random things on my mind

I need to paint the front door, but it’s mosquito season and I don’t want the inside of the house to be the box in a bug spray commercial. I also don’t want Doug building another ‘clean room‘ before we’ve repaired the staple damage from the last one. Hmmm. I need to find a place […]

drip, drip, drip

We live in an old house with what is politely known as personality. The long list of things that need simple repairs is low priority when something else is dripping, sparking or overflowing. Except for the occasional lightning strike destroying the a/c or a hail storm destroying the roof and siding, repairs are limited to […]

under construction – bed version

Half-full: We have a new-to-us mattress set to replace our mattress that sagged in the middle and stabbed us with broken springs. Half-empty: We don’t have a frame for it, so it’s on the concrete slab that is our floor. Half-full: The new mattress has an extra layer of squishy comfort that makes it feel […]

But they were nice

Despite my obviously high expectations about what clean-up should include, I do not have any complaints about the workers that the contractor tasked with repairing our house. They sang and danced to cheesy 80’s tunes. They joked with me. They played ball with the dogs. They were extremely interested in my 18-y-o daughter. Okay, EXCEPT […]

no progress today

The crew didn’t show up today. They missed four hours of bright sunshine, but they also missed a mean hail storm with excessive thunder and lightning. Tomorrow’s forecast looks equally ominous, so I don’t expect the crew to return until Friday. Unfortunately, the house is currently less prepared for bad weather than when the construction […]

Repair Progress

First, there were a series of storms. So, we removed the old shutters. New windows replaced the broken, leaky windows. New siding replaced the hail dented siding.

Sounds like winter

Our tiny neighborhood’s hills, trees and creeks combine to create an acoustic oddity that peaks when the leaves have fallen and the air is crisp. Unlike the muted, echoed or separated tracks of noise that you hear in a city, everyday noises blend in our spoon shaped hood to create a perfectly mixed symphony. It’s […]

squirrel in the kudzu

Doug knows that the quickest way to make me quit whining is to distract me. His distraction for my kudzu project complaining is project detail discussions. I don’t mind this particular distraction. The decade of ducks as a bathroom theme has ended and we have a new theme that is going to require a lot […]

Rocky Hill rocks

I recently made a joke on facebook about a house in our neighborhood that is home to several graduate students. It is easily identified by the couch in the yard, television on the porch and mailbox stuffed with frisbee golf discs. The twenty-something guys who live there always have bicycles or kayaks or some form […]