Posts Tagged ‘moving houses’
Night Scare
This morning, I am contemplating fourteen years that have passed since we moved from the Twin Cities to western Wisconsin. It’s good for me to look at pictures from when we first arrived to see how much the trees have grown. It happens so gradually that it’s easy to lose sight of the change.
While I was looking back, I liked seeing how the inside of the house looked before we filled it with furniture.
For the first time in all these years, I had an uneasy feeling that someone might be lingering around the house in the middle of the night. Cyndie spent the night in the Cities at a friend’s house after the costume party they attended, so I was alone with Asher. I had fallen asleep at a reasonably early hour and was deep in slumber when Asher interrupted the serenity with a sudden outburst of barking.
That alone wasn’t all that unusual, and I chose to ignore him and keep sleeping, assuming it was a passing raccoon or herd of deer that he sensed. Maybe whatever it was wasn’t actually passing. Asher kept barking. I kept trying to sleep, mostly successfully, while his shouting became my white noise.
Sometime after 1 a.m., I came to again and realized he was still barking. Poor guy. He must be getting hoarse. I got up to pee, and he noticed and came to find me. I tried soothing him, and he followed me back to the bedroom to settle down and go back to sleep. Unfortunately, I didn’t. As I lay there, my mind decided I could smell cigarette smoke.
It took a while to clear my head, but it sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering what imaginary scenario might be playing out. It helped that Asher was no longer bothered.
In all the years we have been here, there have been no known prowlers. It is a very unlikely probability. I’m writing last night’s anxiety off as a momentary loss of confidence due to Cyndie’s absence. In reality, she wouldn’t have let Asher keep barking as long as I did, and we all would have been back to sleep much quicker.
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Time Ravaged
More than I can remember in my lifetime, we have been cycling above and below the freezing point this winter, taxing everything exposed to the extremes. As I’ve written many times before, everything moves, including what is often referred to as “solid ground.”
Terra firma is not so firm a.
This is the current state of a base I installed for an outdoor sink on the backside of the barn.
It used to be level.
In some places, the ground sinks. In others, it rises up. And it changes back and forth about as often as the freezing and thawing cycle is playing out. Of course, the base in the image above never happens to return to level. Oh, no.
I have no idea what happened in our pile of limestone screenings. It looks a little like maybe it regurgitated all over itself.
A while back, Cyndie posted a bunch of our furniture for sale on the local neighborhood app. Quite a lot of furniture, actually. The app offered a suggestion that she could also post it on another app to be seen by more than just our neighbors. All it took was the push of a button. So she did.
Soon we had people from far and wide contacting us to ask if everything was okay. Why was she unloading all this furniture?
It’s nice to know concerned friends will check on us if we start showing signs of distress.
The reason Cyndie is looking to jettison our old furniture is that her mother is moving from the family home of many years into a smaller unit in a senior living community. We will be taking some of the precious furnishings that didn’t make the cut for her mom’s new home.
In preparation, we have already started to move things around in our house. We took possession of the old flat-screen TV that had been in her mom’s basement and put it up in our loft, replacing the smaller one we’ve had since it was our main television mounted on the wall in our Eden Prairie home.
Here in Beldenville, the old television was in a stand on a table. In a classic domino effect of one change leading to another, we decided to relocate that TV to the bedroom to replace a smaller one in that room. There, it will be able to be mounted on the wall again. That means I needed to find the old wall mount bracket.
I didn’t know if we’d even kept it, but Cyndie remembered seeing it on the top shelf in our storage room. With her direction, I found two of the three primary pieces. The ravages of time have taken a toll on my memory and I couldn’t recall if we’d detached the base plate from the wall when we moved out of the old house.
I actually started researching online to see if I could replace just the base plate before one last double-check in the storage room, where I was actually checking old packaging for information on the name of the wall mount manufacturer. That’s when I spotted a tiny corner of the base plate on a different shelf.
As far as I can tell, we actually do have everything needed to proceed.
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