Kansas

You are all probably wondering what I think of my new home state. After all it is quite a change to move from a hip state like California to a rather backwards state (one that does not even have curbside recycling) like Kansas. There are sure a lot of differences!

• The humidity (especially before a storm) is amazing. I thought that the part of California we had been living in was pretty moist, especially when compared to Utah, but man sometimes when I head outside I feel like I am walking into a pool.
• The traffic is soo much better here. Rush hour is slightly heavy traffic on the freeway instead of three hours of bumper to bumper traffic.
• The people are so much friendlier here. People working in stores have long involved conversations with you. People actually ask about your children and their ages instead of mostly ignoring them. One of my neighbors brought over some really yummy brownies. It is almost disconcerting to have strangers talking to me when I am out and about. I have to remember to do a real smile instead of the tight lipped half smile and brief nod that was so popular in California.
  
• You don't get looked at strangely when you mention that you go to church. In fact there are churches all over the place and people are not shy about asking you about your church.
• You see more people smoking. In California smokers were seen as social outcasts and misfits, here it seems to be more socially acceptable even if it is still very bad for your health.
• There seems to be more wildlife here in the more settled parts of the city. We have a bunny that regularly visits our yard and there seem to always be a variety of birds eating bugs off our lawn. I even got to see fire flies for the very first time that I can remember.

Pictures

Vicky wanted me to take a ton of pictures of our trip from Utah to Kansas and I am always happy to oblige. These are all taken at rest stops along the way. We drove both of our cars so I didn't have much of as chance to take pictures as I would have liked. Enjoy!

Utah

This is was our first stop. We are still in Utah going over the mountains into Wyoming. It was pretty chilly and windy. Evan was worried that he was going to fall and Harry was trying to look at all the many cars passing by.

I loved the contrast of the green plants with the reddish cliffs.

Thanks to a very cold and wet spring the grass was still green.

"Are we there yet?"

Mmmm... tasty thumb

Wyoming

I ended up not having any pictures of Wyoming, we only stopped for gas there and grabbed some lunch. The wind was relentless and bitterly cold. I got an amazingly slow gas pump and it seemed like I had to be out in the cold for hours while my tank filled. The sky there was amazing and huge. I have spent the vast majority of my life near mountains, so the flatness that was around me was almost scary.

Colorado

Here is my husband trying to figure out where the heck we were. I was the lead driver and had neglected to sufficiently study the route of this leg of the journey. My walkie talkie was out of commission at the time so I could not ask my husband about the route so when I saw our destination mentioned I took the exit. It was a scenic and very beautiful drive and we did get to our hotel with out too much fuss.

My two very cold boys posing on the rocks to humor mommy.

The hotel that we stayed at was right off the freeway. The boys had a blast looking at all the cars and trucks that passed by.

Harry the pig boy

The inevitable shoving match that occurs any time they are having too much fun.

Kansas

There were a ton of great places to take pictures along the way in Kansas (including a super neat wind turbine farm). However I was so fried from driving that I just wanted to get there already and pictures were very much lacking.

The boys in front of a wheat field. I felt like such a goof walking all the way over to the field, I have seen plenty of wheat fields in my time but I felt it was fitting that their first picture in Kansas be agriculturally themed.


Harry was such a goof and kept trying to get in front of Evan when I was taking pictures.

Hell week part two

There has been so much going on since I last updated that I hardly even know where to start. The trip over to Kansas was not too bad except for the one car rollover that happened right in front of me. We stopped to help but there was not much to do, both people were trapped in the SUV and were talking. Luckily it was not far from a town so the firefighters were quick to get there. We got into town later than we had wanted thanks to that and the time zone change. We discovered that there was some car thingamajig in town which meant that if we did not want to spend the night sleeping in our cars we had to drive out a ways and stay in a casino. Normally I avoid giving my money to places like that, but we were tried and glad to have a place to sleep.

Tuesday was the day that we closed on the house. It was pretty exciting and also very scary. When we got to the house we noticed that the wood paneling in the basement was warped which seemed odd to us. We called our real estate agent to have a look and he thought it might be structural because the carpets were dry so he assumed that no water had entered the basement during a bad storm that had come through a few days earlier. We also noted that a bunch of random junk had been left behind by the previous owners. They even left ancient food in the refrigerator. I was pissed.

Wednesday our stuff came. We found out that our washer had not been properly secured during the move and it leaked out the front. We also discovered a few more random broken things but all in all the washer was the biggest thing that had been damaged.

Thursday we madly unpacked our stuff trying to get as much done as possible to help speed our return to normalcy. While I was cooking dinner we heard an eerie siren and realized that this was the tornado siren and that we should be heading to our basement asap. I quickly finished dinner and we ate downstairs. While we were eating I heard the sound of water hitting concrete. That sound was coming from the unfinished half of our basement. Water had filled the window well making it look like a fish tank. It was leaking into our house from the window. Luckily I had never followed through on my thought that I should move more of our boxes to that are of the room. We also discovered that water was slowly leaking into the finished part of the basement from a window on the same side. The same side that had the warped wood paneling. *cue eerie music* It was obvious to us that the basement indeed had leaked during that earlier storm and not been taken care of.

In the disclosures we were told that there had been some flooding during the previous summer, but that dirt had been piled against the house to help prevent further flooding. When we got there it was pretty obvious that nothing like that had even been attempted. Some rocks had been shoved up against the back part of the house where the leaking was happening, but that made things worse since the rocks created low spots and let the water run right through them. It frustrates me to no end that the former owners could have had compacted dirt piled up against the foundation for about $200 (which is what we ended up paying to have a handy man do it for us). Now they are facing some ticked off people (my husband and I) who are going after them to pay for the damage that was done while the house was still in their possession. We sent them a letter through our real estate agent and if they do not pay up we will have to take them to small claims court.

This week since becoming home owners has been full of so many frustrations. I am so ready for stuff to be working already and for us to be able to concentrate on fun house projects instead of fixing all the screwups of the former owners who seemed to care more about appearances rather than doing a project right. I must say though that in general the people here in Kansas are very friendly and we seem to have very nice neighbors (who seem pretty glad that the former owners are no longer living in the neighborhood).

I have been counting my blessings and trying not to be frustrated that I can't do any laundry and I can't find random things that I know are hiding in boxes that have yet to be unpacked. I have to be happy, because we finally have internet again and I can catch up on my blog reading.

Moving on

Tomorrow we are heading out to the great state of Kansas (via Wyoming and Colorado) to sign the papers that will make us homeowners. Much to our dismay we discovered that the DSL that we were used to using was no offered in our area and we will have to go with cable Internet. Since we do not currently own a cable modem we will have to take the time to procure one and until we have one in our hot little hands we will be with out Internet *sob* Hopefully my hiatus will be brief. I know it will be super busy. When I return I will post pictures of the biggest purchase we have made in our lives aka our "Kansas House" (that is what Evan calls the new house).

When will it end?

I have been avoiding talking about the impending purchase of a house for fear of jinxing it, but I feel that we have moved beyond all that. Buying a house has been a very frustrating endeavor for us. We found this house on the first day of searching. After a bit of back and forth about the price and if we would get to keep the refrigerator or not, we thought we were set when we left Kansas. Murphy laughed heartily at us.

First it was some things on the inspection. The jacuzzi tub that was in the master bath (how cool is that?) needed a special plug so that if water got on it while it was in use it would not electrocute whomever was in the tub. Ok, no biggie, the owners would get someone in to take care of that.

Next the appraiser found a small crack in the foundation and decided that an engineer needed to look at it and see if something was drastically wrong with the drainage. It turned out that some dirt needed to be dumped and compacted next to the house so that a grade would form to move water away from the foundation. Again the owners would take care of that before our proposed move in date.

Today we got a lovely call from the realtor. Apparently during our bug inspection some termite damage showed up. Talk about frustrating! Again the owners will have to fix it, but there is no way it could be done before we are wanting to move in. If the damage is too bad we may decide to walk away all together and start all over again. Sigh. I am hoping and praying that the damage is minimal, because I really love this house and want to have a place to move into right away.

P.S. In case you were wondering about my look changing back and forth, I was deleting a flagrant spam comment that slipped past me when I was in a hurry to approve comments. I can't do that with my current template so I temporarily changed it so that I could. I am pondering changing things up a bit since I have had it for over a year, but am waiting until I get things in order from the move.

Hell week

If you combine illness, moving and children you get one very stressful week.

Sunday I got knocked flat on my bum with a cold and a fever. Monday was just as bad but I had to pull myself together to finish all the moving related things that had to be finished before the packers came on Tuesday to start the process of getting all of our stuff ready for Kansas.

Despite our misgivings surrounding our new moving company things urned out pretty good. The packers did a pretty good job and were good about asking my husband before they packed up any trash. I did forget to pull out shoes for the boys and my husband only managed to grab some of them. There were also a few other sundry items that got packed up before we realized that they would be handy to have out. The movers that put all our stuff in the van were great. The driver of the truck was highly motivated and he moved up our pack out date when he saw how little stuff we had. He was aghast at the 10,000 pound estimate that he had been given. It ended up taking only one and a half days to get everything done even though the guy that had estimated our weight had thought it would take three days for everything.

The boys did pretty good through out the whole process. My inlaws came to help out on Tuesday and Wednesday (Thanks Diana!) which made things go so much smoother. The wimin' folk kept the boys out of the house while the men watched the packers to make sure there was no funny business going on. I was so exhausted by the end! It is a hard thing to have to entertain two little boys who are used to a certain schedule that involves afternoon naps at home. Things got better once all the people tromping through our house left.

Harry was especially affected by the removal of all our stuff. He thought it was funny that all our stuff was "hiding" in boxes. Once the removal of those boxes happened he got very upset. For awhile he would not even go downstairs to the empty living room. He just clung to me and would cry if I suggested that he even think about going downstairs. Now that we are at my parent's house he has something really fun to take his mind off the missing toys. They both loved that they got to watch movies the whole way to grandma's house.

I had a hard time of it too. I am missing my friends. It did not help that I was sleeping horribly thanks to my cough and our awful air mattresses. Now that I have had a good sleep I am ready to have fun in Utah and am thinking ahead to what is waiting for us in Kansas.

We survived

It was a very hellish week which was topped off by a very long drive to Utah. We are here in Utah safe and sound thanks in part to Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. I am ready to crash and catch up on all the sleep I missed out on this week. I am even being super naughty and skipping church this week.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

For some crazy reason I agreed to let the owner show our home to prospective renters today. Why? I don't remember the reasoning behind it, but it sure seemed like a good idea at the time. I have been saying this many many times, but I will say it again: I will be sooo glad when the move is over with.

I am teetering on the edge of sanity

I am going to be so thrilled when this move is over. This spring has been so amazingly stressful and that stress is really starting to build up. I am trying hard to keep my sanity intact while simultaneously being a good mom, a good wife and a good me. I am starting to see my edges fray.

What has been so frustrating about the last month or so it all the ups and downs we have been having. The ups just are not up long enough and there is a very long climb to get to those ups. We have been saying a lot of goodbyes lately and the sadness is starting to get to me. I also have a massive list of things to get done which is probably the only thing keeping me slightly sane. I can concentrate on one task at a time and pretend that nothing else is going on. The house could fall down around me and I would not notice until I had finished my task.

The frustrating event that has prompted the above paragraphs was the pre move walk through and weight estimation. This moving company handled our move from San Diego and we had a lot of issues with them. My husband was already predisposed to dislike them this time around but was willing to give them a chance since it was a different branch that we would be dealing with.

After the walk through and the looking and adding that went on the estimate of our household goods weight was about 2,000 pounds above our limit. Which, in our minds, is quite absurd. Even though we do now have a lot more stuff, thanks to having two kids, we still don't have all that much stuff considering that we live in a small three bedroom town home. The weight allowance was based on bigger homes with more stuff. Before we go nuts and start getting rid of furniture that we would have to buy again when we got to Kansas we are going to talk to the moving coordinators to try and get things straightened out.

We really should not be so shocked at the high estimate. When this company moved us from San Diego they claimed that they moved exactly the weight limit that was allowed for my husband's rank. The funny thing is that we had moved only a year earlier and not really acquired that much more stuff and the weight from that previous move was several hundred pounds lighter.

Moving was so much easier before kids and when I was a kid. Before kids we did not have nearly all the junk that we do now. When I was a kid, there was no worry about securing a place to live and being in charge of a lot of important things that cost a lot of money. The most I had to do was pack up a few boxes of my things and go along for the ride. Ahh those were the days.

Da kidz

The trip was the first time that we had both left the kids for longer than overnight. I was nervous about how they would handle it, but the kids did just fine with out me. My sister was a champ and managed to keep them alive for the entire time and she did not looser much of her sanity in the process. I tried to keep my instruction minimal so that she could find her own style and it was rather funny to see that she coped in a lot of the same ways as I did and a lot of the same things drove us batty.

We had to leave in the wee hours of the morning so the boys did not see us leave. My sister told me that they assumed that Daddy was at work the whole time. It was different for me of course since I am generally there all the time. At first they assumed that I was sleeping upstairs. They kept bugging my sister to let them go upstairs and wake me up. Harry even started peering under every item of clothing on the floor, making sure that I was not hiding or anything. My sister kept telling the boys that we were on a trip. Evan decided that I had taken a trip to grandma's house, which in his experience is the only place that people take trips to.

I called home every night before bed time. It was funny talking to them on the phone. Evan is becoming a pretty good conversationalist and would tell me some things about what he had done that day (with a tiny bit of prompting from me). Harry is still in the phase where he will sit there and smile at the phone. I am sure that he did not really understand that there was a real person talking to him on the other end of the phone. Some times he would not even let my sister hold the phone up to his ear.

When we came home the boys were pretty excited. Evan did not really need much of a transition, but Harry became very clingy. He is still in that clingy phase that I mentioned earlier, so this was not a big surprise to me at all. My husband has had the last few days off and today is my first full day back in the saddle.

Today Evan has his final visit with the amazing cardiology team that has cared for him since his birth. I will update you on how things go with that. It is going to be hard to say good bye to these amazing people.

Knitting on the trip

During the trip I was very productive with my knitting. I ended up finishing a lace scarf, one sock and making great headway on a wool diaper soaker for Parker. It is amazing how productive you can be when you don't have kids constantly interrupting you. It is also amazing how calming knitting can be when you are crammed into an airplane.


The before blocking shot of the scarf. I love how different lace looks after blocking. It is a beautiful transformation.


Here it is after blocking. I think that I will invest in some blocking wires before too long so that I can get a more even strait edge. Pins are nice if you need points, but for a smooth strait edge they stink. You have to click on this picture to enlarge it, otherwise you miss the beautiful details.

Here is a close up of the pattern. This is my most complicated lace pattern to date. I am so glad that I got the chart keeper for my birthday as that made keeping track of where I was so much easier. The yarn is also heavenly. The picture does not capture the nice sheen that the wool silk blend has. This is the Oriel Lace pattern from 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders. I used size 5 needles on it as I wanted a narrower scarf and thought the 8s made the scarf too lacy. I wanted to be able to see the pattern better.



This pattern is the Adult and Child Socks from 101 One-skein Wonders book (can you tell that I adore these books?). I love this yarn so much. It is so soft and lovely. I also am loving all the different colors that are in the yarn. It is so fun to see what is coming next. This heel is also a different one for me. You use waste yarn and then later go back and add in the heel. It was a bit tricky at first, but I love how it turned out. I am not a huge fan of the heel flap.

I am baaack!

Did ya miss me?

So I am sure you are all wondering about how the trip went and if we managed to secure housing. Well I am kinda mean and going to make you wait a bit. I am first going to discuss the joys of air travel..... it sucks! The nice thing was that the plane did not snap in two and crash land on a mysterious tropical island.

We went bargain basement with our airline tickets and I totally regretted it. Our flight went from San Fransisco to San Diego to Phoenix where we had to change planes to get to Kansas City. That is a lot of stops! The worst was the Phoenix- Kansas City leg. The plane was packed to the gills and we ended up in the tail section, which as any Lost fan knows is an almost certain death sentence.

I almost lost it when the lady in front of me leaned her seat back. I was already giving up so much personal space and that was the last straw. If I had been using any metal knitting needles at that moment, they would have been shoved into that lady's head. I guess the security precautions are there for more than the chance that the plane might get hijacked. It also did not help that there was a lot of turbulence to add to the fun.

When we got our rental car the gal at the desk tried to get us to upgrade, calling our economy car cramped. Well, once I got in the car I breathed a sigh of relief, after the airplane the car almost seemed enormous. I think that next time I fly I am going to the extra money for a more direct flight. I don't mind one stop but the flight over was just ridicules. It did not help that to get to the airport on time we had to get up at 3:30 in the morning.

Bye bye Mommy and Daddy!

House hunting

Tomorrow we fly off into the great unknown to do a bit of house hunting. We have been doing some online peeping, but this is going to be the big trip where we get to see for ourselves what the houses really are like. I have a rather nebulous idea of what I am looking for: I would like to have a bathroom off of the master bedroom, we need a fenced back yard, we are looking for a house with a basement, and I would like four bedrooms but would take three.

What are some things you like about your dwelling? What would you change about your current dwelling?