My first blog of 2004, hurray. I’m happy to report no cars burned up over the holiday and major calamity was avoided. In contrast to the Christmas 4 day weekend, the New Year’s 4 day hiatus was much more filled with work.
Our New Years Eve plans were simple. There were two firework displays going on. The first was on the gulf. It was really great weather, probably around 70. We had our chairs right next to the water so we had the background sounds of breaking waves as we watched the fireworks light up the sky and water. It was a very well done show, better in my opinion than the 4th of July fireworks we saw this past year. Afterwards we headed to a local park that had another show going on at 9pm. That show topped the first! It was done to music and had some firewrks that I had never seen before like ones that were smiley faces and hearts. The finale of that one was spectacular. The show wound up around 9:30. We had plenty of time to head home and watch the ball drop. We watched Dick Clark as always. His Rockin Eve show seems much lamer than in years past with all sort of fake interaction between Dick live and the recorded people out in Hollywood. Plus as I complained about last year, he doesn’t go on top of the roof anymore. Anyways, we hit bed probably 10 minutes after midnight. Not a big celebration but it was still very enjoyable, unlike any New Years experience I have had up north.
New Years day we spent the majority of our time at my mom’s new place doing lawn maintenance. As part of a deal we worked out with the owner, we agreed to do lawn maintenance in exchange for a break on the rent for my mom. The yard was a pretty big mess and we spent a good couple hours pruning, weed whacking and mowing. It looked much better when we finished. We had to stop at Wal-mart to pick up a new vacuum cleaner because we gave mom ours to have. What a zoo, wal-mart on New Years day is not recommended.
Friday was moving day. We loaded up a bunch of stuff and dumped it at mom’s place. While Ali and mom were cleaning and unpacking I was doing “man” stuff like moving furniture around, hooking up the stereo, collecting trash and looking in the attic to figure out how I was going to get cable into my mom’s bedroom (had none). My mom’s new place is nothing fancy but it’s cute and we were able to walk to the beach in 13 minutes from her place, a MAJOR perk. I came back Friday night with another bug up my ass to get the cable run into mom’s room. I knew this would be a nasty process. It required me to slink around the attic with barely enough room for me to crawl on my hand’s and knees, with nothing but studs to support me, filled with blow in fiberglass insulation. To reach the corner of the closet where I needed to drop the line required me to be on my belly, wedged into the corner of the roofline with a cordless drill trying to locate the drill spot by Alisons tapping on the ceiling. It was bad. I was coughing from all the shit that was in the air from the insulation, drilling multiple holes from misjudged location information, running out of battery power on my cordless and generally becoming very aggravated. During one of my attempts to crawl out I got too high and was impaled with a rusty roofing nail in my shoulder, need to get that tetnis shot sooner or later I guess. Eventually I got the cable where I wanted, tested it and it worked! My reward for the effort was a bloody shoulder and arms that felt like they had a million tiny splinters in them from the fiberglass in the insulation, lovely.
We got finished up late, headed home and I couldn’t wait to get a shower to clean up. Just after I got all soaped up, the water shuts off….. No problem, I have had this happen before, normally the float in the tank gets stuck, I just need to reset it. So out I go in a towel and flip flops, dripping wet with soapy water. Hmmm everything looks normal, further investigation led me to see there was zero pressure from the well pump. So I head out to the well in the back yard (still in towel and flip flops) and take apart the electric box to see if I can notice anything abnormal. Nope, just wires in there, no breakers, fuses or anything that I could “fix” Great. So I left a message on the well companies machine and resigned myself going to bed with sticky soap residue all over me. What a day.
On Saturday I awoke and had a couple other ideas about things I could try on the equipment. I went out and lo and behold we magically had water pressure again. I have no idea how or why but didn’t care. It’s been fine ever since. The rest of the weekend was filled with nfl playoff watching, tivo hacking and several more trips to mom’s new place to take stuff and do stuff. Nothing very interesting.
My mom seems quite happy to be in her own place. I have to admit I was really sad on Friday when I left her there. I almost felt like I was giving her the boot. However she seems absolutely thrilled to be there which makes me feel a whole lot better about it. It’s seems strange after 8 months to have the house to ourselves again. It’s nice.