The trip report is thankfully over and you all can go back to being bored about the mundaneness of my life instead of being bored reading about my vacation.
So...where to start?
My parents are NC homeowners. I did the closing for them last week and we now shuttle back and forth to the "Raleigh Property" as we're calling it. The house is huge. 3 floors of huge. We had to go and learn from the previous owner how to work the fish pond out back. We had to take pictures. We were there to meet the landscapers. We have an appointment with the floors lady. Really, it's a lot of fun. On the bright side, they don't think they'll be moving for a while. That should give me enough time to become entrenched at RedCompany and be able to look for a transfer.
Speaking of which. So, yea...new job. Before we left, I was on a call with some people from RedVendor discussing how they plan to start managing the print and mail work that I control. They were babbling away and saying how they needed to hire 2 people to do it. I casually asked "Why can't the person work from Raleigh?" It was like I'd dropped my pants and crapped on the table. After a beat or 2 of dead silence, they all started chattering about what we needed to do in order to get me hired and on the payroll. Sweet. So, I went away knowing that RedVendor and HealthCareRelatedCompany would be working out the details of my trade. When we got back, it took 2 days, but I've been hired. I have to go to NJ on Sunday night so I can start training first thing on Monday morning. It's a good gig. I'll be doing the same job that I am now, just be getting paid a lot more money to do it. Plus, it gives me a chance to get established in the company. I'm sure they're doing similar work down here in the Triangle and want to get into one of those locations. But, until then, I'm still working from home. But, home is changing because...
Shmuppie started preschool last week. She goes 4 days a week from 9-12. It's not a very vigorous academic curriculum. I mean, they play with blocks. Give me a break. I wanted to enroll her in a foreign language immersion school so she'd have the best chances at getting into a good college, but then I realized that she walks into walls and that getting her out of the house was god enough. The house is quiet in the morning. Shmuppie is out of the house and JewelrySlut usually goes to the Y, so I'm all alone. It's quiet...but not for long...
Because we're having work done at the house. We're getting new floors on the main floor. We currently have disgusting carpet that needs to go. The main floor has the dining room, living room, kitchen and assorted hallways. All the rooms but the kitchen has an awful looking carpet on them. Out it goes, in comes the laminate flooring. We signed the deal last night and it comes in 2 weeks from today. It also looks like we're getting new carpet upstairs. My mother announced that she wanted to pull out all the carpeting on the 2nd floor of the Raleigh Property to make room for hard woods. I announced that the carpeting was going to be installed at our house. We got a rough quote from the floor lady and, assuming we can make it all fit into our house; we're getting the whole upstairs carpeted for just over $1000. It's brand new carpet...put in when the previous owners listed the house. It smells new! By the time we're done, we'll have redone all the floors in the house, minus the kitchen (that's another project) for not a whole lot of money. This is a good thing because we're doing something foolish next month.
Yup, we're actually going to Disney. Shmuppie has been very excited lately about our Disney books, and we can't resist. Plus, we'll be driving past it on the way to Gramps' house. We're driving down and spending one night on the grounds. We'll go to the Magic Kingdom for the day before we head out across the state. Are we crazy? Yes. We are. This little junket is setting us back over $300. Now, that just gets us a room and 3 tickets. We still have to eat. The way we see it, this goes one of 2 ways. There's no gray area in this. Either Shmuppie loves it and has the greatest time EVER or she wigs the fuck out and goes crazy. JewelrySlut is cautiously excited. She's worried about me. As we know, I tend to be a bit twitchy. In the past, we've done Disney at one speed; full speed ahead. It's going to take some doing to have me ratchet things down a few levels and learn how to move at a slower pace. Because, a 4-year old sees the world differently. For example...
Last weekend was a busy one for us. When I found out for sure that I'd be heading north this weekend, we decided to go to the NC zoo last weekend. It's about 1 1/2 hours from us, conveniently located in the middle of nowhere. Well, that's only partially true. It's smack between Raleigh and Charlotte. Unfortunately, that's in the middle of nowhere. We had a good time though. But, the zoo is huge. It's not laid out well and you have to do a lot of waling for a relatively sparse zoo population. But, ask Shmuppie what she liked best. She's likely to talk about a bug that was peeing or that the shuttle buses were painted like zebras. Did we like the animals? Beats me...did you know the bug peed? So, Disney could be fun. The trip there also affords us the opportunity to drive through more of the South. And, I use a Capitol S when I say South. Because, once you get outside of the Triangle and head to the Zoo, you enter the South again. In fact, you see signs like this:
Did no one else in Donkey Fuck, NC (or whatever the hell town that was) tell them that 1: The name is dirty and 2: they had a typo?
Shit...sometimes, I love the South.
Then, for fun, we rearranged the living room on Sunday. We'd been talking about doing it for a while and finally decided to do it then before the flooring came in. This way, if we hated it, we could switch it back at that time. The room is rectangular. It's fed in from the kitchen on one side ant the hallway on the other. The TV side of the room was on the hallway side and we had a big hutch of dishes and shit on the kitchen side. A few months ago, JewelrySlut thought it would be better the other way; TV side on the kitchen side. It would be brighter and allow us to listen to music or the TV while we cooked. So, we flipped the room. I had to drill a hole for the cable line, and the furniture is heavy as hell. But, we managed to do it in less than 3 hours and I never swore. It was quite an accomplishment. We like how the room looks now. We're still tired form moving all the crap, but the room looks good.
Lastly, when Shmuppie started school, she needed a family picture to put up in the classroom. Well, we didn't have one. We're never all together for pictures. I have plenty of the assorted twosomes that a family of 3 can create, but none of the 3 of us. So, on Sunday evening, I set up the digital camera's timer and took this: