A Road Less Travelled

So, I’ve been talking about how I’ll tell y’all more about us moving later. I was planning on rhapsodizing after we had a signed contract, but that looks like it will be a few days away and I don’t think I should stretch the tension out anymore.

There is a house across the street from the Lansberry’s and eight houses down. It has four good sized bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs. It has a front stair and a back stair, a decent sized dining room, a dry basement and a really sweet looking front porch. The railing around the front porch is a wall wide enough to sit on. It will have a good sized kitchen with a dishwasher, a breakfast bar complete with pass-through right in front of the sink, space for two refrigerators, a dishwasher and lots of counter space. Did I mention a dishwasher? It has one full bathroom downstairs, one full bathroom upstairs and a full master bathroom that Seth insists does not factor into the bathroom count. It is his bathroom. And Crystal’s. So for all intents and purposes we will have two full bathrooms. But I will still count the master bathroom in my calculations as to whether or not I have fulfilled my lifelong ambition of having more bathrooms than my grandmother. She lives in a little apartment and has two full bathrooms. Explain that to me.

Now, I say the house will have these things.  Currently it doesn’t have all of these things. But the seller is a house builder and was fixing this house up almost as a hobby or something. I met him Thursday and was very impressed. He was pointing out some of the shoddy work that was done by the people who owned the house before him and it was like he was morally offended by this. His sense of aesthetics is very similar to Seth and Crystal’s and when he says he thinks it will be done by a certain time I am fairly certain we can trust him.

In many ways this house is almost exactly what we would have asked for. And I’m looking at the circumstances and the only way I can figure things have worked out as well as they have is that God loves us and wants us to have this house we would like. Seth and Crystal knocked on this man’s door last Saturday and asked if he wanted to sell his house and we should have a signed contract by the end of this next week at the latest. In fact we were supposed to have a signed contract today, but there are a few modifications that have to be made to the contract. We are currently planning on moving at the end of July, though it might be some time before that depending on when he finishes the work he has planned. And we are planning on putting this house on the market in about three weeks. So I’m looking a little bit down the road and I can see long days and hard work, but there is a new house at the end of that road. A new house in a place I would very much like to call home.

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If the Lord wills we will be moving soon (more on that later) and we will be experiencing the joy of living in a house while it is being shown. In the interest of a nice, clean house we are looking to sell the guinea pigs. I am very excited about this because I am allergic to them. Crystal is selling the two guinea pigs together or not at all. They are very good natured animals and no matter how long they sit without anyone playing with them they remain very tame. There is a male and a female, but steps have been taken to ensure that no offspring results from their cohabitation. There is no danger of these guinea pigs escaping because they have round, fat little bodies and short, stubby little legs. They can run for about a foot and then they get winded and have to stop. It’s really funny to see. If you are interested please leave me a comment. If you enjoy animals (which I do not) and are not allergic to these animals (which I am) they will make really nice pets.

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If any of you know Raquel and I or have read this blog for any length of time I’m sure you will have heard us express our disdain for those smarmy e-mail forwards that talk about “True Friends”. “Friends do thus and so, but True Friends do such and such.” Well, I have an addition. When you get stung by something and are scratching away at your arm a friend will commiserate with you, but a true friend will go root around in her bag for the baking soda she knows is in there and when she finds it she will make a paste for you and liberally apply it to your arm while you hold a very cute baby. And if she is a true friend the itch will go away after a time and you won’t even know where you got stung.

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Raquel remarked that I have not written a Dinner at Lansberry’s post and she was shocked that I would be so remiss in my duties. Or, you know, something like that.

The heat has reached Peoria and it was very evident last night that the Lansberry house does not have air conditioning. We piled into the dining room and ate beans, salad, and this really funky cornbread with sour cream and cheese on top. We managed to avoid talking about diapers though Jon was there. Instead we talked about a puppy birth Theresa and Jeremy had attended. That’s so much better than diapers. We talked about Firefly, puppies, ice cream with pie and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember. After dinner Seth, Crystal and I walked down to the house we are most likely going to be moving into (more on that later) and I got to meet the seller and tour the house. When we got back Theresa and Arianna were playing a tactile dominoes where instead of a different number of dots there are different textured circles. I rhapsodized about the house for a bit and then we packed up and went home. As we drove away I thought how cool it would be to live just down the street from there and to simply walk home. I thought about how that neighborhood is almost home already and how I pray it will very soon be truly home. But more on that later.  

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  Around eleven o’clock this morning Arianna opened her eye and proclaimed she could see. She then sat at the table poring over a book as if to make up for lost time. Her eye is still red, but it seems to be working just fine. We still have to use the antibiotic drops to make sure she doesn’t get an infection, but to date she’s doing just fine. God be praised.

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Wednesday afternoon Arianna ran into one of her brother’s fingers. Crystal thought her eye was scratched and put the appropriate drops in and had Arianna lie down and close her eyes. She was still lying down and closing her eyes when Seth got home. They tried to flush the eye with water in case some dirt was stuck in there, but whenever they tried to get Arianna to open her eyes she would start crying and say it hurt too much. If it was a scratch there was nothing to do, but wait so Arianna ate dinner then went upstairs to bed and slept the night away. The next morning her eyelid was swollen and she still couldn’t open her eye. Crystal spent most of the morning playing phone tag with various doctors until she finally got in touch with Arianna’s eye doctor. He said put ice on it (which we were already doing) and if it didn’t improve he told Crystal where to take her. And so they went and found out that three quarters of the surface area of Arianna’s cornea had been scratched off. It isn’t more than surface deep so with time she will heal and her vision will return, but for now we need to be super concerned about infection. If she gets an infection she could go blind in that eye. The doctor said she should be able to see by Saturday.

Please pray for Arianna. Please pray that she would heal quickly and that she would not develop an infection.

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Once upon a time there was a not-a-princess who lived in a not-a-castle. She lived in this not-a-castle with her sister, brother-in-law and five neices and nephews until they decided to move out of their not-a-castle into something-resembling-a-mansion right smack in the middle of the city.

The not-a-princess wasn’t quite sure about living in the city, mostly because the city was rumoured to contain many of that dread species–PEOPLE. She agreed that the something-resembling-a-mansion was much to be prefered over the not-a-castle, and she was pleased to moving closer to some non-people she liked rather well, but over the city was a disconcerting place to live.

One of her consolations in all of this was the nearby Vietnamese Lunch Buffet. A city which contained such a sterling lunch buffet couldn’t be all bad, and as it was very close indeed to the something-resembling-a-mansion she would surely be able to visit it often.

  Alas, it was not to be, for some sinister force had laid a curse upon her that she would never quite make it to the lunch buffet, perhaps in hopes that she would reject the city altogether.

As time passed she began to grow fond of the city in spite of the Curse of the Vietnamese Lunch Buffet, and even to think of the city as ‘home’. Still, she hoped for the day when the Curse of the Vietnamese Lunch Buffet would be broken forever.

 One fine day another not-a-princess in the city suggested a daring plan to break the Curse of the Vietnamese Lunch Buffet. It was not so very different from their plans of before, being something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m going to be out tomorrow, maybe I could pick you up and we could try to go to that lunch buffet again.” Our not-a-princess was skeptical of success, but she agreed to the plan.

  The next day they stormed the lunch buffet, disguised as two not-peasants. In the end, the sinister curse could not stand before their determination. As the steaming egg rolls and curry hit their plates, the curse shattered into a thousand pieces, never to return. And they all lived happily ever after.

The End 

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Tuesday was a bad, no good, rotten, horrible day. We hope that very soon we will be moving (more on that later) and so the really hard days are about to begin. So Seth and Crystal gave me yesterday off and the van to gallivant in. It was glorious.

First I tried to go to the Book Nook which was recently bought by someone Seth met at a BlogPeoria event. I can’t remember his name. The man who bought the bookstore not Seth. I can remember Seth’s name. That’s easy- Seth, Seth, Seth. See, no problem. Anyway, he, the guy whose name I can’t remember, is going to try and make the Book Nook into a bookstore that is worth going to. I wanted to go see what he’d done with the place, but it was closed when I got there. Then I went to JoAnn fabrics and bought lots of clearanced crochet thread. I then proceeded down to a Steak and Shake (funny name, great shakes), bought a shake, couldn’t finish it and read a good book. From there I went to the library, got a parking ticket and perused the book sale room. All I could find was a really nifty looking book about lines and an old copy of a Rudyard Kipling book. I got out some books, discovered the aforementioned parking ticket and headed over to the Lansberry’s to pick up Raquel.

Now, you need to know that Raquel and I have been trying to get to the lunch buffet at the Vietnamese restaurant on Main Street ever since they moved into that house. What with one thing or another we have failed at least three times in our endeavor. But not yesterday. Yesterday was special. Yesterday the curse of the lunch buffet was broken and we triumph over evil, egg rolls and crab ragoon. Well, Raquel triumphed over the crab ragoon. I don’t like seafood, but their not-crab-ragoon food was quite good.

I dropped Raquel off at her house and continued to travel hither, thither and yon. But first I went back home to change into cooler clothes. It got hot yesterday.

I went to Peoria Heights and saw for myself the new book store, I Know You Like A Book. I give it a high on ambiance, but a low on selection. And, since I was there, I went to the other bookstore in Peoria Heights, Second Chance books. I give a low on ambiance, but a high on selection.

And then I went to Glen Oak Park and read while a thunderstorm came and went around me. I had left the van window open during the storm so when I got in the van to go home I got wetter than I like to be. I got home, I curled up in my room with my good book until dinner and I finished the shake I had saved. After dinner I beat Seth and Crystal at Seth’s new game and didn’t gloat too bad. It was a good day. Craft supplies, books, milk shake and more books. Lunch with a friend, a storm in the park, more books and beating my brother at his own game. What more could I want?

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 Today was a bad day. A really bad day. I e’splain. No, I sum up-

You ever have one of those times when you feel like if you just cried and got it over with you would feel better? Well, at those times I usually can’t cry and get it over with. Not so today. I got my cry! Yay!

And then Seth and Crystal kicked me out of the house. I went over to the Lansberry’s and Raquel met me at the door with a yellow straw spoon tied up in a ribbon. She said I sounded like I needed something cheerful and it was the best she could do on short notice. It was more than enough. We went downstairs, watched X-men 2 and I felt my countenance brighten. Life is still hard. Lord willing, life is about to get even harder. But I’ve got folks who love me and that ain’t no small thing.    

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 So here I am in Peoria again. I got back Thursday afternoon, finally got a chance to unpack my suitcases Saturday afternoon, and am just now getting around to writing a blog post again. Perhaps it’s just as well I put it off, because this may be the first time I’ve truly been awake since I got up at four-thirty Thursday morning to catch a plane. (I wonder if I could use my state of non-awakeness as an excuse for losing Ra horribly badly at game night.)

 My life has gone back to normal. This was a little strange for me to realize because it made me notice what sorts of happenings make my life normal. Most of the ‘normal’ happenings are the ‘bizarre and unexpected’ happenings.

  There are the routine things, such as having twenty-four people at our house for dinner the first night I was back. Or spending the next afternoon cleaning the house for an undetermined large number of people to show up for game night.

 There are also the events I never could have predicted, but fit very nicely into our pattern of having a crazy life. For instance, there’s a dog expecting puppies. This dog doesn’t actually belong to us, but through a series of events a little too involved for this post, we’re likely to be needed a great deal to help take care of said dog and puppies.

  Also, there’s some chance that the Ben-Ezra’s could be moving in down the street in the near future. If this works out it would be lovely, wonderful thing which will involve all of us going through the moving/cleaning/fixing-up-the-old-house process to different degrees. Personally, I think they’re going to get this house, if only because it’s about time for something else to get thrown into the middle of our lives. I have a feeling it’s going to be that kind of summer.

 

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