A Running Tally of Metaphysical Phenomena

I’m catching up on a whole bunch of weekly pictures this time. I kept forgetting to get a Saturday picture from Kirsten’s mom from when Greta stayed with her to avoid our sawing and hammering and painting and everything a few weeks ago, and I didn’t want to skip any, so it’s taken me this long. But here we are. New batch of weeklies! Of note: hair!

Uvula!
This is the last recorded picture of Greta while she was still living on Willows Rd.

This pictures just screams of genetics. One of Kirsten’s favorite things to do is to jump up into the frame when you’re about to photograph something*, and this one looks like it’s exactly what Greta was trying to do.
“Oh, hi! You want me to get in the picture? Like this? Hi!”

This is what happens when you try to get Greta to eat food. It’s bottle or nothin’ for her, although we have been offering something every time we eat, without pressuring, and her curiosity has gotten the best of her a few times now. She’ll be eating for real pretty soon, I think. But still. This is what it has been like.

It’s Seabiscuit! She may not understand exactly the way horses work just yet, but she sure does enjoy sitting on this one!

Huck Finn gets a new car seat! How exciting! The one we brought her home from the hospital in is good for babies up to 29 inches and up to 22 pounds, and she’s closing in rapidly on both, so for safety’s sake, we had to pick up this new one. It’s so big and Barcaloungesque that it has a cup holder! Kind of ridiculously huge, but so’s she, these days, so what are you gonna do? We got one of the less outrageous ones, anyway.

This picture was chosen from this week’s candidates because holy moly, look at that hair! Compare it to this one, and you can really see what a few months can do!

She’s growing up fast! She finally got her first tooth to start coming in over the last couple of weeks (took long enough!), and she barely puts any of her weight on her hands when she stands up on stuff and walks along the edges (of the bed, the dresser, her play pen, wherever). The next step is, well, some steps (handsfree) and some more consistent eating. She’s getting close to both, so stay tuned!

* – It’s how this picture happened in Prague. It’s actually quite a cute and charming habit, which is what happens when you have a wife who knows when propriety dictates discretion and so on.

Good news! I don’t have a right hand full of stress fractures. After last week ended and I came back to work more grateful than ever in my life for the opportunity to just sit and not have to haul, install, replace, remove, paint, or pound anything at all for an entire work day (!), I was pretty sure that all the pounding I’d done putting plank floors in had really wreaked havoc on my hands. But here I am, three days later, and I’m ready to get back to work later today.

We have been improving the home with much fervor. Kirsten’s dad (hereafter: The Foreman) took a week off, and so did I, and we went nuts on the place in anticipation of moving in. We were there anywhere from 13 to 17 hours every day, and we got a TON done! We had some help along the way, too, mostly from Kirsten, but also from great friends who were very generous with their time and energy. Still a ways to go, for sure, but it was a might effort for only one week and a small cast. The would-be-inclusive-if-my-memory-was-perfect task list:

• Painting everything downstairs but the kitchen (that includes the ceiling), which we’ll attack when we pull out the cabinets, etc. to replace it all.
• Removing nasty carpet/prickly tack strips as well as heavy padding/endless staples upstairs and putting primer/sealant on all of the subflooring.
• Painting everything upstairs except the hallway and the stairwell (again, including ceilings).
• Putting down about 60 or 70% of the upstairs flooring. (Looks great, was a great deal, but takes a LONG time.)
• Removing an old water heater that wouldn’t even drain out the bottom it was so full of deposits and stuff; we had to tip it over and drain it out the top, which was as tough as you would expect it to be to move a 100ish pound water heater with 40 gallons of water in it.
• Installing the new one.
• Working on cleaning and sealing a slate floor.
• Patching, mudding, and texturing two sheets’ worth of drywall in four places altogether.
• Installing a new sink/faucet and cabinet in our bedroom. The existing sink was re-e-e-eally bad and rusted and gross.
• Fixing up the dryer duct down in the crawl space, which is really more like a walk space and is quite pleasingly clean, well-ventilated, and clear of frightening substances or animal-related detritus of any sort. If my previouse construction plans fall apart, I may consider relocating my bat cave down there.
• Putting overhead lighting in the upstairs rooms where there wasn’t any. And really, not to go on a rant here, but why oh why would anyone build a house where a switch only turns on an outlet? It’s ridiculous, and it needed to be fixed. And so it was, and all was good.

With the floors unfinished, the trim missing pretty much everywhere, and the kitchen not being addressed at all just yet, we’re a little bit limited in what we can unpack and how much we can get settled at the moment. Kirsten expressed it well when she said that it feels like camping. But we have everything we own within the walls, and tonight, we’re going to put in the remaining four heaters (it has baseboard heat, and all of the existing heaters were recalled) and maybe make some progress on the floor upstairs.

I know you’re wondering, and plenty of people have asked: we do have pictures. Not hundreds and hundreds, but a decent amount, and enough to remember a lot of what it all looked like before. I don’t have the pictures with me at the moment, so this is a pictureless, boring post, but I just wanted to put an update on where things are at the moment. We’ll keep on working, and I’ll keep on updating as we do!