our home in the cities

This week, we learned lots of fun things about living in the country.  Like, there are ticks here.  And, when I discovered one on my leg after walking around our backyard, I screamed and pranced around in such a way that it became immediately obvious that I’ve never been camping before.  Seriously.  We’ve since pulled 3 ticks off of Barley (and ordered tick meds for him).  They’re tricky, yucky little bloodsuckers.

Also, we learned that we’re going to have to provide large tips to the movers if/when we move out of here.  The moving truck won’t fit up our 1/4 mile-long driveway, and the movers had an uphill battle.  I felt so bad for them, that I just told them to pile everything in the living room and dining room.  Except the heavy furniture – I let them move that to the appropriate room to avoid potential Jason/Jen furniture moving bickers.  Because usually when we move something, it goes like this, “Pick it up!”  “I can’t, it’s heeeaaavvvvyyy!”  “You HAVE to”  “But I’m not strong enough!” And so on.

If you look very carefully, you can see the moving truck through the trees at the end of our driveway.

Ahem. Anyways, now my living and dining rooms look like this:

Gah!  It’s kind of a drag.  Especially since we decided to spend much of the weekend working in the yard (pictures to come as progress is made!  There is a lot of overgrown-ness and my arms are sore from clipping it!), and the boxes have remained in place, taunting me.

I painted our home office (4 times!) this weekend, and Jason grounded electrical outlets, since (once again) we have a house that is almost exclusively ungrounded.  At least our current home has a plethora of outlets (our previous home did NOT)- there are 7 separate outlets in the master bedroom alone!

On a related note, if anyone can tell us how to identify the first outlet in a circuit, I’ll give you a virtual high-five.  We’ve discovered that if we replace the first outlet in the circuit with a GFI outlet, it would improve the safety of the ungrounded situation.  As for now, Jason has simply been grounding each outlet to the metal box that houses the outlet – the internet seems to advise this solution to the ungroundedness.

We’ve also hit a few local places for happy hours with Jason’s coworkers.  His coworkers (and their spouses) are really a fun bunch and I’m looking forward to getting to know them better!

To celebrate our first week of country living,* we grilled out and had a picnic on our new screened-in porch – grilled chicken sandwiches and fresh Michigan blueberries.  And, yes, that’s the fine china sitting on the little table, because we are classy like that the everyday stuff is still at Jason’s apartment.

*Disclaimer: we are still technically sleeping in the city, at Jason’s apartment.  Because we still have no shower.  I hope to make progress on that this week, so that we can officially live full-time at our new house… I am getting antsy to have everyone and everything in the same place again!