Friday, January 8, 2016

Another busy day


Miss D. and I had another crowded day.  We spent the morning changing our order for underlayment (to use beneath the laminate flooring) from a low-cost to a more expensive, but higher-grade product.  We also bought three sets of locks and deadbolts, and had them keyed alike at the store so that we wouldn't have to worry about that ourselves later.  We'll give the contractor a key to the existing locks in order to complete the renovations we've asked for.  When he's finished, our friends will install the new locks for us, so we'll come back to a more secure home.  We also bought a second garage door remote control unit, a new battery for the old one, and a few other bits and pieces.  (We still have to figure out how to reprogram the garage door opener to a new frequency.)

I think we've now done and/or arranged to have done and/or bought everything we had in mind for this trip.  It's been expensive, but thanks to a lower than expected price on the laminate flooring and a much lower than expected quote from the contractor, we found we could afford it all.  Our savings are sadly depleted, but we can fix that over the next year or two.  The important thing is, we now own our own home.  It's felt like camping out to me, living in rented accommodation since we married - it seemed very temporary.  Now we can build a proper home together.  It's a good feeling.

Blogorado buddies Jennifer and Evyl Robot Michael are arriving in town this evening, so with Lawdog, Phlegmmy and Old NFO already here, we should have quite the merry gathering tonight and tomorrow.  Early on Sunday morning we'll head back to Nashville in a rental car, leaving my pickup and trailer here.  That'll allow us to drive down again at the end of the month in a U-haul truck or something similar, towing Miss D.'s vehicle on a trailer.  We'll alternate driving with looking after our cat, who'll be in a carrier in the truck cab with us.  It might be a noisy, scratchy journey . . . let's hear it for kitty tranquilizers!

Peter

8 comments:

DoninSacto1 said...

Peter, I brought my daughter's cat from Las Crusis NM to Sacramento CA with a stop over in Tucson and he did extremely well. Didn't force him to remain in the carrier unless we were stopping. He rode most of the way on her lap.

Snoggeramus said...

Best of all, Peter, this is what you have achieved as a further result of making your own income from writing those books of yours. Others may have given up and accepted their fate, but you, sir, have done well.

Charlie Mitchell said...

And you picked a pretty good state. Lived there about 25 years in total.

Alanatswbell said...

Unless you have a really weird garage door opener, you are changing the code it uses not the frequency. There should be (usually is) a dip switch in the unit on the door itself and one in the remote. Just make sure the switches are set the same in both or all three units and you should be good to go.

Anonymous said...

If you have never given your cat a tranquilizer before, you may want to try one combined with a small local car trip. My wife and I were going to take our cat for Thanksgiving home visit and gave her a pill for the journey - but with the strange feeling and the car motion she put up an incessant, constant LOUD mewing. Fifty miles down the road, we had to turn back and arrange for a neighbor to look after her.

Charles

Gail said...

It's beginning to feel more real now, isn't it?

Anonymous said...

unless your garage door opener was made by a defunct company, you should be able to find them on the internet and download a pdf copy of the manual (including how to reset the codes). Alan Simpson is right.

richard mcenroe said...

We tried giving our cats kitty downers at the start of our move from CA to TX, but the foaming freaked the wife right out. So we did without them and the cats did fine. Of course, they each did have a large-dog size cage of their own in the van (one from each household) so they weren't stressed for sharing space and food.