I called to price said bolts.  I freaked out that our moving company didn’t have clue how to move my precious washer.

Update: On Friday the moving company called to confirm that they have hired the right person to prep our washer — which come to fine out includes draining said washer — a panic I totally missed.

I had more examples — but for the life of me, I can not remember them.

As most of you know, there is a trip upcoming and frankly, since I’m insane, I must have a clean home to return to.  Thus, I was running through my house like a mad woman doing something close 9 billion loads of laundry and scrubbing toliets.

(Sidenote:  I totally am a sucker for new, make my life easier, bathroom cleaners.  I drool over the self cleaning shower thingie, but don’t trust it enough to actually purchase it.  But when I saw this thing from the scrubbing bubbles that puts a ‘disk’ inside your toliet and keeps it clean for a week — I had to have it.  Just a note, that ‘disk’ isn’t a disk, it is a giant BLOB of goo.  A giant blob of GOO that you have to explain is POSION and should not be touched ever!!  And it SMELLS — faintly like flowers and cleanser — something my toliet probably ought not smell like.  Fair is fair, I’m happy that my toliet not smell like the stuff that goes IN the toliet — but seriously, I keep waiting for the odor to go away already.  Unless this blob keeps the pottys in this house extra clean and shiny (and maybe wipes down the floor around the potty, I’m doubting that we will be reflling our ‘disks’/giant blobs of goo.)

Duke loves to clean his room if the robot comes to vacuum, so he was set on a task.  He cleaned, puttting things away (or on his bed — whichever) and waited for the robot.  We grabbed the robot set him down on the floor and turned him on – he didn’t move.  A message to tech support later and I’ve had two e-mails from the iRobot people, but not ONE of them addresses the real question I asked in my e-mail.  The best part is that I’m questioning if the person responding can actually read.

So, I vacuum the old fashioned way without a nifty robot.

Then I go to use my handy-dandy Floormate ( you know the vacuum/scubber/wet stuff sucker-upper for hardwoods) in my bedroom.  I put the thing together, though I thought I’m missing a piece.  I try to use it and I made a puddle.  Yup, that’s it.  My FloorMate refuses to suck (not dry stuff or wet stuff).  We are HOPING it is because of this missing piece that Frankenhouse ate.

So, now I’m faced with the horrors of all horrors.  I must sweep, vacuum (with a normal vacuum cleaner) and MOP my floors.  Forgive me while I sit on the couch and eat a bonbon to steel myself up for the task.

1. Remember me cutting down trees?  Well, it didn’t work.  It seems that I only thinned enough out in the upper canopy of FrankenYard to allow for MORE swaying of the trees and WORSE TV.  We’ve been back to cut more, but seriously, the trees that need to go at this point aren’t safe for ‘woman with hacksaw’ kind of cutting.
2. So, as you can imagine we have given up TV.  We will be putting the TVs on the street later this month.  Oh, wait, we aren’t.  We are getting cable.  Seriously. Stop laughing.  After careful research, we found that the 6 months of nearly free cable followed by the “Oh, my, make the bleeding stop” rate came out to exactly $28 more than we’d pay for satellite for the same year.  So, for $28 we are getting reception — now you understand right?
3. But wait there’s more.  You see with cable we get a REAL TIVO box again.  I miss TIVO.  Seriously, none of the non-TIVOs can compare to the goodness of TIVO.  (If I’m seriously honest, our first DVR was the Ultimate TV and that little Microsoft product was the best at the time — it took TIVO a few years to catch-up.)  But I get TIVO again.  TIVO, which will arrive on Monday.  TIVO which can not be set-up with a Cable Guy, because apparently shoving a card into a slot is HARD.  So my cable install appointment that would have given me clear TV yesterday has now been moved.
4. Enough about my TV woes.

My schedule will change again in August as I prep for school to begin (must.stop.crying).  I am still waiting on the supply list from the school, but Duke’s backpack arrived this past week (Thank you Queen Mum and Dad) and he loves it.  Now if I can only find shoes that meet his approval.

Yes, I tried to go to sleep earlier — In fact, I was blurry with sleep from 10pm forward.  I could not push mysef over into the world of sleep.  And I blame this bird.

You see, I’ve not mentioned that Frankenhouse (the gardens of Frankenhouse to be exact) are home to more birds than appeared in the Hitchcock classic “The Birds.”  It is hard to explain, other than to remind you that we have fruit trees, MANY other trees, and what not all around us hat makes our little spot in this world bird paradise.  Now, 90% of the time I love this.  I love that we have a family of hummingbirds who come around and flit and flirt with our flowers.  I love that we have paired doves and chickadees and titmouse (yes that is a bird dangit) visiting us.  I delight in their songs at 8am (a human hour) on a Saturday morning.  I love to watch them fly about and to watch my indoor cats attempt to ‘hunt’ them safely behind glass.  The birds aren’t normally bad.

Except we have a new bird.  This bird I’ve not met before.  This bird sings at night.  This bird lives in the tree outside my bedroom — I think.  Ok, so t doesn’t tweet and twitter sweet songs, it more clicks.  Yes, clicking.  Just loud enough to be noticiable, but not so loud that you can tune it out.  It is a piercing click, the kind of click that invades your dreams.  The click you hear as you walk down the hall like high heels on rocks.  And it is ANNOYING.

So, we have this bird who didn’t get the memo that I’d been up at 3am the previous morning and all I wanted was sleep.  We also had a serious violation to the feline sleeping policies that somehow meant that two cats wanted/needed to be petted.  And finally, somewhere across town there was a truck backing up — for HOURS.  I think the truck was going through town in reverse.  (No, I have no idea what this sound really was, but it was the exact sound of a truck backing up miles away only being carried to my open window by the MILES of silence between us.)

Oh, you say, shut the window.  I would have, if I wasn’t also hot and needed the fresh air.  Alas, the joys of Frankenhouse.

So, I finally sleep.  I finally wake.  I get all bodies moving in the proper directions and coffee even.  Though, I’m still trying to decide on breakfast — hmmm, maybe I need to think about lunch?

You see, Frankenhouse yet again has proven why this is the house to love/hate.  It would seem that unknown to those of us who live here and oh, most of the normal people in the entire world, that our garage is not intended to be the nice dry space for the storage of random crap and at least one car.  Oh know.  Our garage is an integral  part of the drainage system of water from the backyard to the front.  Yes, who would have known.

I know now as I packed 7 plastic totes from wet cardboard boxes.  I know now as I bought a wet/dry vac (which were shockingly less money than I’d expected).  I know now that even my sandbags aren’t enough to stop (or slow) the flow of water THROUGH the garage.

Total damage is a full recycling bin of cardboard; a few random things that would have been discarded in the purge of ‘08 when we got to the garage; and a roll of brand new Christmas paper.

So, since I can’t see water without a twitch in my eye, I thought I’d leave you with a list of the other random events:

1. We had a parent teacher conference this week, nothing earth shattering came from it — other than my son seems not to be into cutting much and won’t write his name like he does for me at home.  Go figure.
2. We lost internet on Thursday night (our DSL modem went out) and while it is major since we run a business off that connection and I wouldn’t have wanted to be down for the night.  Prince calls me and tells me that we have “a MAJOR EMERGENCY” that demands my attention right now.  So, I offered my one and only solution — ‘go and buy a new modem and fix the dang thing.’  I am at my core a problem solver.
3. I had great plans for what the target of ‘the purge’ would be this weekend.  Never in my plan did it involve being parts of the garage late on Friday night.  However, in my moving things into plastic, I found a box that should have been sent to my kitchen when we moved in, because it contained recipes that I’ve been looking TWO years for.  I have since gone through that box and another one — put those items away and purged some other books in the process.
4. When asking a small boy child to entertain himself for a few minutes while Mommy and Daddy ‘access the damage’ (which is total code for grumping in each other’s general direction), he will wander into the office, grab a pair of scissors, and proceed to cut up things on Daddy’s desk.  (In case you are wondering, this did nothing to improve Daddy’s mood. And so much for that not liking to cut thing, huh?)
5.   Speaking of purging, anyone know of a good place to sell off DVDs and maybe VHS tapes?  I have a collection we are reducing to nearly half of its former self and I’m thinking even at a buck or two a disk, I’d be able to go out to dinner or something.  Thoughts?
6. For my knitters, who I know will be wondering, I finish my grandmother’s dish cloth.  I have learned more too.  First, I’m a MUCH tighter knitter than she was.  Her entirely done cloth is nearly double the one I made.  In my defense, mine does scrub a bit better and is a good size.  We’ve been using them constantly since they came off the needles and I almost feel that I should be sorry for thinking knitting dishcloths was silly.  However, I’m back to a new sweater and thus feeling all superior again.
7. Yesterday was a Duke/Mama day.  These are special and exhausting days.  Yesterday alone, we finger painted, we cut paper, we baked, we watched a movie, and we played in our room.  Oh, and we didn’t bother to get out of PJs until Daddy came home and declared that we were going to do the greatest thing EVER — family trip to Target.

I know, it is an exciting life.  I must go now and watch for more water run through my garage.