She's really excited about her gasoline

She's not even the driver.

Those wacky neighbors

I have no idea what's going on here. Well, okay, that's not true. I have some idea. There's a hose connected to the exterior faucet that's set up to go through an open window into a bedroom. So how come I don't feel enlightened?

Truckvertible

Caught that a few weeks back.

Like dyslexics don't have it hard enough

Raised letters? Really?

Murphy's law (for moving)

On top of the normal moving difficulties and stresses, we got a bunch of other whammies:

• Kieran got sick Wednesday (day before)


• Uma got sick Thursday (day of)


• Flooring was only half completed when the moving truck showed up, so the movers we hired couldn't do the other half of what they were hired for: putting everything where it belongs


• Discovered flooring on site was damaged, as well as flooring in Austin warehouse and flooring in Houston warehouse. Eventually had them finish installation with the damaged flooring, which happened on Saturday. As a result, we had to dig through the garage box piles whenever we needed something for 2 days until the flooring installers put most things roughly where they were supposed to go.


• Wore out my back moving stuff that the movers should have moved (though it seems to be recovering).


• I checked in a bunch of bad code at work earlier in the week because I was distracted by the dozen things I had to do. That caused a bunch of problems when the site got updated, and I was in no position to clean up the mess.


• Discovered that the house didn't have a gas line for the dryer when the movers asked how to hook it up. Hopefully today will see the arrival of our electric dryer so we can have clean clothes.


• House was full of dust from work on flooring, filling everyone's sinuses with junk, and making everything grimy.

Note that much of this happened when we needed to be fixing and cleaning the old house to prep it for sale. We did as much as we could, but not as much as we should have been able to do.

Re damaged flooring: the agreement is that they're going to rip it all out and replace it in a month or two when they can get undamaged replacements at their cost. I personally think they need to do better than that, as this caused us huge problems.

A neighborhood mystery solved?

I may have mentioned that we have some crappy neighbors at the old house. My pal Samir moved out in the summer of 2008, and it was purchased for use as a rental. The first round of tenants were painfully hip and occasionally rowdy, but generally tolerable. Their replacements.... well, they're something else. They've had a car up on blocks since they arrived in November. They used to pile up garbage and junk outside. They've got some weird pavilion set up on the front lawn. It's the sort of thing that makes you want a HOA (which the new neighborhood has). They have 2 adults and 6 kids between 2 and 14 living in a 1700 sf 4-bedroom. It's nuts.

Anyway. That's not the mystery. For a few weeks, we've been hearing some kind of engine coming from their garage. I've been wondering what it is. Since the man of the house is something of a fixer, I figured it was an air compressor for running pneumatic tools. Still, it was strange how often it was on. At night, for instance, or when nobody seemed to be home. How much compressed air does one man need?

The other day, as we were cleaning out the old house, I heard a clue, perhaps the only necessary clue. A friend of theirs that I'd seen before came to visit. As I was throwing away trash (trying to set a good example) or something like that, I overheard the friend ask a single question (imagine the appropriate Texas redneck accent): "So whaddya'll gotta do to get the electricity turned back on?"

Moving day disaster

Short version: flooring wasn't completed when it was supposed to be, so the movers couldn't put most things inside. They finally finished the flooring today. The installers moved some stuff in, but we're still lost in a sea of boxes. At least I have my interwebs, my precious precious interwebs.