So we’ve been “living” at Casa Jaquandor 2.0 for a bit more than a month now. Time for some random thoughts and observations!
:: Garbage. We don’t get to just toss our trash into the apartment complex dumpster whenever it’s full anymore, so now we have to know things like what day the trash gets picked up, and how they do recycling, and all that jazz. It’s not hard, actually — I’m lucky enough to live in a town that makes this sort of thing relatively easy — but there have been a few hiccups. The first week, I failed to tie the bags tightly shut, because for the last eleven years, just cinching the drawstrings and hucking the bag into the lidded dumpster was what you did. Luckily for me I’m a smart fellow, so it only took one instance of me getting home from work to trash blown all over the yard from untied bags to learn that lesson. Whoopsies!
:: Having neighbor cats can be amusing, when one of them decides to drop by and taunt our dumb lummoxes through the sliding door.
:: It’s interesting how much effort of a new place is just trying to figure out routines for normal stuff. My morning coffee ritual was taking fifteen minutes, because I had to stop in the middle of the kitchen and think it through, but now I’ve got things kind-of figured out so it’s back down to ten minutes. Ditto little things like cooking (every time I cook I find myself wondering where a particular utensil is), changing cat litters (I had this down to a science at the old place, not so much at the new, although I think I have it figured out), and so on. Walking into the bedroom and realizing I forgot to grab my book or glasses or whatever from the kitchen is more annoying when there’s a flight of stairs involved. So, for that matter, is negotiating that same flight of stairs when you have one cat who really really really likes feet. The Wife thinks that Julio is trying to kill us, and if not for all his “Cuddle and pet me!” shenanigans in the morning, I’d be inclined to agree with her.
:: I was going to post photos of some of the stuff we’ve done with our plants, but it turns out I haven’t taken any. This is a curious oversight on my part. Must fix.
:: The moon sure looks pretty above our yard.
:: A perfectly-timed rainstorm ruined my plans for grilled steak the other night. Stupid weather…but the steak, cooked indoors, was still quite good!
:: I’ve really been giving my studfinder a workout!
:: I really dig having a bathroom with a skylight. This is one of those things I liked when we first scoped out the house last winter, but I like it more and more.
(I took that photo at night, when the skylight was reflecting what was below. In this case, me.)
:: We can do little things we’ve wanted to do for years now! More complex cooking in the kitchen. Growing things. Burning wood in our new firepit. (Note to self: Assemble firepit.) And, hang our mirror.
Way back when we got married, we wanted to decorate our bedroom in a sun-and-moon motif (a motif which I still love and look for when I’m prowling about). One item that we put on our registry was an oval wall mirror with a golden sleeping-crescent-moon face to one side — quite beautiful and striking.
And we’ve never hung it.
Our first apartment had old-school plaster walls which I had no idea how to tap, and at our next two apartments, we really had other fish to fry — new jobs starting and ending, The Daughter being born and being a toddler, moving twice in nine months, et cetera. For various reasons, that poor mirror languished in its original box for years.
Until now. Specifically, until last night.
Slowly, surely, we’re figuring this whole “house” thing out. There are still some headaches — more shelving to install in my library closet so I can set up proper storage in there, figuring out why the wall switch in the garage is set up so you can’t turn on the light in the garage unless you also turn on the light outside the garage door, et cetera, et cetera, and so it goes.
And so it goes, this life at home.
Home. I like the sound of that.
We moved into our new house almost two years ago, and I still don't know where anything is.