Good mowing, Good MOWing...

If you don't know which song from which musical inspired that title, this is not the blog for you.

Let me preface what will seem like a "my-new-house-is-a-pain-in-the-ass-woe-is-me" post by saying that I love my house. Every time I walk into it, I get all light and happy, like a teenager in love. We own that house. The history of our family from here forward will be written there. It will always be the colors I want it to be. There will always be dog toys in the living room and a random pair of flip flops hiding in a corner just in case.

I have sworn - in private, in public, on Facebook, on this blog - that I would be doing no lawn maintenance or gardening. My work is indoors. The men in my life (my husband and in his absence, my father) are responsible for maintaining the outdoors. I did watch the day Corey assembled the lawnmower my dad got us as a housewarming gift. I remember him saying "this lever has to be held down to start or push the mower. If you let it go, the mower stops. That's a safety measure so if you fall, the lawnmower won't keep going and run over you."

That's all he said.

On Monday morning, I opened the door to let Murphy into the backyard to a cool 65-degrees. Murphy did not want to do in the backyard, because the grass was too tall. With the weather being so lovely, and me being so drunk with the joy of homeownership, I decided that if the weather was nice that evening, I would mow when I got home from work. 

At 6 PM, I put on my lawnmowin' clothes - cropped yoga pants, a sleeveless shirt and my hot pink Crocs - ooched the mower out of the shed and into the backyard, held down the lever and pulled the cord.

Nothing.

I did it again.

Nothing.

I had checked the oil. I had made sure there was plenty of gasoline. 

I looked around to make sure none of my new neighbors were witnessing the ineptitude of a very smart lady.

Pissed, I marched in the house, picked up my laptop and Googled "how to start a lawnmower."

I can only assume, because Corey mowed the lawn while he was home on leave, that he knew very well that BEFORE you hold down the lever and BEFORE you pull the cord, you have to push the red rubber button three times to "prime" the f*cker AND THEN you do that other stuff.

I pushed. And I pulled. And the mower started and I had the most indescribable sense of triumph when I finished my little yard without breaking a sweat. 

I did not get the front yard done, because a bunch of my neighbors were in a driveway across the street and called me over to meet them. By the time we dispersed, it was 9 PM.

I have cool ass neighbors, but more on that later.

A week later, I mowed the front yard. Now the back yard needs it again. It's turning cool, so hopefully the shit will stop growing. I just don't have the attention to detail required to make every blade of grass the same height and remove every leaf from the front walk. Murphy will let me know when to mow again by refusing to go make poo in the grass.

I'm an indoor girl. He knew that when he married me. Actually, he knew that when he MET me in high school.

It's a beautiful day for a neighbor...or to eat your neighbor's baby for lunch.

There are TONS of dogs in our neighborhood. Driving down the street to get to my house, I pass by all my unmet neighbors working in their yards or fiddling around in their garages, their dogs calmly by their sides. I see them walking their dogs pleasantly down our sidewalks and stopping to talk to their neighbor while the dog relieves himself quietly near the mailbox. They gather with their leashed dogs in front of people's houses and talk about whatever neighbors talk about.

It's all very Wisteria Lane, except the houses are smaller, much closer together and have LSU-abilia somewhere along the front.

You see, we have an electric gate that closes the fenced-in backyard off in the middle of the driveway. However, the stationary post that the gate meets when it closes rotted, and the dipshits who replaced it did not dig up the broken post, they just put a NEW post in front of that one. The gate meets NOTHING when it closes, and Murpy can happily squeeze his ass between our gate and the neighbor's house and run his little Gestapo self all down the street.

In theory, when I let Murphy out of the back door, I shouldn't have to stand watch over him because he should be completely confined to our driveway and fenced backyard.

Unless, as has already occurred, someone (my husband) leaves the electric gate open and Murphy barrels down the driveway and around the corner. It will add a touch of desperation to this story when I tell you that Murphy chases cars. He has gotten Corey hit by a car, and he himself has run face first into a rolling tire as he gave chase to the car attached to it. So for Murphy to go bounding down the driveway and out of sight around the corner, up the main street of our subdivision with me locked behind the electric gate in my white nightgown lends an ominous distinction to a sunny morning in our new neighborhood.

On that particular morning, by the time I came back in the house, threw on some clothes and got out the front door, he was three blocks up. Every move I made toward him inspired a game of chase. By the glory of God no cars came through while I lured him the three blocks back to our house and seethed at him until Corey got him, whereupon I threw my fury at him for leaving the gate open.

Murphy is not a vicious dog. He just barks all the time. When cars drive by. When horns honk on TV. When thunder rumbles. He's very social, and everybody is automatically his friend. It would be like a little kid who sees you, runs up to you at full force, stops just before he runs smack into your face and screams "HIIIIIIIIII" at you the whole time he's running in your direction.

Penny, the Dachshund across the street, does not care for this welcome at all. And Lucy, her new baby Schipperke sister, went dashing into the house and would not come back out into her own yard when I took Murphy over to meet them last week. We haven't seen them outside since.

And then, to my delight, today he chased a baby.

Did you say "baby"?

Yes, a baby.

There was a little blond child in an LSU romper, about 18-months old, walking with his mother down the street. Unfortunately, they crossed our driveway, behind what would appear to be the safety of a closed electric gate, unless the Cocker Spaniel who resided there could fit between the gate and the post and made a loud, barking, mad dash out of the gate and in your direction.

And there was the Cocker Spaniel's mother, on the other side of the gate, with no means to open it from where she was, in her white nightgown, fresh off a late Saturday night slumber.

I ran through the house and came out the front, calling him and squeaking his favorite toy toward him. I was too scared to go put clothes on and run out into the street. The baby had started to cry and his mother was walking him back from whence he came, but the louder he cried, the more worked up Murphy got, and that little sonofabitching dog gave chase. I was too scared to take my eyes off him to go put on clothes. So I stood on my porch and called him and squeaked until he finally came, once the baby had gone back into his house.

I have to call the contractor to come out and charge me a couple hundred dollars to remove the broken post and relocate the Official Post to a spot that will actual prohibit Murphy from leaping out into the road,  jumping on top of dogs who are smaller than him, chasing the ten full-size SUVs and pickup trucks on our double dead-end street and making my neighbors think he's going to eat the faces off their babies.

We know Murphy just wants to knock them to the ground and lick their teeth, the same as he does to the tiny people who live in his house.

If I'm that baby's mother, I'm not going to risk the delicate skin of my toddler to give you a chance to prove your dog won't eat my baby.

I'm probably also going to call Animal Control to come pick up your clearly rabid dog.

We don't have friends in our neighborhood.

We may never.

.....

After Action Review

On Friday my beloved boarded a jet plane to head back to Iraq. We're told he'll be home for Christmas, so this leaves us with three months of separation. When he stepped off the airplane in Baton Rouge two weeks ago, I had not seen him in four months. There's no bullshit welcome here. That four months felt like a f*cking eternity. I cannot believe it was only four months. I am not currently in possession of a "he'll be home for good before you know it" attitude about these next three months. Three months is just short of agony.

I do have this new house to play with, this super-cool new job trying to make people healthier (some of them against their will), these two cool little dudes who are funny and delightful albeit challenging as hell....and there are only 61 days before I get to decorate for Christmas.

Ah, Christmas.

In spite of this being Corey's "vacation," he was very active and helpful. I wish I could boast he did it all without complaint. He did A LOT of it without complaint. He did a fair amount without having to be asked or reminded. He eventually complied after every incidence of my stomping angrily out of a room.

Funny thing about this husband I got: he resists EVERYTHING he doesn't think of himself. If you ask him to do something, or if you're his child and you ask him if you can do something, his first, automatic, immediate response to you will be "no" or "why?" Once you make a simple declarative statement about why it should occur, why he should be the one to do it, why you should be allowed to do this or why he needs to procure something for you, he will deliver unto you. But not before he says "no" first.

I also teased him a lot these last two weeks about his unnecessary defiance and/or indignation. If I state aloud in his presence that I need to do something, he will become indignant that he's not doing it. Where he learned to assume that all chores and responsibilites fall upon him I do not understand. Example #1 of a possible 435: we were in the car coming back from an appointment and I said that I needed to run in the party store to get supplies for this new token system we're implementing with our children. I intended for Corey to remain in the car, keeping it cool in 95 degree heat, while I went in the store. He surmised that he was expected to leave the car to go in the store, and he got quite hot about it. Until I started laughing. How can you get mad about having to do something that no one was asking or EXPECTING you to do?

Silly man.

Home ownership has, for this two-week period at least, sparked a home maintenance and improvement interest in Corey that was never present in apartment-dwelling. He volunteered for every Home Depot shopping need that surfaced and spent half his swollen combat paycheck on home stuff.

He dug up all the dead plants around the crepe myrtle in our front yard. Then he RAKED and BAGGED at least twelve months of leaves, bark and dead weeds and grass in the front yard.

I broke the sink in our half bath trying to soak skewers for the kabobs I made Wednesday night. Corey "harumphed" at me and told me to call a plumber, but then I used my powers of persuasion to convince him that HE could fix that sink, no problem. And he did it.

I bought him a blower so he could send all our crap into the street. He delighted in blowing all the leaves from our driveway and front walk out into the street.

He's developing a system of organization for his shed where his tools and toys go. Things go in shelves and hang on the walls and when he gets home, he's going to have MORE STUFF and all of it will be organized.

He painted. We had our contractor remove a wall-mounted TV stand and patch the sheet rock. Corey took the paint to be matched AND THEN he painted that section of the wall. You can't even tell.

I somehow ripped the side of the countertop off in our kitchen. He put it back. There was sandpaper, caulk and nails involved. You can't tell I broke it. (That's two things I broke and he fixed. Damn.)

He's the one who figured out WHAT DAYS the garbage truck comes and WHICH TYPE of garbage goes out to the curb on which day.

The boys did great while he was home, as expected. Both of them are having trouble with their grades, but we all think it's emotional and behavioral and not ability-related. Their behavior at home improved, and we launched the token system their psychologist recommended. We have assigned a value to the behavioral outcomes we want to see every day, such as being kind to your brother and eating what is given to you. At the end of supper every night, the boys receive tokens based on their behavior that day. These token are to be used to play video games, eat candy, have slumber parties and get toys and games. Plastic money literally changes hands in our house. They were so stoked about it when Corey and I introduced it and did it last week. Whether the same level of cooperation and enthusiasm will continue once I am the one governing the bank is unclear. But not expected.

I think it was very difficult for Corey to not treat us like soldiers. The first few days he was home, he was a little critical of me - the way I drive, the way I clean the kitchen...and he had forgotten that little boys are noisy by nature. I tried to be patient. It been just as long since I had to let someone else in on my decisions or factor in someone else's wishes and concerns into my process. We called a truce about halfway through R&R and any changes will be implemented when he is home to implement them. I do things the way they are done because that's the way I can get them to work for the boys and me.

I commend myself for overlooking the mess. We were packing, moving and unpacking the entire time he was home, so I can't claim that he kept the entire house in a mess when it would have otherwise been tidy. But, I know that Corey does not leave his shit all over that tiny ass room he shares with someone else over there, and that in order for there to be order and efficiency, everything has a place. So why in the name of all that is holy could he NEVER put a pair of shoes anywhere other than right in the middle of the living room? Wherever anyone dropped anything in this house, that's where it stayed. The boys would get up and get dressed for school in the living room, and at 5 PM the pajamas would be on the floor by the couch, exactly where they had left them eleven hours earlier.

The Army now does these reintegration retreats with soldiers and families when they come home. Although it's not until about three months after they return, so presumably all the things that need intervention have worked themselves out for better or worse after the soldier reintegrates with the family. I've had other Army wives, of past and present deployments, validate me about the "leaving random things sitting in random places where they do not belong and walking around them as if there is nothing amiss" phenomenon, so I wonder if they cover that at the retreat?

Our new home is blah without you. Just come home, okay?

.....

Now everything is easy cause of you

Everyone keeps asking us for pictures of the house. Our abode is not yet ready to have her picture taken. I gave myself until Sunday to do as much unpacking and arranging and putting everything in a place, and then I stopped. I didn't want to spend this week, Corey's last four days, working for a paycheck and then working on the house at night and not savoring every available second of this time together.

I do want to share this joy with you, so here are pictures. Once Corey leaves on Friday and the boys go spend time time with their grandparents, I will stage the house for photography to occupy myself, and THEN you'll get the pictures you're waiting for. Until then, give me a frigging break and enjoy what I can give you! If you see something in the background that truly captures your attention, click on the picture to make it bigger. Then don't give me any shit because my house is a mess.

We have some landscaping work to do next Spring. I am super proud of Corey Daniel though, because not only did the mow the yard this week and blow all the leaves out of the driveway, but he pulled all the dead vegetation out of this bed. I didn't even have to scream or pout to get him to do it.

This is what soldiers do when they are home on leave and you give them a break from minor home improvements and repairs and doing homework with their children. They sleep. They also don't pick up their shoes...ever.

This is our living room.

These are the new pillows I bought for my couch. We needed a touch of red. I have a very stylish aunt who says every room should have some red in it. There it is.

I let Corey buy himself a big new fancy television. I will be filled with anxiety if I do not clearly state that that table has more accessorizing in its future, and that there is a system for taming those wires.

My same stylish aunt gave us this glorious oil painting. And those blue Chinamen. This is our mantle. It's my #2 favorite thing to look at in our new house.

This is the wine we keep stocked in the house with two small children, one dog and one neurotic-ass cat. This is on my rolling bar cart my parents gave me when I graduated with my MPA. It's in our dining room. My mom made those toile curtains. Corey gave me that bowl for Christmas two years ago.

That's Corey doing Landen's homework with him. This was immediately following a severe breakdown - Landen is a smart, smart kid who thinks too much about video games and world domination and does not pay attention to what the f*ck he's doing in class. When he brings home C's and D's, he gets in trouble. Then we take things away from him and he cries and cries. I have the most work to do in my dining room.

I just really like this photo.

Murphy loves the photos. There is not amount of red eye correction on this computer to help him out.

And then, once he gets the camera's attention, he strikes a pose. This rug is textured and yuppy and beachy and we love it.

My friend Weezie gave us these little birds as a housewarming presents. From left to right: Coreybird, proud and confident and forward-facing; Nellbird, polite and demure ; Jakebird, who cannot make eye contact and Landenbird, who doesn't pay attention to shit.

This tragedy is what lies behind my beloved French door refrigerator. I cringe. I am also well aware that once my children become preteens, I will need another fridge outside because this one will not hold all the food they will require.

Because we have not perfected how to keep Murphy off the second floor, and because he loves the high-fat, high-calorie cat food diet, we have to keep Lily's dishes elevated. This is why they are on the table at the foot of the bed in the guest room. You're looking at a very unfinished room.

It was 5 PM when this picture was taken. Jake is doing a little journaling in his bed. Voluntarily. He was not being punished.

Optimus Prime lives here.

This is our grown-up king size bed. It's also my #1 favorite thing in my house to look at. I took this picture right after Corey and I hung these mirrors. There is no direct natural light coming in to this room. It has sliding glass doors out to the sunroom. To illuminate the room more, we hung these big mirrors. Corey said "Man, f*ck this!" no fewer than eight times trying to hang these mirrors.

Enjoy the peek, although it will never compare to the joy we feel in living here. Oprah says that your house is supposed to come up to greet you. Our house gives me the dough-boy "ee-hee" when I drive up or walk through it. 

.....

Ten things I need to do before we move into our house. On Saturday.

There are seven-times-ten things I need to do for the house and would like to do before we move in, but I believe in setting reasonable goals for myself.

1. None of the windows in our house have screens. Buying screens is not on my list of things do to any time soon. I'm all about screens and open windows. For the three pleasant weather days we have in Louisiana in a year, I do not feel the need to invest in screens where there currently are none, when I had to sacrifice things that were really important to me. One of the few requests Corey made was about the refrigerator. He had specific qualifications for that. In order to give him what he asked for, I had to use what I had budgeted for another very important appliance. I've always dreamed the day when I would not have a microwave sitting on a counter, but would have one installed above the stove or hidden in a cabinet. This house has room above the stove for an over-the-range microwave, but I postponed that for a French door refrigerator. I'm not worrying about screens until I get my damn microwave off the counter. BUT, Jake and Landen are very enthusiastic about windows they can lock and unlock and climb in and out of. This includes the window on their second-floor bedroom that opens onto the roof. So, before I put children in this house, I have to get additional security gadgets to keep those windows closed. I know what they are. I just can't think of the name. I have to put them on eight windows.
2. I have to paint a section of our bedroom wall where the contractor patched but did not paint because the owner (me) did not get him the paint in time and took it upon herself to paint that section of the wall. One of the owners (me) has never painted a wall in her life. The other owner probably has painted a wall before but we can't ask him right now because he traveled 48 hours to get here today and he's asleep on the couch right now. It's 4:25 AM Baghdad (and his body) time, but he said he would feel bad going to bed.
3. My mother has a thing about bleaching toilets and bathtubs. I've never really considered the importance of this, but I know it must be something you're supposed to do, else my mother would not insist on it being done in every apartment I've ever moved in to. She won't be here to bleach my bathtubs, which means I'm going to have to do it myself, before anyone can bathe in the new house.
4. I have to clean my floors. I have selectively cleaned them already. Only the sections I needed to clean before I put rugs down. So I need to clean the hardwood floors (especially the corners), scrub the tile and vacuum the bedrooms and the stairs.
5. I need to move my clothes. And my art. And my KitchenAid mixer. These are things I do not want/trust my professional moving company to move for me.
6. The lawn needs to be mowed. Please note that I did not begin this one with "I need to" because I have no intention of doing this myself.
7. I need to put locks on the attic doors. Homeboys are DYING to go fuss around in hidden places like attics. We either need doorlocks that need keys to open, padlocks or chain locks way out of the boys' reach.
8. Which is incidentally what we're going to put on the front and back doors. I'm not convinced that miniature Allbrittons who share 50% of their dad's genetic makeup will never let themselves outside without our knowledge.
9. I need to get the water put in our name. They're not going to deliver the bills that have my name on it, and eventually the water people are going to notice that the water at our address is not being paid for. Then they're going to cut that shit off. I know because I used to forget to pay my water bill all the time in college. And when they do decide to not let you have water any more, they shut that shit down on a FRIDAY, so you have to be dirty all weekend. They punish at the water company.
10. Oh yeah, and I need to finish packing this apartment.

Corey gets a reprieve from some of this stuff, because it took him 48 hours to get home to us, because his body clock is eight hours ahead of me and because I've refused to get up at 6 AM to get the boys up, ready and a half-hour down the road to school for the entire 15 days he's home. Also, because when the movers show up at our apartment at 9 AM on Saturday to move our shit, I'll conveniently disappear and leave him here to supervise the entire thing by himself.

I'll be at the new house completing items 1-9.  The move is predicated on our completing Item 10 before Saturday at 9 AM.

A quick note to say how completely different I feel tonight, September 8 at 8:49 PM, than I did last night at 8:49 PM. The boys are upstairs asleep. Everything is laid out and ready for tomorrow morning. I am in my nightgown watching today's DVRed Oprah rerun, fiddling around on the computer. Murphy is resting on the floor. Lily is chilling in the window. The difference is that my long lost husband is snoring on the couch beside me.

(Speaking of Oprah, I may die with an incomplete life if I never meet Cher. You can say "ha!" all you want, but I did sit fourth row center at a Barbra Streisand concert and meet her backstage. Cher, Bette and Barbra is a playlist on my iTunes.)

And somebody, the dog or the husband, is making unpleasant noises with his hiney.

Everything your husband does is precious when you haven't seen him for four months and seven days.

You know that nothing as major as moving into our first home is going to go down without at least one incident of jackassery. Plus, I will fall down or break something.
.....

Here you come again....

I can't believe it's been a f*#%ing month since I posted anything on here. I have no idea what I've been doing.

I bought a house.

I started a new job.

The boys went back to school.

Corey stayed in Iraq.

I am packing.

I am reminded that my exercise bike I was so proud to purchase sits lonelily (it's a song) upstairs, abandoned long before this blog was. I don't have time for everything.

As I write this, Corey Daniel is in transit, on his way home for fifteen days with us. The fifteen days begins when he lands here, not when he left Iraq. I have no idea when he will be here. I spoke to him Sunday at 10:30 AM, and not since then. He was supposed to leave Iraq around 8 AM our time Monday, and as far as I know, that happened. He would try to call when he got to Kuwait, but he wasn't able to do that last time. He'll definitely call when he gets to the stop after Kuwait, and let me know when he needs to be greeted at the Baton Rouge airport.

Jake and Landen have been having some trouble at school - they're not focusing, not performing as high as they typically do and having moments of uncooperativeness. Their school is great and their teachers are putting in extra effort to get them over this hump. Parent-teacher conferences have already been scheduled with their dad. I think school starting back made them nostalgic for their mom and they've been without a parent for waaaay too long.

I'm a little nervous about R&R. The boys and I have been alone in our house for four months. I've established an independent relationship with each of them. We have a way that we operate in our little family of three with me as head of the house. It's going to be interesting to see whether we all fall back into our former roles when Corey is here or he feels left out. We've had to make lots of adjustments to our schedule, our rules, what we expect of each other....the boys have gotten more independent as individuals.

They pick out their own clothes. They get themselves into and out of the shower and are on autopilot for everything in between. They learned to swim. They no longer use booster seats in the car. They drink milk or juice before they brush their teeth and get in bed. They tell me they hate me. They beat their heads into walls. They like girls. They love the Jonas brothers. They want to be Harry Potter but they used to want to be Jedi.

I have always had a great relationship with the boys. Then their dad deployed and their mom went to heaven and for right now they are mine and we have gotten attached.

When soldiers come home for good, there is a big emphasis placed on reintegrating into the family. They don't do that for R&R and very damn little about the Allbritton household is what it was when he left here after the funeral in April. What if, once the fog of excitement to be back together lifts, we are strangers to him, and him to us?

Anxious with. Anxious without. FML.

I'm sure none of this will matter when we see each other...when the boys get to hug their daddy, their remaining true parent, for the first time in more than four months. And I get to hold my husband and know he's safe and present for us.

Right now he's out there floating around the planet, trying to get home to us.

Don't hold me to taking pictures.

....