Category Archives: Life

A little less moldy…

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It’s a little less moldy here at Casa de Jeff tonight. The mold remediation company was here today. They appear to have done all the right things so far. The offending drywall was cut out, fungicide was sprayed, and things are airing out as we speak. A cursory (and completely uneducated) look around doesn’t appear to show any mold intrusion into the wood. This is a good thing and makes me at least a little optimistic that soon the drywall will be back up and I’ll be able to finish shoving stuff around the basement and make it into something approaching usable space… or at least let it be halfway organized storage.

With starting back to work this week, I have to confess that I haven’t made any real progress on sprucing things up here or even putting much more away. That seems like something that’s going to be reduced to a box-at-a-time pace for the foreseeable future. I’d at least like to have everything upstairs finished. The basement can be out of site and out of mind almost indefinitely, but the real living space still needs some work. I should probably knock off the blogging and get back after it.

Schedule…

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This is going to seem like a really minor detail, but for the last 7 years, my schedule as been 6:30-3:00. Start early, end early get back to the house with plenty of day left. Now we all know that I’m a creature of habit, but even I was surprised at how pushing things back just an hour would throw off my day. That’s not really a complaint per se, just an observation. Getting to the house after 5:00 is just downright strange at the moment. Once it settles in as part of the new normal, all will be well. After all, it is sort of nice not to necessarily want to go to bed at 9:00 most nights. With this new schedule, I push it back as far as 10:00 or even 10:30 if I’m feeling froggy. That’s right, we’re living on the edge here at the top of the Bay. Don’t ever let it be said that I’m not willing to broaden my horizons.

 

Back to good…

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Since life is starting to take on some semblance of normalcy again, I thought it was probably time to get back to posting more than whatever passing through wandered into my head. I wasn’t able to get into the trials and tribulations of moving in the level of detail I had hoped to cover, but I think in the next few posts I’ll be able to come up with a nice summary. The fact is, I didn’t remember moving being this traumatic (or time consuming), though in fairness, the last moving from an apartment into a house doesn’t take much effort. Moving into a rental after being use to your own place is a whole different version of complicated… Especially when the place was not quite ready for prime time when you walked in the door. The Previous tenant’s junked out Expedition is still sitting in the driveway waiting to be hauled away. The gas company still hasn’t delivered bottled propane for cooking. And of course there’s always the basement mold issue. I’m doing my level best not to go ape shit crazy about these issues, but I know if either of my properties were ever turned over to a new tenant in the condition this place was in, there would be a property manager looking for a new client. It’s a piss poor business practice and tells me all I need to know about who I’m dealing with.

Thoroughly annoying as those issues are, It’s time to focus on actually going to work tomorrow. No, I haven’t forgotten that I actually came here for a new job… Though that’s sort of ancillary to being back on the East Coast. I haven’t had a “first day” since 2003 so it should be an interesting experience. I’m glad I in-processed last week. At least the agony of the paperwork drill is mostly out of the way.

This old house…

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So far since Monday, I’ve moved into a house that wasn’t completely painted, still had some of the previous tenant’s furniture in the basement, has a junked out Ford Expedition in the driveway, and now has a mold problem in the basement. Roll that into checking in with the new job and trying to sort out a tractor-trailer’s worth of stuff and it’s been trying. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely grateful to be back in the fold, but a smoother transition would have been a real perk. It won’t seem like much in a few weeks, but just now it’s been a real pain in the ass.

Last…

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No in depth discussion tonight. No rants. No raves. Just a guy ready to catch a few hours of sleep before loading up the dogs (and the air mattress) and heading east. It’s been a long time coming. I’ll miss the house… And even a few of the people I’ve met here, but it’s time. I’m ready.

Things I should be doing…

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There are something like a million and a half things I should be doing rather than sitting here tapping out an update. The nice men are coming with a big truck on Monday to cart away everything that I can’t jam in my own truck for the 900 mile drive east. The good news is the checklist is turning green at a nice pace. The bad news, of course, is that the big ticket items are still red or just barely amber. Not time to hit the panic button yet, but definitely time for some moderat spazzing out. I’d probably feel better if there was a little less stuff sitting around waiting to go into boxes. Of course the down side is that it’s the things I’m still using that are sitting around waiting to get put into boxes. I mean I still have to live here for another week, right? How does one resolve the OCD need to have everything nicely packed before noon on Sunday with the need to not spend the next five day sitting quietly with my hands folded waiting for Monday?

I’ve got some good leads on potential places to live, but have decided the better plan at the moment is to obsess needlessly about one thing at a time… and at the moment, that one thing is closing the loop on whatever I need to do to get outta Dodge on time.

Stuff…

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I’m not a horder. I’m a neat freak (thanks for passing on that family trait, mom). Knowing that I have a place for everything and everything is generally in its place begs the question, where did the boxes and boxes of stuff now filling every room in the house come from? Seriously. If there’s a flat surface in the house, it’s got boxes stacked on top of it. And the worst is yet to come. I still haven’t attached the kitchen in anything like a meaningful way. My closet and bathroom and still pretty solidly intact. And I haven’t even contemplated bringing down the vast grid that networks my TV to my computer to my phone. The cabling alone will probably needs its own box… with everything zip-tied and neatly labeled, of course, so I can reconstitute the network right out of the box as soon as I actually find a place to live. So yeah, food, bathroom, and network, those are the things I have deemed essential to life and those that will be the last to find their way into the growing mountain of boxes and crates (remember the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Arc?).

The last time I moved, I had enough “stuff” to nominally fill a one bedroom apartment. I think it’s safe to say that I could probably make life livable in several of those now. I know that at some point I’ve had to hand carry all of this stuff into the house, but I can’t for the life of me remember where most of it came from. I suppose knowing where it’s going is really the important part.

Getting short…

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There’s something very freeing about working on short time. As I’m reeding the calendar these days, I’ve got a grand total of 5 days when I’m actually going to be in the office out of the 14 that I’ll officially be carried on the roles of the Engineer Regiment. In school it was called senioritis. Here, it’s called short-timer’s syndrome and impacts everyone who is near retirement or who is on the way, but hasn’t completed out-processing. Symptoms are a generalized loosening of the tongue and a Give-a-Shit indicator that’s plummeting towards zero. It’s a few days in the middle of a career when the job you’re leaving doesn’t matter all that much because all you’re really worried about dealing with is the personal minutia that will get you out of town and the pressure of making a good first impression at the new job hasn’t spooled up yet. It’s like the peaceful calm at the eye of a hurricane… and I’d never realized it before, but it’s a hellofa fun place to be.

I’m going to enjoy my short timer status for the next few days, wrap up a few loose ends, and say my professional smell ya laters on my own timeline. If I happen to get any work of major import done between now and next Friday, you can be pretty sure that it’s purely a fortunate accident because I’m pretty much focused like a laser on the making as expeditious an exit as possible. For now, everything else is background noise.

Behind the scenes…

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Some time around 10:00 PM CDT yesterday, the total number of views for 2011 climbed past 2479. There’s nothing particularly special about that number other than the fact that it is also the total number of views Get Off My Lawn had in all of 2010. With the fifth month of 2011 barely halfway through, I’m very pleased with what has the potential to be a doubling of views year-over-year. Of course that largely depends on my continuing to write and your continuing to have at least a passing interest in whatever happens to be on my mind when I sit down at the keyboard. I know that little “about” tab at the top of the page says “I’m not writing for an audience,” but if we can level with one another, no one puts something on the internet without at least hoping for an audience. If the metrics are any sign, it seems that I’ve found my niche. Fortunately, snark is a strong suit for me.

In fairness, this is more a post in tribute to you readers who check in every night  or a few times a week who keep those numbers up. Now that we have the worst of this job search fiasco behind us, I hope you’ll be entertained with the growing saga of how to find a house to rent when you have two larget but harmless dogs, the pain and agony of dragging a couple of thousand pounds of personal effects halfway across the country, and starting yet another job for which I have no actual education. It should also be interesting to lean if I still remember how to live on the east coast, fight may way along I-95 twice a day, and kick the pace of life up a couple of dozen notches. Trying to figure out how to pick up life where I left off five years ago should prove hours of entertainment for all of us.

With the move date closing in, I won’t promise to keep up the every night posting schedule, but what does make it to the screen will have a story worth telling.

Be nice or I’ll blog about you…

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Among my many faults is the desire for people in general to act with some semblance of urgency in getting things done. I’m not saying that everything should be a crisis, but if I say I’m going to call you later this afternoon or that I’ll send you some paperwork in a few hours, you can be damned skippy that it’s going to get done before the sun goes down on the day. So far in the housing search I have run into two real estate related professionals who apparently have enough business that they don’t need to call back even after spending a fair amount of initial time talking. I’m not asking for much here, just the the return call even if that’s to say you’re not interested in the work. Otherwise, there’s a fair chance I’m going to make a note of your name and blog about your bad business practices at some point in the future when I figure out what key words are going to drive that post to Google’s #1 landing page when someone goes looking for your business’ name. Consider this fair warning as the search continues.