Left about an hour ago for PA. My driver is such an awesome person. Should be close to 6am when we arrive.
There’s less than twenty-fours until we leave for Pennsylvania and I’m not packed. At all. I just threw a load of clothes into the wash that will solely be for us to bring with. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Which is very odd for me. Usually, I’m so organized. I have my stuff piled up at the front door and my lists made and everything in it spot ready to go. You should’ve seen when we left for Hawaii. I had everything I needed, including a travel pack of Kleenex for the plane. Because you never know when you need Kleenex. (I really never use Kleenex, so that was an oddity for me). Right now, all I’ve got is a list.
Technically, we’re not leaving until after work. And since we’re driving through the night, we’re not in a major hurry to get there as we don’t have anything to do Saturday morning. So I’m apparently using that lack of urgency to procrastinate to the very last minute. Which probably means I’m going to forget something.
Let’s just hope it’s not the dog. Or something equally important.
But I’ve got my list. And that’s a step in the right direction.
I think it’s partly because the trip was planned so last minute and because we’ve been dealing with the floor debacle all week. On Monday, the claims agent came over and assesed the damage. On Tuesday, the contractors came by and dropped off three industrial fans and a huge dehumidifier and also take their estimate. Those were here until today. We spent the last two nights feeling like we lived on an airfield because it was so loud in here. But it sure did dry the place out. I woke up feeling like my eyelids were dried shut.
Yesterday, I got the estimate: $7000 worth of repairs. The drying process cost $1500 alone. The rest will cover replacement flooring for the living room, dining room and hallway (the chunk of the cost, about $3000), replacement of the baseboards and repainting of the repaired areas.
Now I just have to call the insurance agent and figure out when we’re going to get the check. Then I have to talk to the contractor to schedule the work and find out if we need to go pick out the new flooring (we better be able too!). Then we need to move all the furniture out of the rooms and get them in here to fix everything. I will be so happy when the place is back to normal. The concrete slab sure is cold on my feet in the morning.
Hopefully, we will be able to get all that cleared away next week, after we return. Then we’ll have two more rounds of visitors in and then it will be autumn. If anybody asks where the summer went, I know exactly what I’ll tell them. At least I’ll have spent it with family and good friends.
Regardless, all of this has been a very tiring and stressful process and I really just want things to return to normal. Is it too much to ask to be able to come home, change into my sweatpants, plop on the couch and play XBox until my eyes get heavy?
I’ve got the Blackberry all set up for mobile posting, so I’ll probably be doing a small trip blog. It’ll be late at night and early in the morning so, aside from sleeping, I’ll have nothing else better to do.
In light of this, at least I’ll get to go to Wawa. (Don’t shake your head at me – it’s heaven in wrapped up in a convenience store!)
So here I am, finally!
I’ve spent the past few weeks migrating this site over to WordPress. I can’t tell you exactly what made me do it. Considering WordPress has been out about five years now, I’d say I put up a pretty damn good resistance.
I think the final straw was the fact that my Movable Type dashboard never wanted to load at work. I know it wasn’t blocked because we are in a “go anywhere on the web” group in my department (that, and I have access to the filter so I can see what’s being blocked). It would take forever to load the sign on screen and if I managed to put in my information, it would take forever to load and either time itself out or log itself in after close to a half an hour.
Not that I need to be blogging from work, but you get my drift.
Plus, the themes for WordPress are endless and there are some gorgeous ones out there. And while I had gotten pretty adept at porting them over to Movable Type, it just became too much work. Partly because porting is work in itself and partly because the new template nesting system that was released with MT 4.0 is an ever-loving pain in the ass. And the templates for WordPress are just phenomenally simple. And I love that you can edit them right in the dashboard.
Finally, there was the built-in protected post functionality. I’ve been on the web long enough for the anonymity I started with to have pretty much disappeared. I wanted to be able to protect some of my posts when necessary so that everyone’s prying eyes weren’t privy to certain things I wanted to talk about. And WordPress made that easy.
Overall, it was the ease of use and functionality that made me switch. Initially, I avoided it because the WP installation only let you have one blog per install, where MT let you have multiple blogs in one install. That was nice because I had built my entire site around three different blogs (two were more of a CMS than a blog). But looking back, I realized that I was spending a lot of time keeping those blogs up and part of what I wanted was consolidation. I needed to bring everything together in one area, including other sites like Live Journal and Vox, because I was tired of keeping up with them. Plus, the content was stale.
So I give you the new and improved website. Powered by a new CMS with a new layout (which, truthfully, I already hate!). I’ve deleted all my old entries because I wanted to start fresh. There’s also some new content (Movie ratings, books I’m reading, a new 101 things list) and I am making a solemn, solemn vow to myself to post more, comment more on others blog’s (because I’ve been a lurker for too long) and actively keep this site more up to date. I’ve just been wanting to post and post away for months now but because I’m such a perfectionist freak, I couldn’t do it until I wiped the slate clean.
Consider it done!
You shouldn’t have to change your RSS feeds – I did it for you (for the 18 that subscribe)! Also, I’m looking for new people to read, so if you have some interesting sites, please feel free to suggest them. And look around, tell me what you think. (I need to test out the comments! LOL)
This is my fresh start.
—————————
On a side note, a quick update of my summer. We’ve had people in town staying with us for visits every other week since I returned from Hawaii in June. While it’s always nice to have visitors, Steve and I (and the dog!) are exhausted and looking forward to having our house back.
But that’s not happening yet! On Friday, we discovered that there was a leak from our air conditioning that seeped out of the intake vent into our living and between the lovely floating laminate flooring and the concrete slab. What we thought was going to be a quick fix by pulling up a few pieces of laminate and replacing them ended up being a homeowner’s insurance claim that results in them replacing our entire living room, dining room and hallway floors. Because there was mold under the foam padding on the floor and behind the baseboards. Not a lot but enough! And because they don’t make the type of flooring anymore we have to make sure it matches throughout the entire house. Did I mention I love my flooring and I hate construction crews in my house?
And then Steve and I have to leave on Friday evening for an impromptu trip back to Pennsylvania. A rather close uncle of his died so we have a funeral attend. I hate how, as you get older, family reunions always tend to be in the forms of sicknesses or funerals.
Finally, we have more visitors coming at the end of the month! All I’m saying is that they better hope our floors are done, otherwise, they’ll be put to work! LOL
