Silver Linings

It’s been a bitch for the past several days — days unexpectedly spent in NY to visit my favorite Great-Uncle, who had a stroke on Tuesday and is not expected to live. I am so grateful that I got to the hospital in time to see him again while he could still recognize me. Still - the general situation and several days spent in a hospital room and among grieving family members takes its toll, and it’s another stretch of time I am not at home with both my kids. I am leaving tomorrow but — sadly — will likely be back soon for a funeral. So to cheer myself I decided to recall the good things about this weekend that would not have happened but for this sad visit.

I got a Mommy-Daughter weekend with A - she begged to come with me and was an absolute JOY to have around and a total trooper, sitting in the hospital for hours, (re)meeting cousins she hasn’t seen in years, etc. Not a single peep about being bored, the long drive, etc.

I got a few days with a several cousins and great aunts I haven’t seen in 5-20 years.

I got to watch A and my mom have an absolute ball as they spent today cooking up a storm and watching cooking shows.

I shared a bottle of 1998 Saint Emilion Grand Crue Reserve with my mom.

I remembered what fun a ferry ride is:

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I got a day where I have absolutely *nothing* to do but put my feet up, read a book and sip wine.

I drove with the top down.

I got to talk to my Adopted Godmother (my real one is a complete Freak who I haven’t seen since I was 10).

Ketchup

Thought I would try and catch up a bit now that things are settling down a little around here. The latest is that the relocation company ran out of excuses and accepted the buy-out offer on Thursday — with 6 hours to spare until the offer expired (and there was much rejoicing!!)

Part of the relo package was that they would buy the old house for a certain price but the offer expired on 7/31. By that date we had to get a bunch of inspections and get any needed repairs. We have been going around and around with them about related issues for months. Obviously it all looks like it will work out (though I won’t rest completely easy until the $ is in our account) but it got bad enough that when this is all over I plan to take up one particular issue (among many) with the Attorney General in the state where the company is headquartered. We found out 3 few weeks ago that the relo company recently filed for Chapter 11 which is likely part of the problem. We had our lawyer involved to get his read on possible breach of contract issues and D’s company had to intervene once as well on our behalf. We’re not the only ones having trouble - there are lots of people at D’s company having issues as bad or worse than us. It was very stressful as the worst-case scenario would have had us holding mortgages on both houses plus a $70k loan at 12% interest. Thankfully, all the paperwork is now signed and all that remains is the actual wire transfer of $$ which should happen within 10 days.

The new house is mostly unpacked but there is a lot we can’t put away easily until the new addition is built (a great room, garage and expansion of our bedroom). We need to get a lot of storage solution type things, too. We have a lot of yard work to do — stuff we can’t easily do ourselves because it requires serious machinery, so that’s on tap relatively soon. We did the first round a few weeks ago - a lot of tree trimming and fertilizing and getting acres of yard mowed (we don’t have a ride on mower yet so it isn’t practical to do it ourselves). We filed the building permits for the expansion today and now we can get financing since the old house is sold.

The kids are adjusting beautifully and really seem to like it here. Overall, NH is much more suited to A’s natural likes and inclinations (she’s a very outdoorsy kid) which is nice. D’s job is going well but he was very disappointed when his boss left for another opportunity a few weeks ago. I have started to work in my Boston office a few times and that seems to be going well. It will be hard not to be here 2 nights a week but I am trying to put the best face on it as possible. I have already been back to DC once and I have 2 more trip planned so that makes my separation from my friends easier. We have a family trip back to Maryland planned for Labor Day weekend and also for the weekend before Thanksgiving. A bunch of close friends — including my brother and sister in law — kept me relatively sane while I was home alone with the kids, packing/selling the house and pretending to work full time. I could not have emerged more or less in once piece without them. This has not been an easy 6 months for a variety of reasons and having them all for moral support and to lean on and ask favors of was fabulous. I learned an awful lot about myself and who I can really count on and who I just thought I could. I don’t know how everything will turn out — who ever does? — but I am a better person for it in the end.

My dad had neck surgery on Tuesday which seems to have gone well. He came home today and sounds almost like his old self, though I am sure it will be a long recovery (what do you expect when they crack seven vertebrae open and mess around?) He didn’t do so well with the anesthesia and morphine but is doing better each day. I plan to go to Florida over the next few weeks to see him and help out my step-mother.

We are getting used to some small annoyances like not having trash pick up and therefore having to go to the transfer station to dump trash and recyclables, and the bazillion bugs in NH; and nice things like less humidity, not needing air conditioning, far fewer crowds, better camps, the gorgeous surroundings, and being able to walk to the farmers’ market and having abundant access to cheap, local food, which is very important to me (some of you may like this site… http://100milediet.org/) There is a lot about small-town living that I love already. I’m sure these are things that will annoy the crap out of me someday, too, but all in good time. Talk to me when Winter comes…

And last but not least - we are *stupidly* excited that our best friends have moved back from Belguim!

Update: A Fungus (No Longer) Among Us

For those following the relocation trials and tribulations…after much ado and angst, the relo company was convinced to expedite the test results from our basement mold remediation (remediation: $5,500; yes, sir, you MAY have another…) They came back on Tuesday *clear*. YAY!! Today we have a scam artist…erm, I mean drywall guy… in to replace the drywall (to the tune of $2,000 - can you freaking believe that?!) so it seems that all we need to do is send photos of the finished drywall repair to Sirva/Satan by 5pm Thursday and then we will be able to sell them the house.

Not out of the woods yet but it’s looking a whole lot better than it did on Monday.

It’s All About Perspective, Grasshopper

Clearly I am unbalanced (shut up, Michael) because this song had me bawling today.

My Wish, by Rascal Flatts

I hope that days come easy and moments pass slow,
And each road leads you where you want to go,
And if you’re faced with a choice, and you have to choose,
I hope you choose the one that means the most to you.
And if one door opens to another door closed,
I hope you keep on walkin’ till you find the window,
If it’s cold outside, show the world the warmth of your smile,

More then anything, more then anything,
My wish, for you, is that this life becomes all that you want it,
Your dreams stay big, and your worries stay small,
You never need to carry more then you can hold,
And while you’re out there getting where you’re getting to,
I hope you know somebody loves you, and wants the same things too,
Yeah, this, is my wish.

I hope you never look back, but ya never forget,
All the ones who love you, in the place you left,
I hope you always forgive, and you never regret,
And you help somebody every chance you get,
Oh, you find God’s grace, in every mistake,
And you always give more then you take.

Oh More then anything, Yeah, and more then anything,
My wish, for you, is that this life becomes all that you want it,
Your dreams stay big, and your worries stay small,
You never need to carry more then you can hold,
And while you’re out there getting where you’re getting to,
I hope you know somebody loves you, and wants the same things too,
Yeah, this, is my wish.

Farmers Market: Opening Day!

Well — our first full day in NH was Saturday July 5 and it’s Opening Day for the Wilmot Farmers’ Market. We can WALK there - I am SO excited about that. The kids asked if they could take plastic bags to pick up trash along the way (!!!) and off we went. Sadly, we filled a bag of trash on our short walk (Note to our local beer-drinkers: Find a trashcan. ps: life’s too short to drink bad beer…Ditch the Bud. Yours, MM.)

Being this far north we’re just starting the summer harvest season. We scoped out the yummies and planned supper. We bought: kale, garlic scapes, and leaf lettuce from Two Mountain Farm, and the most gorgeous semi-boneless leg of lamb from Fruit Cake Farm. At Autumn Harvest Farm we picked up some potted basil, thyme and rosemary to transplant (since I hadn’t had a chance to get any started back in Maryland) and a dozen eggs that were soooooo good. The kids fell in love with honey sticks from Cutting Farm, too. I was a little taken by the abundance and quality of the food — next thing you know I was buying an $8 loaf of french bread. Don’t get me wrong - it was great bread but even in DC and NY you don’t pay $8/loaf for the best, freshest, most authentic Italian and French bread there is (except for the stuff in, well, Italy and France.) Thankfully I found more reasonably priced bread at another local market.

I am really looking forward to Local Supper Nights each Saturday as I am calling them.

The following Tuesday we celebrated being partly unpacked (yeah, I know — any excuse for a party but we needed a pick me up) and I made a fresh (and local!) lob-stah dinner, complete with fresh (and local!) corn and a salad of leaf lettuce, pine nuts, fresh goat cheese from Twig Farm dressed with some gorgeous peppery olive oil my mom brought back from Tuscany last Fall, sea salt and fresh ground pepper and a squirt of fresh lemon juice. It was fabulous until I realized our nutcrackers were at my friend Deb’s (left behind at the last crab feast on the Chesapeake) and we had no butter. Ah well — we muddled through and I had the best leftovers ever…a fresh lobster roll for dinner the next night.

We’re still drowning in boxes but some rooms are more or less unpacked which gives us a respite. The kids are adjusting beautifully — for which I am so thankful — and we’re looking forward to our trip to Maryland at the end of August for A’s birthday and my girlfriend Renee’s Labor Day Bash. Working with the relo company to sell the Maryland house is proving to be an absolute nightmare (they say Sirva, we say Satan…) but this too shall pass…eventually. The latest bugaboo is that when we repaired some drywall in the basement we apparently disturbed some mold spores so we now have “bad air” which must be remediated and reinspected by July 31. Or else they won’t buy the house. Sigh. Well, we’ll get through it, I’m sure…

Oh Give Me a Home Where the Moose and Deer Roam…

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Maple Brook Farm. We close on June 27.

Smurfy Goodness

For a fun, quick makeover, walk through a preschool classroom oblivious to the fact that there are finger-paintings drying on a clothesline. Quickly brush past the paintings, making sure to get just enough wet paint (blue, if possible) in your hair to simulate funky streaks/highlights. Take care that the paint actually gets in your hair and not on your face — otherwise you’ll go from cool, mod punk-rocker mom to a bad impression of an Indian Warrior.

I’m just sayin’. Not that I’d know, personally. Ahem.

For Everything Else, There’s MasterCard

Checking a suspect timing adjustor: $192

Replacing said timing adjustor: $1100

Replacing leaky seals on the cams: “free”

The phrase “Thank you sir, may I have another…?”: Priceless

Book Meme

I shamelessly stole this from Radical Mama because I, too, am brain dead lately. Yet I feel the need to post.

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

On the Road Again…

Never before have I been moved to jot down quotes while on the road with my cow-orkers. I don’t know what about this trip was different — that cow orker C and I were celebrating our 10-trip anniversary, that there was a male cow-orker present, that I out-aged the youngest member of the team by 13 years, that we were in Nebraska and Missouri and what else is there to do there after work besides patronize the local watering holes, that we drove *between* Nebraska and Missouri and what else is there to do in the car for 3 hours besides be rude … so here they are in all their glory. And I duly note that the only ones from my mouth are the very few with no curses in it (as the boss I feel it is my duty to shut up and buy beer and offend people as little as possible.) And as an aside, I note that the night I flew home, my cow-orkers “sheltered in place” in C’s hotel room while a tornado ripped through Kansas City...

F-ing Congress, they can ask for anything.

This is how I learned to snow ski.
Do you KNOW how?
F-you, man.

With a name like Quaalude you expect something with a little punch.

F-you bitches, I’m wearing Lucky jeans

Mmmmmmm. Anne Bancroft.

Sorry, you seem to have lost your filter. Would you like it back?

What the hell was that?
That was my sympathy.
That was the coldest piece of sympathy I’ve ever received, you cold-hearted bitch!

I’ll try to restrain my inner asshole as much as possible.

Why do they call it Missour-uh and not Missour-eee?
Because they’re f-ing hicks.

Hey - your inner asshole has escaped.

Now THAT’S a tramp stamp.

“My inner asshole is coming out…”

“I’ve eaten nothing but desserts and beer for the past four days”

“This is kinda’ fun because I’ve never had sisters”

“Remind me to stop winking at the bartender”