The Amazing Bathroom

At our old place, Steve and I had a glorified outhouse for a bathroom. It had plumbing, but it was basically a shed with no windows, so the door had to be left open at all times (when not in use, of course) for ventilation. That lead to all sorts of problems, not the least of which were in the form of mice and mosquitoes.

Given all that, I knew I would appreciate the real bathroom in our new place. But I never could have imagined the uses we would find for it in just our first month of residence.

Bathroom as….

… dive locker.

… clothes dryer.

… rabbit surgical recovery suite (that’s Demetri hiding behind the litter box).

I think I’m going to like living in a “real” house.

Goodbye Mountains

As we were leaving our old place in the Santa Cruz Mountains after dropping off our keys with the landlord, we were treated to one of the natives doing their thing.


Woodpeckers sure are charming and pretty when they’re not waking you up at the break of dawn.

A Moment to Breathe

It seems that since Steve and I began the moving process in June I haven’t had one. You would think that moving from one place to another, while not easy, is fairly simple in concept. You pack up your stuff, load it in a truck/van/trailer and unload it at the other end. However, we had many more steps than usual.

Our former home in the mountains had roughly the same square footage on the ground level as our new place, but the converted garage had a loft space into which we had been cramming stuff for the past 6 years… through college, entrance into working life, the wedding and beyond. After we moved all of the things we actually use on a regular basis to our new home and pulled all of the stuff out of the attic, we were left with this:

Through a complex spreadsheet, I determined that the most cost-effective way to move the belongings was to get a tow hitch on Steve’s truck, rent a trailer and dump everything at my parents’ house. You can send your sympathy cards to them in Lakewood.

So, after Steve was sure to secure the truck from rolling down the drive (he always over-engineers things)….

… we emptied our belongings into the trailer.

Roughly 8 hours later, we arrived in Lakewood and did our best to make a serious dent my parents’ available square footage. I am truly thankful that we (and our junk) have always been welcome in my parents’ home. I only wish we could have stayed down south along with our things.

It must feel so good to be right…

I checked in at work today (my boss returns this coming Friday) to pick up the mail and stopped by the bathroom on the way out. As usual, there’s a sign posted that says “Please only flush toilet paper! Thanks!” but this time, someone had added a comment. Circling the exclamation marks, she had scrawled a rant against the improper use of exclamation points. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it basically said that exclamation marks ought to be used to convey excitement or shouting and that it was incorrect in particular to use them after the phrase “please only flush toilet paper.” The rant ended in a snippy comment requesting that we all give thought to how we use punctuation.

I stared at the note for a moment, picturing the sad, frustrated little person that stood in a bathroom stall for quite awhile writing this note about punctuation on a sign that most people probably don’t even read anyway. What level of unhappiness in your life must you be experiencing to get upset enough about someone else’s grammar to spend at least 10 minutes ridiculing it?

Not to mention that she’s not exactly correct to begin with. Merriam-Webster online defines an exclamation point as “a mark ! used especially after an interjection or exclamation to indicate forceful utterance or strong feeling.” And I’d bet she’d have strong feelings about the issue if she had been the one unclogging the toilet when it backed up after people flushed who-knows-what.