Progress...

We've made pretty good progress around the house in the last week. Perfecto painted most of the inside of the house, and we had the carpets cleaned. The furniture has been put back in place and most of the pictures, paintings, and other wall decorations have been put back in their place. Realistically, it will take another couple of weeks to get things back in order. No real rush now other than we want to have everything knocked out by the time the baby comes.

I took some time out last weekend to help the father-in -law do a little work on the railings on their upstairs balcony. The spacing was large enough to allow a certain couple of 3 yr olds to fall through, so we worked put in some lattice and trimmed it out neatly with treated 1x2's. It looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

Taking MLK day off...

I took a rare vacation day to stay home. Even though we're not moving, we decided to keep making progress on de-cluttering and otherwise sprucing up the house. Perfecto showed up bright and early this morning to start painting. I hate painting, so Perfecto is one of my favorite people this week.

Maybe I'll take some pictures a little later. The house is a complete wreck. Furniture is scattered everywhere, and all of the artwork and other stuff has been removed from the walls and is scattered around the rooms that aren't being worked on yet.

I'm about to go downstairs and help Shelly with cleaning out the inside freezer. I picked up one of the deer this morning that has been processed, and we have to make room for it and the other one that will be ready in another 2 or 3 weeks.

Unfortunately, I've been too busy to go down to the big MLK Parade. Dang.

Not moving.... Yet.

We met with the realtor last night. After going over comparables, talking about the market, and thinking about what our wants are, we had some decisions to make. This morning as we laid in bed thinking about what was ahead of us, we grabbed the computer and started crunching numbers. Of course, Shelly being the financial guru she is, she quickly built an excel spreadsheet to make the calculations we wanted. There it was, spelled out in black and white. We can afford the move.

The decision? We're not moving... yet.

The long and short of it is that we have a baby due the first week of May and we started thinking about all of the uncertainty in the situation. We have a short window in which to sell, buy, and move, and that adds a bunch of stress to a time that is already a little hectic as it is.

What do we do now? Same thing we've been doing. Heavy duty spring cleaning, organizing, repainting, carpet cleaning, and sprucing up the yard. After that's done, we sit back, relax in our clean, uncluttered home, and enjoy the new baby. I might even get to go camping a time or two and make a spring Axis deer hunt out in Rocksprings.

Maybe we'll move next year.

What a morning ...

About mid-morning this morning, I sent Shelly an e-mail telling her how the day was going so far. She thought it was pretty funny, and worthy of sharing.

Just as I was about to go downstairs to leave this morning, Shelly called to remind me to take the leftover tamales with me for lunch. Thanks for the reminder. Those babies were good, so having them for lunch was a great idea. Besides, moving isn't cheap, so saving the cost of lunch is good.

A co-worker is having a baby tomorrow and she needed to borrow a carseat from us, so I had gone into the attic to get the carrier. The base to it was in the storage building, so I had to remember to grab it on the way out of the house. Here's how it went...

go downstairs and let the dog back inside...
think about tamales, gotta remember to grab them...
go out to shed and get carseat base...
stop at my counter in the kitchen to get keys, wallet, phone, etc...
remember I still need to grab the tamales...
put everything down to feed the dog before leaving...
pick up everything and head into the garage...
grab carseat with my already full hands...
open trunk of car to deposit carseat...
(Altima has that funny keyless key deal, so you just open the trunk)
trunk full of dry cleaning picked up last night, close trunk...
put everything down to unlock doors to open back door to put carseat in backseat...
notice trashcans out by street from yesterday...
pick up trashcans so HOA doesn't send me yet another nasty-gram about them...


Damn, leaving the house is a chore some days...

head out, traffic really backed up, so I take alternate route...
crap, wreck on alternate route, really backed up, stuck like Chuck for a while...
finally make it through the accident scene. Dang, car pieces and parts scattered all over creation...
finally get going, log truck exits freeway, cuts across 3 lanes of feeder, straight into my lane...
take evasive action (slam on brakes, hold on, shit pants - not really, but did fart a time or 2 on the way to work)
catch up to truck, roll down window, and give him the finger...
he honks and swerves at me again... I better quit while I'm ahead...
smooth sailing the rest of the way...

Get to work ...
Forgot tamales. Crap.

Still working on the house...

Part of the cleaning out / organizing process to get ready to move involves Matthew's toys. My God, I didn't realize how many toys that kid has. We've managed to whittle him down to what is still too many toys. I packed the rest up into a couple of large tubs. Actually, 4 large tubs and 2 medium sized tubs.

Side note to all... when #2 gets here in May, PLEASE don't buy him any more toys. We have plenty already. If you insist on buying toys, I'll sell you a gently used one for 1/2 price. It's a win-win situation. You get the satisfaction of spending money buying a toy for a child, and I don't have any more clutter in the house. Maybe I'll even promise to put the money into the college fund.

Aside from that, I've hung up the new faux wood blinds, pulled out some clothes and shoes to donate to charity, and a couple of other jobs.

Boring? Yep, but that's life at the moment.

What's coming up? The maids come tomorrow, the realtor is coming by to visit and have a walk-through on Friday night, my parents are going to come help pack up some extra stuff this weekend, and Perfecto is coming to paint next week. This is when things start happening fast. Hopefully we can keep up.

It's a boy!!!

I think back in October before I went AWOL, I mentioned that we're expecting again. A few weeks ago, we found out that we're having another boy. Needless to say, Shelly was a little bummed. Don't get me wrong here. We're especially thankful for a seemingly healthy boy after what it took to get to this point, but with one boy already, we were hoping for a girl to even things out. Shelly's outnumbered as it is, and it looks like it's only going to get worse. On the bright side, I'll have 2 little knuckleheads to cut the grass for me in a few years.

I'm not good with numbers...

Yesterday afternoon, I was at Home Depot getting the blinds cut to fit the windows. I guess it's asking too much to actually have someone there that knows how to do this job. I went in with the measurement of 42 1/4 inches wide for the new blinds. I went to the blind aisle and punched the little button for assistance. The girl that came to help had evidently just fallen off the turnip wagon. She started with a set of blinds 45.5 inches wide. When I told her I needed 42 1/4, she was completely bumfuzzled about what to do. She mumbled something about not being very good with numbers, then pulled out a tape measure and stretched it out. She then proceeded to ask me which little marking was a quarter inch. Holy crap. How do you work at Home Depot and not know how to read a tape measure? It was very confidence inspiring to say the least.

This girl had no idea. She ruined a set of blinds before she finally let me help her with the measurement and set the machine. For the rest of you that aren't good with numbers, that's 1 5/8 off each end. That's the 10th little black line between 1 and 2 on the tape measure.

Movin' on up...

Ok, not really movin' up, but we are preparing to put our house on the market. We're planning to make more of a lateral move. We expect to stay in the same general area of town, but get a few things different in our next house.The main deal will be a master bedroom downstairs, and I hope to get a 3 car garage.

When you live in a house for several years and you are a sort of a pack-rat like we are, the thought of selling the house is quite a daunting experience. We're going through, de-cluttering, and throwing a BUNCH of stuff away. I'm also performing a huge list of maintenance items. It's amazing the stuff around the house that you don't see as a big deal until you get ready to start showing your house. Here's what I did this weekend:

1. remove and replace a rotten piece of wood trim around my garage door then caulk around the new piece of wood.

2. clean mildew from top of patio cover, rear of house, and storage building.

3. clean outside of upstairs rear windows and caulk as needed.

4. Clean back patio ceiling fan

5. paint new wood trim listed above and touch up other areas near garage door (hit with trick mirror).

6. replace all toilet seats

7. replace 2 A/C vents that are starting to rust

8. cut out old caulk from master shower, clean with Clorox cleaner, re caulk with white anti-microbial caulk.

9. replace light fixture in downstairs 1/2 bath (project from SEVERAL months ago that never got completed)

10. measure for and purchase faux wood blinds for guest room and Matthew's room. I'm fine with the metal blinds currently there, but Shelly thinks that since all of the other rooms have wither real wood or faux wood, it will look better to be consistent in all rooms. Whatever. I just work here.

There were a couple of other things to do, but you get the idea. Next up, Meet with a realtor, move some items to storage, paint interior (call Perfecto), have carpets cleaned, hire some "guys" to spruce up the flower beds. We hope to be on the market Friday, February first. Wish us luck.

Long Overdue update...

Man, I thought I sucked before at updating. 2 months later, I'm finally getting around to posting again.

OK, about those pics on the last update.

The first picture is probably the nicest buck I've ever seen while sitting in a deer stand. I don't know how wide his spread is, but people that seem to "know" tell me 22-24 inches. The widest one I've ever killed is 18 inches, which is still quite nice by any standards. The big news is that I let him go. I estimated he was 3.5 years old and he was chasing a doe at the time (it was just at the beginning of the rut), so I elected to pass. Hopefully he bred lots of does and passed those big antler genes on. We'll see in the coming years. I do now have 2 deer at the processors, so it was a good year even if I didn't put my tag on the trophy buck.

The middle 2 pics are just pics of Matthew and I having a good time hanging around at the ranch. He loves that deer hunting.

The last picture is of the inside of my deer stand. It's called "Casa del Marko". It sits on the ground on the side of a hill, which gives a great view of the creek bottom below. Lots of deer come hang out in this area to eat corn from the feeder or oats from the food plot. Here's the rub. I hunt this stand more than any other stand, and have seen more deer here, but I've never killed any of them I see from this stand. Why? I don't know. It's almost like I prefer just watching these deer and taking their pictures.

In the deer stand, I have everything laid out that I need to keep comfortable for a few hours of deer watching. The shelf above the window is for things I don't really need once I get settled in. from the left, binoculars case, camera case, flashlight, range finder case, and wasp spray. Early in the season, we seem to have a bunch of wasps hanging out in the deer stands.

On the bottom shelf, on the left you can just see the blue edge of my snack cooler. I typically pack 2 diet cokes and a couple of Little Debbies. Snacks on the deer stand are a family tradition that goes way back. Next is the Diet Coke, walkman, binoculars, cell phone, and range finder. Cell phone you ask? Set to silent, we send text messages back and forth. The members of our family sometimes hunt a couple hundred miles apart, but we always give the play-by-play via text message (which might explain the low kill rate...)

I should say something about my rifle. It's a Winchester model 70 Super grade. It was a wedding gift from Shelly. Eat your heart out guys. Not only does she hunt, she also bought me a top notch rifle for the wedding gift. (I got to pick it out, but hey, give the girl credit for actually buying a gun).

Hold on, I have a couple more updates.