C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 69

Adventures in Housecleaning

So I was doing okay until I almost set the kitchen on fire.

Our stovetop dials turn very easily. Something got pushed against one and it turned on, which normally isn’t a problem because the power to the stovetop is controlled by a wall switch that we leave set to off. But I turned the wall switch on so I could cook something in the oven, and I didn’t notice that beneath the stuff on the stove a burner was on.

(yes, I know, NEVER PUT ANYTHING ON TOP OF THE STOVE. usually we don’t, but post-mo...

Home Sweet Home

The movers called at 10 and said they were running about half an hour late. They arrived and began work at half ten, worked with admirable and somewhat depressing speed (it took them SO LITTLE time to pack up a giant room full of book boxes that had taken me weeks to fill), threw the last things we hadn’t quite managed to get into boxes, into boxes, got everything including the trees and the barbeque into the truck, and hied themselves off to Drogheda where they got lost trying to find the ho...

T minus 1

Less than that even, now. The movers are coming in 12 hours. Actually less, or they’d better be.

Things are more or less packed, with the emphasis on more. As Ted said, at this point it’s almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. It’s hard to tell what’s unpacked anymore because there are boxes all over the damn place.

We’re all very tired. Poor Indy is high strung with excited nerves and exhaustion. Ted and I are just exhausted. We keep saying, “It’s only Monday,” with disbelieving...

anecdotes

Me: Can I beguile you with some cake?

Visiting friend: Oh, no thank you, I’m more a brownies kind of pers–is that German chocolate cake? LET ME RECONSIDER MY HASTY DECISION

Friend, later: As is always the case with everything that Catie bakes, IT WAS THE BEST GERMAN CHOCOLATE CAKE I HAVE EVER HAD.

Me: I’d say you flatter me, but it’s probably also true. :)

***

Delivery fella just dropped off a big box of stuff. “Big boxes are usually for men,” he said, “plastic bags with dresses, things like...

Actual Manor House

I forgot to show you guys the place we’re moving into.

It is an actual Georgian (or Georgian-style; we don’t know when it was built) manor house. Not a huge one: it’s 4 bedrooms, not, like, 38 or something. But it’s an actual manor house. It has a living room AND a sitting room. And that is, yes, a gazebo; please do not shoot it with an arrow.

It has about an acre of grounds, and a brook running through them, although the brook is in the badly overgrown part of the grounds and I don’t partic...

clearing out the cupboards

There’s evidently a part of me that’s convinced I’m the sort of person who plans dinners/cooking far enough in advance to use dried beans.

It may be the same part of me that’s apparently sure we always need another can of chickpeas. Or that keeps collecting condensed milk that I never, ever use. (Buying that is usually an actual mistake, rather than some kind of strange conviction, to be fair. Periodically I get condensed and evaporated milks confused in my head.) It’s probably also the same...

small dent

I’ve packed the cookbooks (another 4 boxes), ordered more DVD binders, brought a box to the post office to ship, emailed the real estate agent about the things I needed to, done four loads of laundry, arranged the movers, and packed the random scattering of gaming books left lying around.

I have to do the office books, and then I think (I think) I’ll have enough boxes left over to finish the remaining stuff in the dining room. Photo albums and other…random things like that. And that will fina...

easy dinner fail

I have not wanted to cook in, oh, several weeks. A couple nights ago we were at the store and I thought about a recipe I’d seen online and I thought “I’ll just do that, I’ll get the stuff and it’ll be fast and easy and not really like cooking.”

I managed to use just about every pot in the house, ‘not cooking’. It was a pasta dish, okay, so okay, I needed to boil the pasta, that was fine. And make the cheesy bechemel sauce, okay. And steam the broccoli. And sautee the mushrooms because they ta...

so. many. thinks.

I’ve crossed about five things off my list of things to do this morning alone and I keep adding more. I know I should feel like I’ve accomplished a lot, but all I can see is a horrible mess everywhere.

I mean, okay, the frigging books are probably a full third of our possessions, and we have gotten rid of I don’t know how many bags of clothes, DVDs and CDs, I’ve thrown tons of Random Paperwork Crap away (and have SO MUCH MORE to deal with), we have to Do Something About The Toy Box, we…I don’...

books, boxes, beer

Okay, there’s no beer, but it was alliterative.

I have now packed almost all of the downstairs books. There’s a handful of gaming books left over and the few things we’re keeping out another week or two before we move.

There are 41 boxes of books.

Now I’m out of boxes (again), but I have not yet packed the upstairs books. There are another, I don’t know, 5-10 boxes worth up there/left downstairs, I’d say.

I mean, to be TOTALLY fair, I’ve been packing the graphic novels and gaming stuff with...