Well Behaved

Around the dinner table the other night the little ones were getting a bit rowdy. So we talked about how they needed to BEHAVE at the table.

Cute little 3 year old Mikki piped up, “Mom, I AM haved!”

Pretending

So last night we were driving home, and cute little Mikki is pointing out Christmas lights and decorations as we go. On some of the rooftops are inflated snowmen, santas, etc., which we have helped her understand are just “pretend” and not real. She was initially concened about their safety it seems, so that settled it for her. She just thought they were cool, now.

But then as we rounded a corner to turn up State Street, another commercial building had more inflatables on it. And she cheerfully announces:

“If I were on the rooftop, I would be pretend, too!”

We Passed It!

OK, so cute little Mikki has done it again!

I was waiting to be picked up by Tam, who had all 3 little kids in the car with her on her way to get me. I was talking to them on the cell phone, and when Mikki got on the line, I asked her if she could see the big beautiful moon out. It was HUGE! She looked for it, but told me over the phone that she could not see it in the sky.

I knew it was in the southern part of the sky, and they were travelling north to come to me, so I said, “Look out the back window, Mikki.”

She gasped as she caught sight of it, and exclaimed into the phone to me:

“There it is! It’s behind us! We passed it already!”

The Car is On Backwards

My little 3 year old sweetie is the darndest, cutest thing there ever was. She says the funniest smartest things, and I want to start keeping track of them here.

Today we pulled into a parking space, but instead of going in nose-first like normal, I instead backed into the space. Mikki, from the back seat, exclaimed, “The Car is On Backwards!”

ROFLMAO!!!

Settling In

I am looking forward to life settling down a little and all of us settling in. I don’t have especially high hopes of that happening, but it’s nice to think about. I think it will happen, though.

I came home from work yesterday and found that Tam had unpacked and arranged everything in the “Wood Room” so that it looked wonderful! I call it the wood room because I am not sure what else to call it. It is the only room in the house that has all hardwood floors. It’s not really a living room, and it’s not just a dining room, though this is its primary function. This room is the first room you enter when you come in the front door. We have a couch along the left wall (because it’s too big to take downstairs into the living room, and there’s already a couch down there that’s too big to get out of the place, so the owner left it for us instead of chopping it up and removing it in pieces–it’s a nice couch downstairs so we are glad to have it there!) and a couple of bookshelves. The stairs down are across the room to the right, and the kitchen is further to the right (a right u-turn from the front door will land you at the kitchen counter). Between the stairs and the kitchen we have our fridge (a second fridge since the place comes with its own), and the stand-up freezer. In the move, we acquired a second clothes dryer, so it’s currently next to the freezer until we decide we want it downstairs in place of the other dryer or not. I joked during dinner last night that it looked like I was eating in the appliance department showroom floor…LOL!

For a housewarming gift, since this will be our home for the longest period so far in our marriage, I bought a nice little wall clock that does Westminster (and one other kind of) chimes every quarter-hour and it’s now on the wall in the Wood Room. Hearing that clock reminds me of home as a child when an old German Grandfather clock in our living room would sound of like it. It’s fun, and the kids love it when it gongs the number of hours.

This place is really shaping up to be a place that feels like home. I just wish it felt like that outside the door. There is no place for the kids to play unsupervised. With the population being what it is in the condo complex, it’s hard to feel safe letting the kids just run around and play at will. We have good reason to fear child molestors or other dangers. To remind us how legitimate our concerns are, there’s this website (http://utah-sex-offenders.com/) that keeps us grounded. It ties into Google Maps and the Utah Sex Offenders List to show us how many offenders are within a mile of our home. SCARY!

Here’s a view of our last place we lived, and who was nearby as a threat to our kids!

This guy lived just around the corner!

I am not going to post the address to our new place here publicly. If you know us, you have our address through other means. But know that there are actually EIGHT offenders living within a mile of our place now. The last place (and there is no way you could have guessed it by driving the cozy little neighborhood) had SEVEN. Unbelievable. At least in the last place, the kids could ride their bikes across the street to play with their friends and we weren’t too concerned. There were fewer people to get to know, and people who didn’t belong there stood out. In the new place, we live in condos, and there are just too many people to get to know them all, too many coming and going, too many visitors, too many ways for someone who doesn’t belong to go unnoticed. And that offender list is only of people who got caught…there are more of them…

Our goal is to be ready to move in a year into a much safer place where kids can play freely, and we can really settle in for a while. Here’s hoping!

The End of a Chapter…

…and I have to admit that it is a relief, albeit a frustrating one.

Last night we went to the old house to finish up all the cleaning, and found that the water was off. Well, there would be no cleaning without water, so back home we went. I would have called the landlord, but it was 10:00 pm, and I thought that would be too late to bother him. Tam would be back today to finish then, after stopping by the city to reconnect the water first. When she arrived at the house at Noon, the landlord was already there with a cleaning lady! WHAT?!?! He told Tam that he was afraid we were not going to get things done in time for the new tenants to move in this weekend, so he decided to have someone come in and finish for us. UNBELIEVABLE! Not a single word to us about it. Just showed up. He had our cell phone number, and could have called. That’s lame. No doubt he is going to deduct that cleaning cost from the deposit he is supposed to refund us.

So Tam got the last of our garbage and cleaning supplies out of there (vacuum, mop, brooms, chemicals, etc.) and took off, calling me to let me know what happened.

Oh, we are going to have words. Yes we are…and I will have lots to say when we do…

Moving Limbo

As of this moment, it feels like we are in moving limbo. We have 80% of our stuff at the new place, and are still finishing cleaning this place. The last thing to take down is the computer. Tam says this is because she is listening to yahoo music, so of course, it must stay online to the last minute. 🙂

But it’s good that it is still up because I can post this during a break from the final boxing and cleaning. So here I sit while the sweat dries and cakes onto provious layers. All of our stuff is still in boxes and mostly in the front room at the new place. We collapsed last night on mattresses and slept for 7 hours before forcing ourselves up and at it again.

Here is an interesting observation. We have had NO HELP from the neighbors here at the old place. We have had a UHaul parked in the driveway for 2 days now, and not a single person has so much as offered to help except one person across the street (which was for a time that we couldn’t really use the help anyway). Most people avert their glances as they pass by. Very interesting. There were about 20 people from the neighborhood here when we moved in on X-Mas Eve to help us unpack. But then again, the neighbors have been less then social during the week with us. I guess social hour is between 11am and 2pm on Sundays, and if we miss that, we just aren’t being friendly neighbors.

Last night, we had about 8 people show up out of nowhere to help us unload the stuff from our truck. They were very friendly, of course. They had a good time examining our belongings, comparing our condo with theirs, and scratching the wood floor, doors, walls, and furniture. 😉 I wonder if they will find us unfriendly neighbors if we don’t join them for social time each Sunday as well? I hope not, because (ok, I am a little biased here) we are pretty nice people, and generally quite well-behaved. Time will tell, eh?

Well, back to the cleaning and packing the last stuff in the truck for final departure from this address…

Moving Sucks

It’s late Wednesday, and we have to be moved out of one place by tomorrow night, and the other place by Sunday. We can’t move into the new place until Sunday, so what a mess all this is, eh?

Moving Sucks.

That’s all that can really be said about it safely, because as soon as you start talking about it, you suddenly realize that you have been ranting for the last 20 minutes…and that can be embarrassing in the wrong crowd.

Anyway, Gary’s place was such an Effing Nightmare, I can hardly believe it. A couple of the things we expected to get back from him that Tam loaned him while the boys were staying with him have been completely trashed. DI won’t even take stuff in that bad a shape. They have to go the dump. Great. We thought in a moment of weakness we would sublet his place since he got all kinds of married on his 4th date with this (turns out to be a very like-minded) woman he met a month earlier. She’s from Idaho, so they have uprooted and moved. We thought at first, hey the rent’s cheap, let’s move there…and then thought through it some more and decided it would be hellish living there. Unfortunately, the thinking-it-through part came after being pressured to sign the lease really quickly.

So in order to get out of the lease we signed, we have to clean the place up. WHAT A MESS! I can’t believe how pathetic this guy is. I can’t believe Tam was ever married to him!!! Wow! Pigs live clean, respectable lives compared.

And get this. We told him he needed to come back and get all his crap out of the place that he left behind. We had gone there to clean the place so we could move in (the very day we came to our senses about NOT moving in), and the place was totally filthy. There appeared to be a small effort to clean the place, like maybe a couple of 10 year olds that were told they needed to tidy up before they could go out to play were there…

He came down to do that, and actually STAYED in the place, with his new wife, and dirtied the shower again, left dirty dishes in the sink, and didn’t hardly take a THING back to Idaho with him. The place was left with everything still in it, and dirtier. UN-FREAKING-BELIEVABLE.

So we have to take a whole bunch of crap to the dump, as much as we can to DI, and keep a few things that remain that are actually worth keeping, and that were Tam’s in the first place.

THEN as if that wasn’t enough all by itself to make this a sucky weekend…

…we need to move out of the house WE have been renting, and move into a new condo we found in Orem that we like. That’s a whole new adventure, just not one of cleaning up after a freaking 40-year old pre-teen. It’s a matter of packing and moving, and so many things are so heavy, and there is only Tam and I to do it all. We have not made many friends in the neighborhood here, and so I don’t think they will offer to help much. But who knows. I would feel a little odd about accepting their help anyway, but I am desperate enough to accept it no matter what if they show up to help. But I won’t ask for it.

And all this has to be done sometime before the end of Sunday the 3rd, and before I keel over dead from exhaustion. Poor Tam is in bed right now, sick, stressed, and I don’t know how, but she is sleeping. Normally she can’t sleep when things like these press on her mind. And they are, I can tell. But I think she is perhaps even more exhausted, and sick on top of it…so sleep forces itself upon her against her will.

I’ll let you know how things went after the move. I am sure I will not be posting again until after the PC is set up in the new place, and Internet has been connected.

See? I should have just left this as “Moving Sucks” but instead I went on a ranted for 20 minutes. Sorry… 🙂

June 19 – Father’s Day

It’s the first Father’s Day since being remarried. And frankly, it was WONDERFUL.

Last Father’s day, Shaine was living with his mother while we were separated, so he wasn’t interested in talking to me. Dallin was in Kentucky with my brother, supposedly out of harms way while the divorce proceeded. Dallin sent me a little care package with a movie ticket, a hat that said #1 Dad on it, and a framed picture of him. That was cool. Enclosed instructions told me to put on the hat, take the photo with me to a movie, and watch a good flick with my son. That was nice.

This year, I have several new step-kids, three of which are living with us right now. They call me Dad, and I feel like it with them, even though their bio-dad is here in the area and sees them overnight once a week. He’s a bit of a jerk, and they know it. But heck he’s their Dad, and wants to be in their lives, so they usually see him without too much ire. But last night they called us late and cried that they wanted to come home. But the jerk made them stay there, and kept saying that everything would be alright. Those poor kids.

Anyway, I got to sleep in for the morning, and woke to Dallin trying to barricade the kitchen off with chairs and a sign telling me to go back to bed! Ha! A little while later, he shows up with a tray of French toast and scrambled eggs for me and Tam. Very cool. That was nice! Later, I took him to see Star Wars, Ep III. He wanted to see it badly. I wasn’t able to go with him since there were things that needed to get done at home, but he loved the movie, so that’s GREAT!

Tam had already spent time with the little kids writing some eCards for me and today they arrived in my email box. They were so cute. There was a card from the older kids in Idaho (ok, so Mom helped there quite a bit), and then another from the 3 little ones. And then a special card just for me from someone special. I couldn’t help but be touched by the beautiful words they all wrote to me. Wow!

We wrapped up the day with Tam and I driving into the mountains to Cascade Springs. The beautiful countryside was wonderful to drive through. A short walk through the springs brought scenes of nature’s beauty all around us.

Just before finishing this post to the Blog, Shaine popped up on IM chat with a Father’s Day greeting for me (Thanks Tam!). It was a very fine day!

My job does not suck…

I have a great job, actually. It’s on the better side of the scale than most jobs, better than average for sure. If you think your job sucks, think about the kinds of jobs you COULD have. Here’s one that looks fun at first, but upon closer inspection, I think I can see the horror and misery in his eyes…

The Laughing Guru

And then there’s always this CRAPPY JOB!!!