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The theme for this update is moving.
On June 12th we moved into our new house. Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? No move is easy, something always seems to happen to make it interesting. In this move we hadn’t completely inventoried the stuff in the attic, which was a mistake. Additionally, the movers weren’t insured for accessing a pull-down attic. Something that would have been good to know when their guy was out to do the estimate. The movers agreed to help, for a fee of course. We still needed the help of our neighbors to finish packing a bunch of loose things that were left. One thing is certain, pack everything. No matter how big or small, or strangely shaped, it needs to go into a box of some kind. Otherwise movers get confused. Luckily, there were no issues on the move into the new house. The closings went well with no snags and before we knew it, we were moved in.
We’re really enjoying the new house. I think the best room in it is the bonus room above the garage that is now Axel’s play room. He’s having a lot of fun in there and sometime in June, he started walking by pushing a toy. We had the toy out for a while, but one day I was sitting there and he got up behind it and pushed it over to me all by himself. He’s since moved up to walking while holding our hands.
The last two weeks of July we all went on vacation up to Door County, WI. We had to rent a cottage because the family cottage had a small bat issue. As far as I know, no one ever asked about the total number of bats in the walls, but it sounded like a lot. Eventually someone came to take care of them. It’s kind of strange, but this guy, working out of WI, has flown to various places to help with bat problems, ironically, even Michael Keaton’s place in Montana.
The vacation was good although probably a bit too long. Axel never quite got used to the 1 hour time change and routinely got up between 5:45-6:00am every morning. My parents came up for a few days to stay with us, which was fun because Axel got to hang out with them first thing every morning. We did our normal stuff up in WI, hung out on the beach and went swimming, I did a little fishing on my own and with my Dad. I took my parents up the penninsula one day and we hit some shops. Near the end of the trip we hit that heat wave happening all across the country, so even up there it was in the mid 90s. It was good to come home. Axel did great on the flights, playing during two of them and sleeping during the other two. The last flight wasn’t too good, it was late, had to stop before take off to fix something, and the RDU airport when we finally landed was crazy. I think we’ll do all of our flying in the mornings from now on.
The last move was the website. I decided it was time to get it up on a normal host rather than run it out of our house. The third computer adds a good bit of heat to the office, so it’s nice to keep it shut down. Hopefully now the site won’t be down whenever we go on trips or have a power outtage. Everything seems to be working as it did before, but feel free to email me if you find a problem. I’ll also be getting a lot of new pictures up soon.
Yeah, kinda behind on posting. Wish I was better at keeping things up to date, but it’s amazing how having a small person around the house makes time fly. I had no idea I hadn’t really updated pics since Halloweeen of last year.
Lots of pictures added in the gallery.
Things are going well. We’re (hopefully) in the last stages of sleep training Axel. This is one of those things (apparently) a lot of parents don’t like to talk about, either because they never did it, did it in strange ways, or just had such a horrible time they’d really rather not talk about it. Even so, we’ve had massive support from friends and family. Axel might have been a little on the young side to start this, but that’s hard to judge since he looks like he’s pushing 8 months old instead of 5. But with Maren back at work, we just couldn’t handle his waking up at night and deciding it was time to be awake for a couple of hours.
He’s falling asleep on his own now fairly regularly. We still have a little sticking point at 4am, but we’re sure he’ll get that knocked out soon.
I know, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the website. Hopefully there’s still people out there checking up on us. As most of you are aware, our Son was born on Sept. 3rd, so things have been kinda busy here. Not stressfully busy, but there always seems to be something to do with the little guy. There’s some new pictures up and I’ll be trying to post some sort of update at least once a week or so.
Right now there’s not much to report. He weighed 9lbs. 9oz. at birth and after losing a little more than half a pound, he was already going back up by day 3. He’s starting to be a little less erratic with his schedule and recently let Maren and I sleep a good bit last night.
After much planning with finance people and contracting types, we were ultimately doomed by the appraiser. An appraisal was needed by the Credit Union so they could determine how much they could lend us (under their building loan policy). However, this appraisal came in significantly lower than they expected. Frankly, their expectations were too high and they should probably have been warning us that it could be a close thing, but instead they were speaking as if this was a no-brainer and we “shouldn’t have any problem at all”.
Anyway, the house addition project has been shelved indefinately. The new project is remodeling the master bathroom. This is also going to be a tricky project as our master bathroom has a cathedral ceiling. When the house was built, they must have decided that a skylight in the bathroom would be nice (and it is), but that means the ceiling goes all the way to the roof of the house. That wouldn’t seem like that much of a hurdle except that the bathroom is completely wallpapered. In fact, it has the appearance of being wallpapered before most of the bathroom fittings were installed. In this case, it’s original nature helps us out as 20 years in a steamy bathroom has made it very easy to remove…. so far.
We had just planned on removing the paper, repainting and new counters and sinks, but with the addition no longer happening, I think we’re going to take the time to rip out the shower and tub and replace that with a new shower system. It’ll depend on how much we get gouged, er, I mean charged for having that done.
Other than the home improvement stuff, everything else is going fine. Maren is okay, although I caught a cold during some recent travel and promptly gave it to her and it’s taking her a lot longer to get rid of it than I did. The baby is fine as well, kicking like a tiny madman and moving all over the place. We’re coming down the stretch, Maren has about another 10 weeks to go.
Maybe some of you didn’t fully grasp the scope of my geekery (geekness? geekdom?), but trust me, I’m pretty darn geeky. I’ve been told a number of people have been traipsing through the latest photo album which chronicles my latest computer building project. Glad you enjoyed it. I probably should have taken even more pictures. I might still do that as there’s more work to be done. This time around I really do want to get back inside that computer and get things more tidied up.
The problem with putting a computer together is that once you get it up and running, drivers updated, operating system updated, security systems put back in place, etc., etc., you finally get some games reinstalled, and suddenly all interest in getting the little things finished seems to evaporate and you’re back using the computer satisfied that you’re done building it.
