The past ten days have been frantic and not very relaxing, to put it mildly. For many of them I have just wanted to sleep, to sit, to collapse into my overstuffed chair and be done with the world and house stuff and anything else for a good long time. Both the wife and I have spent far more time awake than asleep as of late, napping here and there when we can and when we can't, not sleeping for 24-30 hour stretches.
But, we are in the house.
And we are still in the apartment. Sort of.
Our last day of our lease is October 5 -- that's this coming Friday (as I write this, anyhow) -- a mere six days away. Today is Sunday, and we moved into the house on Tuesday. Since Tuesday we have been spending many hours every day gutting and cleaning the old place out. It is 3:30 in the morning now and Daisy and I just returned home from yet another cleaning run about two hours ago. The vast majority of everything is done now -- we've already taken care of the hardest stuff, so to speak, and what's left is just ancillary for the most part.
I have burned through every hour of PTO I had available for work, and will now need to rebuild and rack up some time between now and the holidays in order to get my birthday off and the like. While I am looking to move on from that job in telecom hell sooner rather than later, it is a job, and it is something I need to be able to keep for as long as I can, especially now that a mortgage rides on it.
We have a mortgage. We are homeowners. The actual processing of the past ten days' events hasn't really sunk in yet.
I suppose I should start from the beginning with a brief recap of events.
Hi, my name is Brandon. You might remember me from blogs such as the one you're reading. I'm a vegetarian atheist with three cats and a punk rock haircut, and I work as a contractor for the largest telecommunications corporation on the planet. My younger-than-me vegan wife holds a reasonably secure and upward-mobile position in the finance industry and is the brains and cogs of our entire marriage. Welcome to my world. We bought a house.
Now that you're up to speed, here's what happened.
On Monday night we did our final walkthrough of the house with the sellers present. They made sure we had spare keys and knew how everything worked, and said they'd be out by the morning to start on their own next big adventure in life.
Truth be told, they were -- we signed all of the closing documents and paperwork in our realtor's office at 8AM on Tuesday morning in the midst of a raging fall thunderstorm, then came back to the apartment -- new keys in hand, to wait for the movers. Our movers came, they loaded everything up, and by around 4PM they were done, paid, and we were in a house full of boxes with very little actual furniture to speak of.
By 5PM we were at the furniture store picking out our new living room furniture and purchasing rugs and the like. We got a giant sectional sofa set that cost more than four times what I paid for my first car (my Monte Carlo, if you folks remember that from back in the day) scheduled to be delivered Thursday. We got pizza for dinner and ended our very, very long day by passing out in different places -- me in my overstuffed chair in my new office, and the wife on the bed, which was at that time the only piece of furniture that could be slept on.
Well, I mean, I guess a person could sleep on a dining room table if they really wanted to, but who wants that?
Anyway.
Truthfully, the days all run together. Once in the house, we still spent a large number of hours over at the apartment, packing and cleaning what was left. Because of our jobs and our offset schedules (the wife works dayshift, I work overnights), packing and cleaning together wasn't exactly something we could really do as a team that well. As a result, the entire kitchen and both bathrooms in the apartment were left to deal with later, and we focused on the movers taking all the boxes and the large items we couldn't move ourselves. Tonight we finished the cleaning of the most difficult rooms -- the laundry room and the back bathroom -- and we're still nowhere near done, even though the apartment looks pretty flawless in most ways. We didn't get our TV moved over here until last night, and it wasn't until tonight that I actually brought my truck over here. This leads to amusing conversations such as this one:
Side note -- yes, I own two of the expensive, exquisitely-detailed Black Series lightsabers. One is Luke's, one is Vader's.
So, anyway, on Thursday our furniture arrived. Fully wrapped and unassembled. The house has French doors, so we swung those open and with great pains both spiritual and physical, we got all six pieces of this massive sectional sofa into the house...only to find that to screw on the legs, we needed power tools.
A quick drive to Lowe's later, we had those tools and the wife and I spent hours unwrapping the furniture, setting it up, and screwing on leg after leg after leg. Do you know how many legs a six-piece sectional sofa has? The answer is 24. Yes, twenty-four. The power drill/electric screwdriver we got had its battery die about 2/3 into the workload, and...
***intermission***
It is now a week later and I can tell you without shame that I fell the fuck asleep while writing the above, which is why it stopped abruptly.
Work still continues in the house, though we are now completely out of the apartment -- keys turned in, final walkthrough done, no need to ever darken the door of that place again. The wife cried because of all of the memories we'd made there, but in the end she was just as happy as I was to never have to go back. Onward and upward -- we own a house now.
The building manager did a sixty-second walkthrough and called it good, and said we'd be getting a deposit check back in a few weeks -- didn't say for how much, if we'd be getting the full deposit back or what, but truthfully I don't exactly care at this point. I'm happy to wash my hands of that place after all the maintenance problems we had in it within the past eighteen months or so.
When I say "work continues" at the new house, I actually mean that. We're getting a closet door installed sometime this week by the aforementioned folks at Lowe's, and the door plus installation was only about $200, so we have that going for us. We also haven't unpacked everything yet -- there are still probably 30 boxes in the garage and at least that within all the rooms of the house as well. Without a door on the closet in the master bedroom, we can't unpack our clothing as we can't keep the cats out of the closet without using the boxes of clothing to block it off. As such, we've both had to go in there a few times, moving the boxes and the wife's dresser we're currently using to block the door, to grab whatever clothing we need for the week before we have to block it back off.
I worked all of last week but took tonight off as I haven't had a true day off in several weeks now. Doing so puts me negative into PTO, but I don't exactly care at this point -- I also spent two hours tonight looking for and applying to other jobs. My goal is to be doing something else somewhere else by Thanksgiving. While that may not be possible I at least am trying my best. This house is closer to my job than ever before, yet I just...I can't keep doing it anymore. The stress and responsibility levels are too great, and the job itself never gets any easier -- ever. Unrealistic expectations abound, my team is unhappy with the direction the job is going, I am more unhappy than they are, my leadership is ambivalent at best on a good day and unhappy more and more by the day on the bad ones, and the smart people who have a way out are leaving like rats from a sinking ship -- making me the leader of the idiots, the lazy, the desperate, and the otherwise unemployable masses. I can't do that anymore. I have a Master's degree. My wife was able to get out, so I don't know why I can't.
I told the wife my dream is for her to get a promotion and get pregnant so I can be a stay-at-home-dad. Well, it's not really a dream per se, but something that would be nice. It's not like I wouldn't work; I'd just work on what I want to do (writing/editing/web stuff) versus needing to go into an office every day for ten hour shifts on overnights. There was once a time where I would've killed for an office job -- not anymore. I've done it for too long now and my real goal is to not have to wear pants while I work. Ever.
But alas, I do have to work. We have a mortgage now. It's a bit more expensive than the rent on the apartment was. And we're responsible for any problems the house has, obviously -- things like plumbing or roofing or putting a door on the closet. In hindsight, that last one really should've been something we asked the previous owners to do, because it's a pain in the dick.
My own office doesn't have a closet -- where the closet would be is where the previous owners put the washer and dryer. So I have my office in the laundry room, or vice versa -- which is nice and what I wanted -- but no storage space. It's fine, though. It is what it is. I'll be sharing the master bedroom closet with the wife, once the door is on it. And it's big enough.
In other news, I'm selling my truck.
Truth be told, the truck has sat in the driveway -- both here and at the apartment complex -- for months, only rarely being driven. It sucks gas like crazy, the tires are bald, it needs some new spark plugs and an oil change, and it's rusting out from underneath me. I don't have the time or money to give it the TLC it needs, so I'm selling it for about $800 -- which is close to what the tires alone would cost to replace, not to mention everything else -- and a decent deal for a seventeen-year-old truck. The buyers are one of those online "sell your vehicles to us" outfits, and they'll come to pick it up for free and haul it away. I'm setting up the appointment in the morning (or afternoon) when I wake up.
The goal in the next few months or so -- though realistically probably not until Spring -- is to get me a smaller subcompact four-door hatchback. I just need something cheap and reliable with an automatic transmission that will get me to and from work, wherever to and from work may be. It has to be four-door because if we do ever have kids, I need to be able to put the car seat(s) in the back seat. Rear-facing, of course. I can't tell you what model of vehicle I want, though I've had my eye on a few different ones. For example, I've always liked the styling of the Mitsubishi Mirage:
Just something small, economical, and point-A-to-point-B.
But I digress.
I mentioned above, briefly, that I have become a vegetarian. This wasn't a joke.
For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you know that I have been on the path to betterment and wellness for some time now. Since January 1st of this year, I have now lost forty pounds. This isn't a massive accomplishment, of course, but it's a lot better than many others could do, so I'm counting it as a win.
Part of the weight loss has been thanks to the keto diet, which I was on for several months. However, there's so much meat and fat in the keto diet, and it didn't seem to help my metabolism or energy levels that much. The variety (or the ability to have some variety) was at first thrilling, but began to wear on me after a few months. I can only eat so many high-protein beef or turkey sticks or low-carb tortillas with my steamed vegetables before I snap and want a pizza, or Chinese food with fried rice, or some fucking french fries. I know there are people who stay on keto for years with great results, and more power to them, because I don't want to be chained to a diet for the rest of my life.
So, I slowly began adding carbs back into my diet once I had lost over 25 pounds, and with that, slowly began cutting back on the meats and cheeses almost subconsciously. It wasn't necessarily something I had planned, but I slowly leaned more and more towards vegetarianism.
And a funny thing happened -- I continued to lose weight. More slowly, of course, but pounds kept dropping. Within a month I had basically become vegetarian without even really noticing it. After a month I decided fuck it, let's see where this vegetarian thing goes. As such, I have not had any meat since...late August? Something like that. I didn't really keep track.
However, I want to make something very clear -- I am not vegan. My wife is. I am not. Foods containing dairy and eggs and the like are very much a continued part of my diet -- cheese is a large part of my life. I will get the fried rice with egg from the Chinese delivery place and not bat an eye, and I eat at least five sticks of string cheese pretty much every day. When available and if I'm in the mood, I'll put real milk in my coffee or real butter on my bagel. I do not plan to go vegan, but I will tell you that I do not eat meat anymore.
Friends have already asked me what this means for Gravy Season, and I told them it means nothing whatsoever. Gravy doesn't count in my book, for one, and for two, I don't particularly care. Gravy to me is the same as eating egg or dairy. I wouldn't be opposed to beef or chicken broth either, because I'm not eating an actual animal. Just juices from said animal. Look, my logic is complicated, and I simplify it by saying I don't eat meat. The whole "I don't eat anything with a face" or "I don't eat anything that had a mother" sort of thing applies here.
Besides, the wife makes a fantastic vegan gravy. She's like an alchemist in the kitchen.
I will say that my choice to go vegetarian is more health-based than it is morality-based, but obviously morals play into it quite a bit. I am now sort of disgusted by exactly how much meat-eating plays into our culture, and how much meat is actually out there and being consumed every day. Not that it was outwardly spoken or made a mantra or anything, but growing up, it was sort of an unwritten rule that it wasn't a meal unless meat was involved somewhere -- anything else was just a snack. I think a lot of people have that mindset, and until I stopped eating meat I didn't realize how pervasive it was in society.
This doesn't mean I'll be a vegetarian forever, or even 100% vegetarian all the time. If there's something with meat in it that I absolutely want, I'm not going to deny myself just because of some whim of ideology. And truth be told, in a few months I may hate being a vegetarian and everything it entails, and if that's the case, so be it. But, in the interim, I'm gonna let it ride and see what happens -- specifically, see if I keep losing weight.
Anyway, that's about all for now. This post is long enough. I'll keep everyone updated on the adventures with the new house and with my job searching, all in good time.
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