Janet van Arsehole

Here's what's been going on:

The Jeanners and I are finishing up our mini-vacation in downtown Baltimore. Not really a vacation because we've still had to go to work and baby-delivering class and stuff, but still makes Baltimore feel kinda new and strange. The floor refinishing is finished (and looking nice, by the way), and the house has been airing out for the last 2 days. Tonight we will be sleeping in our own bed once again.

Saturday we hit some estate sales and moving sales around town, and then ended up going out to what ended up being a kind of mansion up in Northern B-more county, where a dude named Bruce was selling a bunch of his stuff so he could move to DC. Ended up getting a couple of rugs at a great price, I think because he really just pitied us. Note: if you ever want a good deal on household furnishings, take along a cute pregnant wife.

So, this week there is some priming and painting in the works, and then the J-Dog's folks are coming out next week to deliver some baby stuff that our families had in St. Louis and are passing along to us.

T-minus less than four weeks. Zoiks!

Cave Dwellers

The floors in most of the rooms in the house are currently being refinished, so on Tuesday night Jeannie and I moved all of our stuff into a back bedroom in the kitchen. So we're basically hunkered down in this cave-type place for the rest of the weeek. Well, actually just for another day, because on Friday we're going to be staying in a hotel in downtown Baltimore for 3 days, because we can't be in the house for a few days after they put down the polyurethane.

The good news is that the rest of the house, is starting to shape up nicely. To wit:





Saturday we're getting massages downtown! Can't wait.

I hear what is probably a woodpecker.

Panama

Right now there are two drywall guys working in the other room. They are listening to the radio, to what I assume is the Baltimore equivalent of K-SHE (that's KSHE95 FM, Real Rock Radio, for all you non-St. Louisans). So far I have heard ZZ Top, The Who, and Van Halen, among others. They are occasionally singing along, and seem to be good guys. One of them has called me Danny. I did not introduce myself this way, but I don't mind it.

Not too much else going on. I went over to Art's house the other night, at the invitation of Ian, and had a good time playing some guitar but mostly listening to other folks play. My guitar was sounding like shit, probably because of keeping it out in the car and then bringing it inside to play. I must learn to take better care of my things, as my mother has always said. Then yesterday the J-Dog and I had birthing class and then spent the rest of the day getting the rooms ready for the drywall guys.

People have started giving us stuff for the baby, and Futurebaby's bedroom is beginning to fill up with junk. Not really junk, but stuff that we have no immediate use for and therefore seems like clutter at the moment. Yesterday the Jeanners and I agreed on a girl's name for the first time. I'm not going to say what it is, because most likely Jeannie will change her mind within the next few weeks, anyway. She seems to do that whenever we agree on something.

Giant Steps

The J-Dog and I have scheduled a drywall dude to come and work on a few rooms in our house next week, which is awesome, and then there will be a few days in which no one is working on the house and in those few days we might try and do a bunch of painting, and then another dude is gonna come in and refinish the floors. At least, all of the floors except for the kitchen and rear bedroom, which are going to be getting new flooring at a later date. This is all very exciting. It means that the scope of the "house project" is finally starting to get smaller instead of the infinite expansion that has happened over the last 2.5 years.

Anyway, what else?

I woke up the other day with pain shooting through my neck and back. That was fun. It's gotten a little better over the last couple of days, but still painful enough to keep me from doing any real work during the mornings that I've been off.

I bought the latest Bruce Springsteen CD, which I do not like very much. Remind me to stay away from any Bruce Springsteen albums that involve any combination of a)banjo and b)fiddle. I also bought the latest Andrew Bird CD, which is pretty good. It sounds like pretty much every other Andrew Bird CD. I also bought The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is by the same guy that wrote Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) and is also pretty good.

I took our computer apart yesterday because the power jack has been a little screwy, and I wanted to see if the problem was in the jack or the cord. Seems to be in the cord.

Anyway, boring boring boring. I just got home from working a night shift, and I'm having a G&T and checking my shit. The Jeanners is in bed and I hope I don't wake her all the way up when I go in but I'm sure I probably will. She's a light sleeper. Probably from her days in jail-o.

Gettin' Lazy Again

It seems that now in my free time what I do is curl up in bed in my clothes and shotgun episodes of Breaking Bad. Ugh. It feels terrible.

Tomorrow, I break the cycle (weather permitting).

The plan:
wake up at 8-ish
lumberjack breakfast
set up rain barrels
call parents
start walking downtown (should take about 1.5 hours to get there)
$5.00 lunch at some sketchy storefront Chinese restaurant along the way
walk around
walk home
dinner with J-Dog and perhaps Katie, the North American Traveler

Several weeks ago, I wrote in my schedule book at work that I needed to be off today from 1pm to 4pm. I made the schedule, giving myself the afternoon off, but because of scheduling issues, I had to go into work this morning and then again later tonight. However, I have no idea why I originally wrote down that I needed the afternoon off. So I hope I wasn't forgetting to do something that I needed to do.

I think my favorite album from 2011 was k.d. lang's. I was also thinking tonight about the Black Dub concert that I saw last year and how it was probably the best concert I've ever seen.