You have an empty kitchen and $250.  What cookware set do you get and why?

As reported in keyne's LJ, most of our cookware has still not turned up after a couple of weeks of unpacking.  There are still some boxes where some of it might be hidden, but their numbers are dwindling.  A cast-iron skillet and Dutch oven are versatile things but we are getting to the point where we are ready to buy a new cookware set.

Whatever we get needs to be easy to store, as our new kitchen is a lot shorter on storage space than the last one.  So options which stack well will get bonus points.

But forget all of htat.  You have an empty kitchen and $250.  What do you buy to cook with?

It's official: we're poor again.

We started this process six years ago, when Q was an infant and Morgan was not yet in school. Many of our friends have been at it longer. None of us really thought it would take this long.

We have been tumbling through this long dark tunnel for so long, bouncing against the walls and trying desperately to keep our bearings, I got used to the idea that this wasn't actually going to happen. It became normal to think of cohousing as this lovely, distant fantasy -- something that might happen, someday, in the remote future, but certainly not any time soon.

That became so deeply rooted in my thinking that I didn't quite notice when, suddenly, everything was actually happening. All of a sudden, houses were being completed, we were applying for mortgages, and people were moving in.

It's been a rollercoaster of a transition. You mean that after all this planning and anticipation, we're not just going to be talking about it any more? We're actually going to be living side by side with these nutcases? What the hell am I doing? Have I lost my senses? Can we actually do this?

We will. I have. And we can. We're poor again, but in the most important sense, we are very, very wealthy. Happy tax day, everyone.

We did not actually have to move a body, but we have so much heavy junk there might as well have been a body in there somewhere. And you people turned out in droves. I was reminded of something I forget every single time we have to move: moving sucks, but if you bring a friend or three in, it can actually be a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun on Saturday, and I am filled with wonder and awe at the amazing people I know.

zsquirrelboy and ectophylla joined us not once, not twice, but three days to help us pack and load and move our crud. dr_agonfly and family came to help both last weekend and this one. catya  and shayde lent us their van for three whole weeks to move stuff into storage. All four of them, plus rintrahroars and moominmolly and dilettante and ghislaine and the whole pulito family joined us at the last minute for the great furniture shove. And randysmith squeezed in some time today to help move some of the last of our boxes and our bed (and if you have any idea how much a king-size Tempur-Pedic mattress weighs, you know how meaningful that is).

Above all, jacflash and dbang and family have provided so much support and so many hours of help that it is hard for me to express our gratitude in words.  You guys are f'in' brilliant.

It is 11:45 and I just stopped moving a little while ago.  The closing is in fifty hours and we are almost done.  Talk to you soon.

Signed.

Still have to fasten some bedslats and a few stays but it should be sleepworthy by tomorrow night.

And yes, it has bookcases in the headboard. Damn am I envious.

is that they're too f'ing smart for us. I left this trap last night *coated* with peanut butter. Today--- well, see for yourself.

Maybe I need to start sending them requests for urgent assistance in moving $3.7 million in gold bullion from my father's accounts in Nigeria.

[Poll #1112898][Poll #1112898]

So we have mice.  Small surprise for a house out in the suburbs.  We haven't actually seen the critters, but there are mouse droppings in the laundry room.  keyne brought home some mousetraps.  The cruel kind, with the snapper bar that whacks down on.  After reading the instructions, I baited them with peanut butter and, with slightly bruised fingers, slipped them above the ceiling tiles in our laundry room.

That was a few days ago.  Today I took a hand mirror and a flashlight downstairs to inspect the results.

I peered above the ceiling over the washing machine, where I'd set one of the traps.  It was still set, but the pedal looked oddly empty.  I looked at it from every possible angle, but there was no sign of the peanut butter I'd smeared on it.  As far as I can tell, the bait has been licked off the pedal, and the trap remains unmolested.

I checked the trap in the other end of the laundry room.  It's not there any more.  Gone.  Nothing.  No sign that anything was ever there.

As I turned to leave, I heard a faint tittering sound coming from within the walls.  I'm sure of it.

During yesterday's heavy electrical storms, it looks like one of the breakers in our house was blown.  None of the outlets on that circuit appear to have power, which includes our cable modem and computer.  keyne and I will not be able to get personal mail for the time being, at least until I can summon an electrician or can relocate the machine somewhere temporarily.

About a week ago the cat peed on the carpet. This shouldn't be such a big problem. We poured some stain remover on it, wiped it off, went to bed. Only then we did a stupid thing. We poured some more stain remover on it, ultimately most of a bottle. Then when it didn't seem to be getting dry, we used a wet/dry vac to pull up as much liquid as we could, and rented a steam cleaner to get rid of the stain. That seemed to work but the next day it was all soggy again.

By this time the hallway to the bedroom was starting to resemble a swamp. The wet/dry vac was no longer doing any good. I pulled up the corner of the carpet and realized -- duh -- that the carpet pad underneath was completely soaked through. So tonight, I pulled up most of the carpet in the hallway -- which required removing the door -- and tore out the sopping wet carpet pad. The substrate is particle board, and it too looks pretty saturated.

After ripping out the tack strips, I don't quite have the energy to pull up the flooring itself. So I used the wet/dry vac to get up what surface liquid I could, threw down an old carpet remnant on the nasty wet floor, and am going to wash up so I can continue to tackle this problem tomorrow. At the beginning of the project, the goal was to clean the carpet. I have given up on the carpet and understand now that the goal is to salvage as much of the floor as possible.

(In the process, we discovered a leak in the floor below the bedroom floor -- water is dripping into the garage through the ceiling. I don't think this is actually related but I could be wrong. I can hear the sound of running water when I stand at the bedroom door, so I suspect a leak in a pipe.)

Note to self. When something happens to the carpet, go gingerly with any liquid cleaner. And problems that involve too much liquid are unlikely to be solved by applying more liquid.