Weekend madness

I'm finding that living in a house for the first time since moving to college is a strange but comforting experience. It's definitely different than the apartment complex, where my front door merely led to a hallway for the better part of nine years. There's definitely something cozy about padding down to the kitchen to grab a glass of water in the middle of the night, or listening to the neighbors shooting off the holiday firecrackers down the block, or smelling the neighbors' bbq grills and mowed grass over the weekend.

They're all things that I forgot about once I moved to college. But they're very tangible parts of the neighborhood as a child, and ones I definitely have welcomed back itno my life quickly.

Today is my last full day of "vacation" before heading back to work, and so far, I'm feeling fairly in control of the unpacking. The kitchen is virtually done. Save the stove, which still needs an electrical socket repair to be plugged in, the kitchen functions just fine and is almost completely together. We have a grill in the backyard and the microwave for leftovers, so we can cook at the house (rather than run out for junk food, which we've done entirely too much of the past three weeks). I think I finally felt in control of the house once the kitchen was functioning. I can get dishes done. We have food in the fridge. No worries here.

One small frustration has revealed itself over the weekend-- somewhere in the mess, Erich has misplaced his ring of keys, which means that we're down to one car and one set of house keys. We're doing to do some lost and found calls to a couple stores that we've frequented in the past few days to make sure they weren't left there by accident (both of us have done to places together several times). We've managed to get into Erich's car and checked both the car and the trunk... no dice. And I've been looking everywhere as I've been unpacking, but nothing so far. Thankfully the trash hasn't gone out since we moved in-- and won't until Thursday, so if it needs to happen, we'll dig through the trash bags just in case they accidently got swept into a bag. We only have a small number of open but still semi-full boxes to check through-- most of the remaining boxes are still completely taped up (which eliminates them from the search).

But aside from that, it's been a smooth weekend. We had our first dinner party yesterday for the 4th. Erich's dad came over, as well as our friends Kevin, Tone, and Robin. We did lots of grilling, chatted, showed off the house, and just had a relaxing afternoon together. Next weekend will be the busy one with the official first house party. Hopefully the forecasted tropical storm will avoid us so we can have a sunny, dry day to party outside in the yard.

Before the party, I went into a patch of our yard that is really nothing but weeds (yay-- we get to do some tilling next year!) and dug up about three dozen day lillies that had propogated into the area of the yard. Despite it being weeds, Erich's mowing the area just to keep the height down right now, and I wanted to salvage the lillies if I could to transplant around the yard. They're all bright orange tiger lillies-- very pretty. I know that they'll spread quickly once I get them back into the ground, but for now they're all in my window boxes (that weren't planted this year since I knew we were moving). We have several bare spots around the yard, so these should definitely help to liven them up quickly.

Anyway... I need to get over to the train station to pick Erich up from the commuter rail. Back to real life tomorrow. (whee!)