Moving day!!!

I'm so over the moon excited right now...we got our base house and can officially move in on Wednesday April 9th!!! Woo hoo! Commence happy butt wiggling dance now!

I've already got the movers scheduled for Thursday and Friday, and then I'll have the carpet cleaned on Saturday so we can free and clear of this place by the end of next weekend.

The apartment was livable enough for a couple months, but not a fun few months. We got jerked around a bit about moving in here, but they had us by the chin hair because there were so few places to move into in January. We finally got moved in and immediately found all the broken stuff in the place...no toilet paper holders, light fixtures hanging from the walls, scuffs everywhere, stains everywhere, non draining tub, rust on every surface and dead birds in the stove vents. We scrubbed and cleaned unmercifully until I deemed the place not in danger of a CPS inspection, but still...and we quickly discovered that the place is constructed of spit and tissue paper. The guy downstairs would throw rollicking parties until the wee hours, forcing us to turn on fans to try to drown out the noise. We knew more about his bathroom habits than I care to record here...and we tiptoed around because we didn't want him to know the same about us! I'm sure he did anyway, considering I could hear his phone convos like they were happening in my living room, but ignorance is bliss right? The water was so hard and rusty here that I have two sets of white sheets permanently ruined by iron stains and/or holes eaten in the fabric by the rust out products used to clean them. We're carrying seven loads of laundry to the new house...I refuse to wash any more clothes in the ironworks downstairs.

All in all, I will probably be reporting these people to the military housing network as unsatisfactory. I called every week for nine weeks about broken stuff...I even lost water for one full day, and never saw the handyman. Even now, the central heat is making the apt 80+ degrees at night, and there's no way to fix it other than to open windows and hope the walls don't freeze.


Our new house is so NICE! Bigger than we've had before, with a basement playroom/sewing room/laundry room. It lacks a decent pantry, but I'm going to get some storage shelves to anchor to the basement stairs landing and that will do nicely. We opted to keep the old carpet (with a toddler and baby on the way and two cats it's safest!) and they let us keep the old style linoleum, which might not sound like a boon, but I've heard nothing but bad stuff about the new "floating" floors they're installing. They're painting inside and out, and as much as I like the look of freshly painted walls in the color of my choice, I do not want to try to paint with Connor underfoot and a pregnant belly. I think we can make do with white for a couple years, especially if it's freshly painted. Best of all, I went over to measure for new black out shades and two out of three of the bedrooms already had them! That saved us few hundred dollars! The other room we're making the guest room. It has regular blinds, but we're going to get the window tint from the base supply store so with the heavy curtains we have for that room it should be livable for summer guests. The only other major purchase we'll need is bookshelves...I didn't have any when Charlie and I got married in New Mexico. I just piled them in heaping stacks everywhere and figured I would deal with it later. We got to Las Vegas and Charlie built me the most beautiful shelves into the wall, so again no dealing with my book addiction in a reasonable manner. Well, now it's time to pay the piper and since I hate to lose any of my well-loved book friends, we may actually need to purchase shelving for them. I'm concerned about kid safety of course, so we'll look for something that we can anchor easily or has a wide enough base that it can withstand a few minutes of rough housing until the Mommy Hammer of Justice can come down from the heavens. The other huge priority is kid locks and alarms on the outside doors. We're living literally five steps from Moose Lake and it's cold and deep, and I don't trust Connor outside for a second alone at his age with the temptation of water, sticks and frogs immediately within reach. The fence might slow him down for a few minutes, but he is the master climber so he could probably figure it out quickly. I'm paranoid, but I am paranoid to a purpose, so it's okay right?

Now that everything is thawing, I'm going to go on a planting spree...might wait a couple more weeks just to make sure we're out of freezing danger...and get myself my veggies, herbs and flowers planted for the spring and summer. You're not supposed to plant much at the housing, and instead are supposed to go plant at some central plot. I'm not sure how to do that...question for Wednesday housing meeting, I guess. And I'll have to judge how much planting over there I want to do. I love having fresh veggies and Connor likes to help mommy in the garden, but I have to also keep in mind that I will be hugely pregnant through a lot of the growing season. All the squatting and stooping will be good for me, I'm sure, but gardening does require some dedication that I may not have if I can't just roll my whale-like body out the door to handle it.

Things may finally be coming together...I've been awfully lonely and pretty miserable and I think this is the first step to feeling better about this move.