Ruler of the Elves

With about 2 million items on the to-do list at our old house and a similar number at the new house, we have been spending about half of our time for the past 2 months at each place. That means that we are constantly traveling. Usually for about 6-7 hours at a time in the car. Ugh. On Wednesday, we finally got back home to the new house and are attempting to recuperate from the many hours of travel and work. During the past few weeks though, I’ve started to realize a few things, so I thought I would share them with you.

10 things that I recently learned or relearned about life…

1.) Driving for long periods of time is not really that fun.
2.) Never try to reason with a tired and hungry 5 year old. You will most likely talk in circles and end up blubbering to yourself.

3.) Red beverages always spill.
4.) Princess crowns can turn into “the Crown of Shame” for no apparent reason.

Photo taken by Carolyn.

5.) When I’m away, I miss the heck out of my husband and dogs.
6.) I don’t miss the burping and the massive hair balls.

7.) I can get a lot of things done in a short period of time.
8.) However, when I push myself for days on end, I usually end up sick.

9.) Good friends are like good wine. They get better with age.
10.) It is so good to be home.

Hopefully, we will be back in the routine by Monday so that we can share with you the plans for Pinky’s new room!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I hope everyone is wearing some green and avoiding being pinched.

I’ve had a bit of luck of my own today. It seems that my Irish name is working out well for me.

Photo via www.flagpictures.org

Today, I’m back at our condo, attempting to get it ready to rent out and have been up to my eyeballs in paint. We figured that sprucing up would make it more appealing. Duh. Earlier, I made a quick trip to Lowes to check out their mistints and see if there was anything worth scooping up. Since I’m not going to be around to enjoy the new paint colors, I’m not that picky, but I did want something that had a neutral tone. Lucky for me I found 2 one gallon buckets of paint that were only $5 each. Score!

I lugged my paint up to the check out counter, so proud of my fabulous finds. I knew that these colors would work perfectly for what I needed, which were for Pinky’s old room here and her new room out east. While the cashier rung up my purchases, he exclaimed that I would also be getting a $5 rebate because one of the paints was premium. Score again! If you did your math correctly, that means that I ended up only paying $5 for 2 gallons of paint. That is pretty amazing and I wouldn’t hestitate to say LUCKY.

0.12 Seconds

That’s the amount of time that it took for my computer to load this web page today, versus the 12 minutes that it took up until yesterday using my cell phone as a modem. On Thursday, our cable/internet/telephone was installed and I didn’t realize how much nicer life was with lightning fast internet service. Well, maybe I did at one point in time, but I had forgotten since I’ve been using my phone to access everything in the virtual world for several weeks. Technology is on my good side now.

Pinky has had a great time this past week getting to know the neighbor kids and also hanging out with some of our other friends. She’s also quite happy to report that we are within walking distance of Starbucks the toy store.

This week, we’ve finished a lot of our unpacking which has been wonderful, although tiring. Just having things in their places and being organized can really do a lot for a person’s sanity. Especially if that person is me! At least we have a place to stash everything and it looks presentable. My Dad would be so proud of my super labeling skills which made their debut in the pantry. He blessed me with this organizational bug. If only I could have gotten his preparedness gene. You never know when you will need a bungee cord or a AAA battery during a move or in general!

I think the kitchen was the worst part. I really truly didn’t realize how much stuff we had in our kitchen until we had to box it all up and move it half way across the country. Part of me wonders why we couldn’t have existed without the orange peeler and the slap chop, but that part of me was gently silenced throughout this process. It’s just good to have supplies to make our own food, instead of ordering take out like it is our job.

Pink Pancakes… Yum.

I know that I have been missing lately, but I have a good excuse. Packing and moving and cleaning and yuck!

Last weekend it was finally time for us to get all of our stuff loaded up and make the official move to the east coast. We had some great helpers and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without them, however big or small…

When we left early Saturday evening, our plans were to make it at least half way to our final destination, but the weather had other plans in store for us and we were lucky if we even made it 1/4 of the way, driving 30 mph, in the dark, while it was snowing. Brrrrr.

On Sunday morning we woke up early (too early by my own standards) and continued on our way. We planned to take a break at the midway point, which just happens to be my sister’s house. All of us were excited to visit with ATM & Uncle Adam, but we were most excited to meet Fuzzworth.

My goodness. I could eat him up. He was so good for us while we were there, but seemed to get a little cranky when I shoved my huge camera lens in his itty bitty face. Or maybe he was just hungry. I vote for the latter.

After hanging out for a few hours, we continued on our way, wishing that we knew how to teleport ourselves from New York to Massachusetts the whole time. We finally arrived late Sunday evening and slowly started unpacking our stuff. I can’t believe how much stuff we have. It is borderline ridiculous. Especially since we went on a super purge in the time leading up to our move and that we left approximately 1/4 of our stuff behind after that. Oh well.

We were welcomed to the area by our friends with some beautiful red tulips, which look quite lovely on our naked mantle. Our next door neighbors also made up a little goodie box for us of drinks and snacks to tide us over until we could head to the grocery store.

Our house is pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. We have 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, living room, kitchen, dining room, sunroom/music room, small office and a full basement. Also, a 2 car garage, deck, covered porch and a fenced back yard will make our lives much nicer. The only thing that will be changed is the cheery yellow paint that consumes almost every wall.

Some of the things I adore most about our home are pretty small.

-Let me introduce you to our cozy fireplace, which will get plenty of use by people snuggling on the couch or little marshmallow roasters. I have a lot of ideas for meals on the fire. Let’s just say it’s my inner girl scout coming out!

-Our house has 5 beautiful French doors that have gorgeous glass knobs. So pretty.

-Here is a peek into our music room. It is technically a sunroom, but we have my mom’s piano, a couple guitars and a rock band drum set all stashed in there, so I think that makes it a sunny, musical space.

So there we have a review of our lives over the past couple of days and a tiny glimpse of our new place. Does anyone have any unpacking advice for us? What are your best plans for getting a new place in order? Anything that will help us get these boxes out of our dining room in a timely manner would be a great help.

Here were are, a day late. Hopefully everyone had a lovely day yesterday. We’ve been super busy with stuff around the house this past week. Chris surprised us and came home for a few days before he was back off to work again. He left yesterday morning, so it was me, Pinky and the pups hanging out for Valentine’s Day.