Refrigerator in the living room!

This is what happens when I meet the delivery guy. It's a long story and I'm going to make you wait for it, but it's well worth it.

First a few things about the weekend...

The suckfest that is moving has begun. We spent all day Saturday packing boxes and loading the cars. It was almost as exciting as it sounds. We rewarded ourselves by driving to three different Blockbusters to track down season 2 of "Dexter." Totally worth it.

We spent Sunday in the new house priming the living room and scraping wallpaper in the spare bedroom. Yeah!

This is Jason's favorite new hobby. Seriously.

Mine? Not so much. However, it just so happens that I am the Michael Phelps of wallpaper scraping--a true natural.

It's messy and I'm good at messy. Jason is good a precise, so he gets to paint. (Or so that's what I tell him.) He could have kept priming and painting until the wee hours of the morning, but I was burnt out after scraping the one bedroom. The only way I could get him to leave was by suggesting that we go to Lowes.

He thinks Lowes is the greatest place on earth. Naturally, he took advantage of my exhausted state and convinced me that we should buy many, many things that I am now wondering what they do and why we need them. This includes a shop-vac.

He tells me I "will not regret this!" I'm sure I won't, just as soon as learn exactly what you're supposed to do with a shop-vac.

Now, finally, the refrigerator in the living room:

I will start by saying that the delivery men were annoyed from the second they arrived. I was not the first person to ruin their day. I think it started with the lady at their first delivery and was fueled by the steep steps leading up to our house. The situation declined pretty rapidly when they told me that their instructions were only to deliver the refrigerator, not to install it. (We paid for installation and haul away, damn it!) I said fine, I'd follow up with Sears, but they need to haul away the old refrigerator (which btw, blew a fuse sometime last week and now smells like hell).

They were not happy about this, but went ahead and started yanking it away from the wall anyway. After they had it pulled away from the wall, they asked me where the water cutoff valve was. To which I said, "The wah??" I had no idea. This sent me tiptoeing down into the creepy basement (the delivery men aren't allowed to go into basements) with our new maglite which Jason insisted on buying a Lowes (!) looking for something which I had zero idea of what it looked like.

Meanwhile, the delivery men were getting agitated. This was taking much longer than the 10 minutes they were allotted for my delivery and they discovered that the old refrigerator had started to leak. Now it was really important that I find the stinking cutoff valve. Of course, I couldn't find it. And did I mention that in the middle of all of this the fire alarm started going off?

The delivery men just stared at me as I ran around waving my arms at it trying to make it stop. Finally, I had to climb up on a chair in four inch high heels and hit it with the new maglite. That worked.

At this point, the delivery men decided they needed to go outside to figure out what they were going to do about this situation. One of them made several urgent phone calls while the other one stomped up and down the street in front of our house screaming the F-word repeatedly.

This is when I called Jason in a mad panic leaving multiple messages on all of his phones. I think one of them went like this, "Please call me immediately. The delivery men are losing their minds. I think they're going to leave the new fridge in the front yard or run it over with their truck."

For a good five minutes I truly believed they were going to drive away leaving me with the new refrigerator sitting on the front lawn and the old one leaking water all over the kitchen. Eventually, the polite one (and by polite I mean he didn't drop any F-bombs) convinced the other one that they had to do something, so they stuck a bucket under the old leaky fridge and agreed to bring the new fridge into the living room. You have no idea how grateful I am to have a refrigerator in the living room. They did leave the giant box in the middle of the yard though.

Our New Old House

Until recently, I never understood blogs. Or people who blogged. It always struck me as self-indulgent and self-important. Why would anyone want to put their private thoughts out there for the entire Internet to read? Does anyone, even friends and family, really want to read these things? I doubted it. Then a couple of things happened and two blogs in particular changed my mind.

First, I've been keeping tabs on my friend Rachel's little boy, Liam, through her blog. They live more than a thousand miles away and I've watched him learn to crawl, take his first steps, eat cake on his first birthday and discover how to climb in and out of the doggie door. That's pretty cool.

Oddly, the other blog that caught my attention is McCain Blogette, by Meghan McCain (daughter of John). Her inane accounts of life on the campaign trail are actually fascinating and funny. I love that she uses photos to tell stories, lists her favorite songs, posts photos of weird design-y objects that catch her eye, and regularly pokes fun at the campaign staff. I'm not a fan of her father's politics, but she's someone I'd like to have lunch with.

So, now I kinda like blogs. And we finally bought a house. Combine the two and, suddenly, I have all of this stuff I want to tell people. Through a blog. For instance, I am terrible at painting and awesome at scraping wallpaper. Jason is a maniac when he gets inside a Lowes and has very strong feelings about insulation. But, telling just isn't enough. I want people to be able to see what we're doing. Especially my mom. The lady wants every detail! And I can't possibly articulate for her over the phone the difference between the two shades of green I'm debating on for the living room.

Of course, it doesn't end with paint. We've got a massive project ahead of us. We have four notebook pages filled with things we want to do to the house. Jason is talking about stripping the trim with a heat gun, removing plaster walls, and redoing all of the electrical wiring. And that's just on the short list. I thought we'd be in good shape if we replaced the kitchen floor.

We're planning to do the majority of the work ourselves and the only tools we own are a hammer and a screwdriver. Documenting our cluelessness seems like a great idea. Or a really bad one. Regardless, it'll be fun to watch the place evolve.