All About My House

In response to Heidi, here's all about the house we'll be living in by March.

It's a small (and i mean very small for a house) two bedroom, one bathroom house. It's pretty old and built as a company house for some company I can't remember the name of. My father's Godmother (she's dead now) used to own those houses and sold them sometime in the seventies i think. Now a couple from Canton, MD own them and have fully are in the process of restoring them. There are four of them all in a row (but not row houses, they're not attached). They are on York Rd in Parkton, MD about fifteen minutes south of Pennsylvania (for those of you who don't know York Rd is a major road that runs north/south and goes from PA down into Baltimore.

You park on the side of the road and you walk down two little stairs and across a couple feet of sunken brick and you're on my front porch. There's a window to either side of the door. You open the front door and you're in the living/dining room. To the right the room is slightly longer to the left it's smaller with a bay window that looks out into the space between the two houses. The floors are hardwood and the ceilings aren't too low. Directly across from the front entrance is a hallway that takes you back to the kitchen and bathroom. As you saunter down the hallway (it's narrow and only four feet long, max) to the right is a narrow stairway leading down to the basement. Just before you enter the kitchen there's a door on the left that is the bathroom, complete with old claw foot bathtub and free hanging sink. The kitchen is tiny but perfect the refridgerator is the the kid brother of your average sized refridgerator. The cabinets above the sink are just slightly too high for me to reach. The counters are just a little too tall but not bad. There's a window that looks down into the back yard behind the sink. As you turn to the right and about face there is a stairwell leading up. You mount the carpeted stairs (I don't know why they're carpeted the rest of the house is hardwood, but whatever, i'm not complaining, i fall down the stairs alot and could use the padding), you notice that above you the stairway abruptly ends on an impossibly tiny landing and you can go either left or right. My friend, you are standing outside the bedrooms. To the left will be our bedroom because that's the sunny side of the house, to the right is the guest bedroom. The bedrooms have attic ceilings so that as you reach the halfway point as you stroll to the other side of the room to look out the windows you may (if you're normal sized) have to duck. The windows you'll notice are the equivalent to the refridgerator, tiny little things that don't have enough room to stand up between the floor and the ceiling. It's really quite cute if you're not six feet tall (which, thankfully neither of us are).

What about the basement you ask? Well after you're finished exploring our enchanting upstairs you bowl yourself down the stairs careful not to crash on the last few stairs and fall headlong into the tiny little refridgerator (you don't want to hurt it, it's smaller than you are), you make yourway back to the decending stairs. Once you've successfully arrived in the basement you will look around and notice that it is an unfinished drafty kind of basement with tile flooring. There is a backdoor that leads to stairs that lead into the backyard, which is small but quaint and beyond it there are woods and wisteria jungles and a small creek. We have neighbors on one side that are good friends of my family and have two small (or at least i remember them being small) children. On the other side there is a big red barn but i don't know who that belongs to.

So... Come spring we'll need visitors. We have a guest room, no more sleeping in the living room on the floor, now you'll be sleeping in the guest room, on the floor.

Home Sweet Home

WE HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAA

Good Morning:

My morning:

Ben gets up at 5:30 (as per usual). I wake briefly and peek at him dressing in the dark. Then I drift back into a drowsy sleep ocasionally waking to hear the sounds of everyone getting ready to go to work (everyone leaves earlier than I do so I have an extra 30-40minutes in the morning than they do).
My father (known to wake up singing completely off-key songs he doesn't know the words to, loud enough to wake the neighbors, of which we have none) for some reason, decided that he was british this morning and everything was said in a Cockney/Baltimore Hillbilly accent. Every couple of moments i would be yanked out of a peaceful dose to hear, "By-gum, I 'elieve 'e draynk the lest o' te Coffee."
At 6:15 Ben comes back upstairs to give me goodbye kisses. Every morning he wakes me up for real by saying goodbye. He kisses me and tells me to be safe and that he'll see me tonight. I ususally respond with either a smart ass remark or tell him to be safe also.
"You be safe out there driving" he says.
This morning I opt for the smart ass remark. "No I don't think I will," I yawn at him. "I still have a couple guard rails I have to take out on Perry Hall Blvd."
"Seriously, there's snow out there."
"Yeah right," i say. This is a common joke of ours. Whenever i want to distract him from something I say, "LOOK! Snow!"
"No Really."
"Uh-Huh. I love you. Have a good day."
He stands and shrugs and blows me a kiss and walks out.
Twenty minutes later I wake up and dress and go down stairs and what's outside the window??? SNOW!!!!!!!!
Okay. So not too exciting for most of you, but I love snow, psychotically love it. And for the last three years I have been pretty deprived of a proper winter. Granted, Prescott does have more of a winter than say Phoenix does but, it's still nothing like a good solid snowy, crappy-weather-out-the-hoo-haa, kind of winter.
It's not much, less than an inch... can't even make a proper snowball... But it will do.

Another Glorious Weekend

It was another glorious weekend of NOT-January weather. Warm and sunny.

On Saturday Ben and I went to his Dad's house and hung out with him and Ben's brother, Casey. (Yes his brother and my sister are both named Casey.)All of our stuff is in Rex's (my father-in-law)basement and we had to grab our various Tax, receipt, write-off files seeing as how tax season is rearing it's oh-so-ugly head.

Ben's Brother is a bit of a nut and going through that stage in his life that most of us have gone through, The "I'm not sure where i'm going or what i'm doing but i'm pretty sure that I am the center of the universe" stage. I sympathize, but that doesn't keep him from driving me completely batty. He gets so "poor me" and i can't really handle it so I yell at him and punch him in the chest. Which, oddly enough, causes him to laugh. Oh well.

So then Ben and I left (with a bunch of tax files and the deposit money from our old rental company that had arrived at Rex's earlier in the week) and proceeded to drive around looking for that perfect house, which continues to elude us. After a couple hours of that, we were more than ready to go home and curl up with popcorn and a bad movie (Red Sonia, for those fellow bad movie lovers).

Sunday was not much more exciting. We spent the majority of the day splitting firewood, sitting around on the woodpile, and doing Sudoku puzzles. I am thoroughly addicted to those things.

And now it's Monday morning and I'm at work, where there's nothing to do but day dream.

Every part of me misses Prescott.

New E-mail

So here's the skinny, I work for a place that is High Security so i cannot access Hotmail and by the time i get home i don't really want to.

SOOO e-mail me at work! ejones@santegroup.org. Careful what you send though. You don't want to get me fired.

Today does not feel like it's going to end.... grrrrr.

Weekday Update

Hello all three of my avid and completely dedicated readers.

I have started my new job. It's great. After a month of living out of my truck and duffel bags it's nice to have somewhere to go where i can be as anal-retentive as i'd like(Feed my OCD).

Due to my uncanny inability to estimate how much time it will take me to arrive at work each morning I am sparatic in my arrival but often between two hours and five minutes early. Traffic being the inconsistent beast that it is.

Nonetheless, everyone is very nice, if a bit burned out on what they do.

Ben and I put in another rental application for another house (Kirstin, it's the one on the other end of the four white houses we looked at).

So this time next month (as it won't be ready for a month)Ben and I (fingers crossed) will be moving into the first house we will have ever lived in and not shared with other people.

Big Epiphany for the week: I quit my job as the manager of a webhosting business to go to school. $64,000 and three years later I return to the job market and am awarded by making the same amount of money, and doing the same things that i did before.
Upside: Being an administrative assistant is WAY easier than college ever was.

I miss you all. I promise to call soon. I'm sorry I'm such a dud when it comes to making phone calls (Heidi).

-me

Sorry for the Delay

Hullo all. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to update. You know how it is, (insert a few excuses here that are all valid but none of which could not have been overcome with a little bit of effort on my part.)

And now for the news:
there is none.
I'm living at Mom and Dad's. Ben works for Dad (they're framing an addition at a friend's farm). I work in the city for the Baltimore City Crisis Response Center in White Marsh. It's a commute. We're still trying to come up with a living-situation-game-plan. We're thinking of renting something for a year or so until we can get the Little House (the pine cabin in the hollow where i grew up) in liveable condition. We're even considering putting plumbing and electricity in it (All thems modern conveniences, whew!) However, we're still deliberating about a great many things. We're taking our time, figuring things out... feeling crazy... Do we buy an ugly house we don't want to live in, Do we buy property and build, Do we rebuild the Little House, Do we rent while we re-build or build or do we continue to stay here... So many questions, and for once Money is not the most significant deciding matter.

Ben and I spent yesterday splitting firewood. It was really really nice. The weather was perfect, cold and windy but not too cold and so clear. We had a tea party on the big stumps of wood and I felt like we were the mice and toads of childrens' books sitting down to a formal tea on toadstools.

A few things occurred to me yesterday that i thought might be fun to share:
1. Even though Ben can split over twice as fast as i can, it would still take him an extra four hours of work to split what we did together, by himself.
2. Splitting wood is a full body work out (boy am i sore).
3. By the time we called it quits I was too tired to over think, stress out, freak out or otherwise lose my shit.
4. If it came down to it, I think Ben and I would be happy living in a fort in the woodpile. Who needs a house?