z’s bubbles 2

Yesterday had some really fun moments…
First, I slept in, again, but it didn’t really matter as I still get there before anyone else. But… I couldn’t find my shoes at first. Then a vague memory crept into my mind: the night before, I came home and… read Gillian a bed-time story (it’s usually the first thing I do since Roo has gotten such a good grip on our household that both kids are ready for bed by the time I get home. Thank you sweet cakes ). So I sneak into her room to get my shoes. I grab them and head back out when I hear a soft “uh.. uh..” noise behind me, followed by, as I turn around to look, a quiet whisper… “cuddles…” Golly how can one resist? So I tucked her back in her bed, cuddled her, bundled her up with her puppy and left her falling back asleep smiling. What a way to start the day out right! (As a side note, she slept until Roo got her our of bed at 9:30am!)

The good mood carried through to work. I expressed to one of our sysadmins that I was quite enjoying working more in depth with Solaris. Her reply was that it was fun to see someone not complain that “it’s not like Windows”. To which I promptly replied that I was glad I could be entertaining even though I felt like a guinea-pig or a hamster. Sounds cute, doesn’t it? “Hi…I am a hamster”. Though I’m glad not to be a lab-rat or a mouse as they usually get dissected after the experiment!

It was a good laugh.

Office politics are starting to come into focus too… There is Khalil(or at least a guy who sounds like him!) who seems to do absolutely nothing when he is “left in charge”. Or the other guy who I’ve never seen but can’t understand for the life of me on the phone. I don’t know what he does, but he does not seem to be doing what others expect of him…

So how did last week go? Well I had made the commitment to make that week better than the previous ones. I think I succeeded, even though not to the degree I was shooting for.

In retrospective the first week in my new position went well, though very different than expected. I learned more about Unix shells, ksh programming, perl, TestWare data management, and Java than I had in the past 6 years. Scary but true. Oh and I made friends with vi, though it still beeps at me more than proper ettiquette would allow.

It’s been fun and interesting. Though not knowing what their expectations are, in regards to my getting up to speed and/or learning FFW is somewhat of a bother. As is me feeling guilty for taking my breaks. It is silly, but it doesn’t feel like that much work. I mean most of the time I stare at a screen wondering why in the world it just didn’t do what I wanted it to do.

Gilian participated in the primary program ar church yesterday. I think thast was the highlight of her week. Ruth’s parents had come down just to see her sing and hear her say her part. Which she did in het cute way majing everybody smile and chuckle when she opened her speech with “Hi, my name is Gillian” and later when she closed (talking about facing the consequences of your actions) saying “sometimes that’s good, and sometimes thats… BAD” *lol* Of course the whole dancing to the songs, chewing on her shoe, holding her giraffe just added to the overall good mood…

Liam on the other hand has been sick most of the week, with yesterday being his worst day: sinuses and a cough. Add teething to that and you have one miserable little boy. But he’s doing much better today. And we had a really good time Saturday when the girls were gone hooking up the remaining 3 speakers to Roo’s computer and watching music videos. And we’ve discovered that he likes 80ies guitars more than beats now (think Billy Idol, Europe, even GnR…) It was lots of fun.

Now we did have a low-point when Roo called me at work Friday afternoon saying the DVD player had died. Upon further inspection, the motor of the drive is gone… well mostly anyway. So our 3rd player in 5 years has almost passed away and is now serving it’s last days, guts exposed with someone having to push-start every movie by helping it to starts spinning the disc. So sad. And then you read about people replacing a player after 5 years. Gee, I want one that lasts a full two and I’d be happy!

I have no idea why it’s been so rough. Actually, it’s not that everything is more rough, but rather it seems the difference between rough times and great times has been magnified exponentially!

On good days, everything is really awesome. On bad days, it’s the pits. It’s amazing all the things a house can do, even change life itself! Now if only we could/would alter the ratio from 9 bad/1 good to 9 good/1 bad, then we’d be ok. Actually 6/4 in favor of good would be good too (heck I’d settle for a 5/5!)…

Now for the high- (and low-) lights since we moved in…

Most of it is really how overwhelmed we all feel. For example, we didn’t even shop around for the fridge before buying it because everybody was so tense, anticipating something to happen during the house-buying process.

To further illustrate: 10 days after we moved in, appearantly the previous owner’s electricity contract expired and TXU decided to cut the power. Ironically, a day later they ran an add on the radio boasting that “they really cared about their customers”. Oh yeah? So you send someone to a house to cut electricity during a very warm time of the year, you walk up to the garage to flip the main switch, you see children playing in the back yard, and someone is sorting through things and the garage and you don’t even question your actions? And then when they call you back you tell them 6 days and if you’re planning on switching providers soon, then they can’t do anything about you not having power? Scary the BS that some companies feed the masses…

The same goes for Saxon Woods, our old appartment complex who decided to charge us $300 for carpet cleaning and $100 administrative fee. You’d think that if they do, they’d at least send a card stating something among the lines of “we thank you for allowing us to host you for the past 2 years and that you enjoyed your stay, bla bla bla…” No… It was “You still owe us $126 and if you don’t pay by the due date, we’re going to give this to a collection agency and report it to every credit bureau in the country”. I guess they really don’t want us to ever come back or to refer people to them. It’s sad. The place was really nice until their tennants (and service) took a dive earlier this year.

I don’t know what I did wrong, but I had a really hard time dealing with all this. Mostly it showed in a attitude low enough to leave scrape marks on the floor and a critically short amount of patience with everyone. I have a lot to make up, especially to Roo and my two little angels!

Speaking of which, Gillian started preschool last week. She’s taking the whole thing very seriously!! She loves it though. And I swear her speech has improved by leaps and bounds over the past week too! But the cutest thing is the addition to her nightly prayers. She used to keep them pretty generic but now every time she says she’s thankful for a specific something or someone thing that touched her that day; like Paige, the neighbours girl, or the lunchbox, the sprinklers and running

Yesterday I found myself looking at Liam and becoming speechless. That little man has grown so much it’s unreal! And even though he’s struggling with a sinus infection, teething and the discovery of rules and parental vero, he still manages to be such an angel!

As for work, it’s been on the frustrating side too. I’ve realized we’re fighting the exact same issues as we were 3 years ago when I started there. Talk about a slap in the face; anything we did, changed or introduced was in vain. Thankfully I’ll start in my new work group this Wednesday. Yeah! That’s rather exciting, even though it’ll be tough to learn as much as I’ll need to in a short time.

I need to huddle with myself to figure out how to do some damage control in what is left of this year! Badly!

I don’t know what’s wrong, I feel so beside myself: drifting, at a complete and total loss… The whole house/move process seems like it was just this tidal wave carrying me away, bopping like a cork on water, floating this and that way… And when the waters finally receeded, the move and everything was said and done, I try to get myself out of the sand just to be hit by another, though smaller wave… Just strong enough to knock me off my feet again.

I don’t like that.

I want to run again, pick a spot on the horizon and run. That’s the type of adventure I had hoped for when a few months ago I had made that wish. This is not an adventure. It’s decay, it’s mold, it’s a soaked piece of cork stuck in the sand slowly wasting away…

Ew.

The last two days flew by like a breeze. It was nice to have 5 days off but it still seems short in retrospective. At least I get to start training tomorrow, which is really nice.

So on my last day, I did some more of the bills, cleaned more papers, helped Roo with the yard, lost another battle to our new (free) used lawn mower and took it in… We also went on 2 shopping trips and had 2 meals An easy day. Though it’s amazing how many more things there are to do in a house. And I mean that in a good way.

Gillian had a play date today. She loved it and since she’ll start preschool this month, it might turn out to be a weekly thing, which Roo wont mind a bit

Liam is being extremely adorable. He’s in love with cars. Wonder where he got that from! His favorite thing right now: sit in a car and pretend-drive. So fun

Anyhow, time for dinner!

Last night, something adorable happened.

Ruth and I were getting ready to go to sleep, when suddenly she remembered she had forgotton to give Gillian her medecine; the poor thing has been eaten up by mosquitoes and scratches the heck out of herself if it’s no treated). So I get Gillian up thinking I might as well make her go potty and avoid a bed wetting scene. I carry her from her bed, sit her on the potty, make sure she’s steady and head off to the kitchen to fetch her medecine. I come back, give it to her ask her if she’s ok (she nods) and head back to the kitchen to return the medecine. When I come back again to the bathroom, she’s passed out on the bathroom rug.

No pictures though, but I showed it to Roo.

So adorable.

Phew. When we signed those papers, I thought the tough part (not knowing what would happen, how much more it would cost, whether or not we’d have a house or if we’d have to renew our lease…) would be over. Boy was I ever wrong!

We had thought initially to schedule our move for the Tuesday after we signed the papers. But it turned out that most people were going to help with the people moved as a result of the hurricane. So we moved it to Monday instead. Come Monday, I pick up the truck, Roo goes to the house to clean, and I finish packing. After a couple of car loads (makes you thankful for station wagons!) moved over to the house, everything was mostly packed and helpers started to show up. 5 of them.

Then it started to go downhill again. 3 of them “had” to be at a soccer game, so they only had 30 mins and our 17ft truck ended up being WAY too small for all our stuff. It was good that Dave brought a trailer to load, which we promplty filled (though it turned out we had 5-6 more car loads left after that night…). So then we spent the next hour with only two helpers moving boxes from vehicles to the house.

We have WAY too much stuff!

The unpacking was quite an adventure too: nowhere to put anything! And the ever-present question: Do we really want to keep this? *sigh*

And then starts the honey-do list: a new remote for the garage, a new showerhead for the master bath, the entertainment center / TV wiring (the 220-110V converters are getting to be a pain)…

And then we had to get our trusty old modem out because it takes SBC one day to switch the phone line over, but 10 days to switch DSL (which activated last night…). Oh the joys of 56k! *cough cough* Talk about unprepared.

But the unpreparedness reached an ultimate high when Friday, the power was cut off. Yes, TXU in their never wavering effort of perfect customer “sadis-faction”, cancelled the service. Now they walked up to a house that was inhabited and turned the power off. And the new service would not start until 6 days later. Go figure. So glad we wont be going with them anymore! Whatever happened to ensuring customers are happy anyway???

But now, thank goodness, everything is done. We’re moved. Of course it’s not perfect. Everything is still a mess as we all get used to the new places to put things, etc, etc… But it still feels good.

And I can even wash cars now