King of his castle

Greetings from Casa de Chickenbone! Can you see the joy on this dog's face? In that picture up there, he's sunbathing in front of the garage, one of his new favorite pastimes. His other new hobbies include terrorizing the mailman, trying to catch flies with his tongue, and staring thoughtfully out the big picture window in the living room.


Yes, except for a slowly shrinking mountain of boxes in the dining room, our moving process is over at last. And what did we learn? That even if you pay people to do the heavy lifting for you, packing and moving is still the sucks. Of course, we took some steps to ease the pain.


Now we're home. And I'm not going to lie to you, it's kinda weird. Like, sometimes I bellow Sal's name, and he can't even hear me. Because he's THREE ROOMS AWAY. And there are all these doors to worry about opening and closing and locking. And, like, someone needs to mow that lawn. And the way we lose things in this place! Oh my god! It's like a black hole for car keys and cell phones and little red dogs with curly tails.

But we're adjusting. The first time I called to order pizza and was asked "Is that a house or an apartment?" I shrieked "IT'S A HOUSE!" But a few minutes ago when I had to answer that question again, I barely even chortled.

I'm on vacation this week, which means I don't shower and I drink beer all day. Of course, that combination perfectly matches my new hobbies of teetering on ladders with a screwdriver dangling out of my mouth and killing bugs with my bare hands. I'm not kidding, when you move into a house for the first time, you grow some BALLS. My First Real Home Project is the closet in the master bedroom. (Or maybe I should just call it the closet, seeing as how it's the only one in the house.) So if it's going to be our only closet, it damned well better be a good one, which it surely was not when we moved in. There were three pathetic little white shelves, one rung that was too high for me to actually hang clothes on, and the remnants of at least two older shelving units still jutting out of the walls. I spent Monday digging those old bolts and pieces of cruddy plastic out of the walls, and I spent Tuesday spackling dozens of holes and cracks. Wednesday I painted, and this weekend Sal is going to install a sparkly new shelving system the likes of which this old house has never seen.

And all the while, we celebrate. One of my favorite things about moving into this house is the endless stream of friends and family dropping by for a visit. Having people over to the condo was a pain, because guests had to deal with parking meters, gates and callboxes. Now they ring our doorbell and walk inside. We have had delicious dinners, sweet desserts, and lots of cold beer and champagne toasts on the back patio. The celebration is so delightful nobody even seems to notice I have paint in my hair.