Stick a Steak Knife in It, It's Done.

Well, the actual move went really well. We packed up various cars with boxes and small things before the truck arrived. Once the truck arrived the guys moved pretty quickly and the living room and kitchen were gone. The next trip saw the basement including the behemoth toy cupboard go and finally the bedrooms came over. We were done with the moving truck by 3pm and we dismissed Lyle, Jeff, Arn, and Steph. The rest of us (Jeannette, Gretchen, Gordon, Megan, mom, and I) kept working and we made a few more trips to the old house. Jeannette left a little while later. We got the TVs and the computer hooked up but we had no cable and no phone line, so we were pretty much dead in the water. We were all exhausted and after a quick trip to Cici's we turned in early. I decided to sleep on mom's brand new queen size elevated Aero bed in the basement and problem started right away.

First it blew up funny; there seemed to be a large bump on the bottom running down the middle of the bed which caused it to rock back a forth. I perched myself directly in the middle and tried to sleep. It was then that I realized that I was freezing cold. I only had one blanket on, but I would have to get out from under that one blanket in order to get more. I decided on a different path; I crawled into bed with mom. When I reported to her how uncomfortable the bed was she decided to return it to QVC and I went down to deflate it. I hit the "quick release" button and got a satisfactory woosh of air and went off to do something else. When I came back a little while later half of the bed (the top half) was still inflated. So I laid on it and rolled it, but nothing seemed to be happening. Gordon came over to help and we got a little bit of air out but not nearly enough. We worked on that damn bed for hours with Megan, Gordon, and I pulling off all manor of contortions trying to release the air from the damn bed. We tried to call the help number left by Aero in the box and were told "Due to high volume your call may be delayed up 10 minutes or more; at that time we will disconnect the call." I was on my cell, since mom did not have phone service yet, so I disconnected the call myself and went back to the bed. We tried customer service at QVC but were unable to get to a person to explain our dilema. We were able to get on-line (another long story) and I went to the QVC site and started a live chat with a "real" person. I explained our problem and she said to try to loosen the valve. I did not know what that means so I explained that the valve was fully open but no air was coming out. She said that once we deflated the bed we could certainly return it. I retorted "short of sticking it with a steak knife, we would not be able to get it back into the box." She said "that may be what you need to do." That was all I needed to hear, we went back down to the basement, cut a hole in the damn thing and still spent another half hour trying to fold it into a bundle small enough to fit in our biggest box. I did a screen shot of the "live chat" so that I would have a record of someone telling me that it was OK to kill the beast.

We have had many more adventures today from the cable company ("we can't drill holes and connect TVs mam") to the phone company ("well, you are scheduled for today so it should be done by Thursday"). We lost the hardware to all of the hanging stuff in mom's kitchen (you know how she loves her mushroom drawer) but then we found it again. I drilled about 16 holes for two screws but the damn drawer is up. We returned a giant cabinet and a small TV. We bought lumber and drawer organizers. We got almost everything unpacked on the first floor (leaving only the basement) and it really looks like a home. Mom is very happy (when she isn't terribly frustrated) and the house is wonderful.

Movin' On Out

I got a lot done in the last few days at mom's. I have almost everything out of the basement; everything that is left will have to go on the truck. It took a long time to clean out the filing cabinet because we wanted to go through and read so many things. I took her copies of all the letters I used to send (the blog before the blog) and hopefully I will be able to scan them in and post them here sometime so that we can all have a blast from the past. I also cleaned out her computer desk and only left her the bare essentials. I tried to pack up the kitchen but I met with some resistance (I am going to need that), so that may have to be done on the 24th and 25th. Her new cabinets are up and they look great. Gretchen and I put in shelf liner on Thursday night so whenever the dishes come over they will have a place to live. There will have to be some tough decisions made since she has far fewer cupboards in the new place.

Mom also had two people come to look at the old place. The first woman came on Thursday night and did not seem impressed. But the guy that came today was great. He was maybe mid-50s and seemed unconcerned with any of the problem areas (I removed the changing table and there are big holes in the wall below the window now). He just said "I'm a pretty handy guy" and left it at that. He is the guy we are rooting for.

Pocket Mush

Here is the recipe for pocket mush:

Two weeks before you need the pocket mush buy a bag of McDonald's cookies, give two cookies to a small boy (preferably cute) and put the bag your coat pocket.

A week later try to retrieve two more cookies for the small boy and rip the bag to shreds.

A few days later decide that the bag is history and just dump the cookies into your pocket. This will make dispensing one or two to the small boy easier.

A few days later brush six inches of snow off the car. In a few hours your pocket mush will be ready. You may discover it when you pull your glove out of your pocket and find that it is now covered in pocket mush.

You can clean your pocket as much as you want, but I caution, do not, I repeat DO NOT, put your very expensive digital camera in that pocket ever again, because the next time you brush snow off your car, remnant pocket mush will re-activate filling every little nook and cranny of the camera. Not that I would know that from personal experience or anything.

I better get a toothpick out of the fridge.

Race

I know I am a little late with this, but I am so glad those sisters are gone. Sisters should not be that mean to each other. It is fine to make comments in fun (or occasionally in anger), but they were not having fun; not one little bit. At least they were honest about it in the end "We though it would bring us closer; it didn't."

I have to remember to set up for Survivor on Sunday.

Here are a couple of links to a blog that had me laughing my head off at 6am yesterday morning. It is a good thing there was nobody else in the office.

http://www.shotgundaddy.com/2005/11/ive_got_a_secre.html

http://www.shotgundaddy.com/2005/12/santas_watching.html

Moving the Mommy

We got some stuff moved this weekend at mom's, but not everything. She needs boxes, Gretch. All of the ones in the basement are very shallow. They will be good for things like individual drawers in the kitchen, but she will need more deep boxes for real stuff.

Since we had Jackson we had a limited moving schedule. On Friday night I packed up her TV stand. I wish we had time to watch all of the videos that I packed, but it was already late. We did watch one with a one-year-old Megan taking a bath; what a cute little naked baby she was. I left a giant basket full of pictures that mom is sending to Gretchen's. I also packed up the table next to the couch and some of the front closet. On Saturday morning we were able to move these boxes and the linen boxes that Stephie helped pack up over to the new house. I unpacked the linen boxes and took them back over to pack again.

When Jackson went down for his nap I headed to the basement and packed up the toy cupboard and the bookcase. We found more things from grandpa's house (grandma and grandpa's immigration papers and passports) and more decks of cards than you could (or should) shake a stick at. When Jackson woke up from his nap we headed back over and these boxes are just stacked in the basement at the new place. Have I mentioned that the new basement is huge. It is shocking after being used to the old basement. My basement is big, but it is divided up into rooms, while this one is wide open.

After the little guy went to bed mom and I started on her closet. We emptied all of the cubbies in the shoe rack (there is a large bag for Goodwill in her room that will need to be handled) and then started on the top shelf or mostly receipts and liquor. Some of the liquor looked older than me and all but two of the bottle had never been opened. Unfortunately, one of the open bottles leaked and that box had to be unpacked and repacked when I got downstairs. Sunday morning we moved all of these boxes over to the new place and I was able to unpack all but the shoes and send the empty boxes home with mom.

Jackson was starting to protest getting in and out of the car so much, so we just hung out at the new house until it was time for us to head home. I had his new snowpants with me and we decided to let him out back to "play" in the snow. After a few misses getting him into the pants, he was packed up and I dropped him out the patio door to "play." He stood there for a very long time, not moving and then proceeded to eat his own weight in snow. Luckily, he is pretty light.
"Do you want to come in?"
"Yes." Pull him in (there is no step right now, but we are working on that).
"I wan out"
"You just came in"
"I wan out" Drop him back out.
Knocking on the window.
"Do you want to come in?"
"Yes." Pull him in.
"I wan out"
"How about a cereal bar?"
"Yeah!"

Things that I would have packed if I had had more time (and more boxes): the filing cabinet and steel shelves in the basement; the desk in mom's room; some of her dresser drawers (sheets, etc.); the cupboards in both bathrooms. Some small things like pillows and footstools in the basement can be moved over in advance too. Anything that will give us less to move on the 26th would be good.

I am so excited. This is a good move and we are going to love the new house. My plans (in my own head) are to head to mom's on the 22nd (after Jackson's two-year tune up). I plan to fill Gretchen's room with balloons for him on the 23rd and have a small celebration for his birthday, maybe inviting Mrs. and Anna, etc. We will probably do grandma's on the 24th and the Zynda's on the 25th. I will then leave him with Mrs. for a few days while we do the heavy lifting.

Damn this post got long, it is a good thing I got to work at 6am.

We are Cheap, but We are Fun

I remember an acquaintance of mine (many, many years ago) talking about going to Vegas with her grandmother. She was absolutely apalled that the grandmother wanted to play nickel slots. I was thinking "mmmmmm, nickel slots." We used to play one nickel at a time and have so much fun it should have been illegal. Then the video slot games came in and we started putting in $5 at a time and playing 9-lines (1 nickel each) that was hard at first but we got used to it and were very happy. Well, now they have penny slots and we are in heaven. We can play twenty lines on a penny machine without having heart palpatations. At the casinos in Gary there were about 10 penny slots and they were almost always full. At Kewadin (the Soo) there were lots of penny machines, and in a pinch we would play the 2 cent machine. (Did you know that they have taken the cent sign off of the standard keyboard? That was the first time I have looked for it in twenty years.)

As mom mentioned in her comment below we got back on the road Friday morning and we were in St. Ignace by noon. I have memories and an x-rated machine called MIB (something that they use in that movie looks just like a dildo and it was a bonus). Mom and I never even made it into the back room before we were ready to go. We got to the Soo by 2:30 and were in our room by 3pm. We snacked and rested and were out by 3:30pm (we will not see this room again before 3am). I hit a little bit on King of the Grill, just enough to keep me going and we ran into Gretchen and Gordon every once and a while to keep in tough. We decided to meet for dinner at around 8pm. We had the best chicken fingers in the state at our favorite deli and then headed back into the casino. We lucked out (or not) and found four "gold coin" machines together. The gold coins are promotional machines that take the special tokens that you get free for staying at the hotel. You play with the tokens but your winnings come out in quarters. So we all sat down and played. Now, in case you don't know, not only do we play cheap machines but we also play very, very slowly. Usually we are only in twos but at this point we were in fours so we watched Gordon spin his reels, then Gretchen, then Mom, then me. It was getting crowded and a group from the hotel was just showing up with their gold coins; they started to hover. Mom had a particularly obnoxious hoverer who kept asking her if she was done yet. We were not hitting anything so we decided just to play one of our three rolls of gold coins. Mom was tempted to play them all (very slowly) just to annoy her hoverer.

We headed back into the main casino but, of course, it was now Friday night and crowded. I hate Friday and Saturday nights at the casino; I don't want to have to fight for a good machine, or feel like have to stay where I am because I won't find another. So we decided to let Gretchen drive us up to Bay Mills (a smaller, usually less crowded casino). There was no parking at Bay Mills so we headed over to the next casino, King's Club. King's Club is smaller, but since it closes at midnight it was much less crowded. We spent about three hours here and only played three machines. I played an Alien machine that was hitting really good; I had to turn away any time I hit anything because the symbols were really gross alien things that throbbed and moved. We moved on as a group and played four machines together; I was at a machine called "Scarfish" and I was not hitting anything. It was making everyone laugh that I could not get one credit on my machine when I got my bonus for about 1500. This went on for a while, with me only getting bonuses and I ended up taking $24 out of the machine. We ended up at some traditional nickel slot until they kicked us out.

We headed back to Bay Mills and went in the back door. Gordon had some coupons for drinks and dinner (oh yeah, happy birthday Gordon) and he knew there was a place to use them in the back of the building. Well, it turned out that there were penny Monopoly machines in that back room (that's right Adrienne, penny Monopoly!!) and they were all empty. We played and I think Gordon or Gretchen hit, but not too much. We ate Gordon's dinner, played a little more and headed back to the Soo. It should be mentioned here that we laughed. We laughed in the car, we laughed in the casinos, we laughed at dinner. Our stomachs hurt from laughing so much. I can't point to anything that made us laugh (I am sure it was unbearably stupid) but we laughed and caused quite a commotion wherever we went.

Back at the Soo (2:30am) we decided to try to play the rest of our gold coins. It was a great decision because all of the machines were empty so we could play whatever we wanted and we started hitting. We ended up splitting (oh yeah, we always split the promotional stuff) about $40 from those machines. Not a bad haul. After that we needed ice cream and then it was up to bed. I was tired down to my very bones and I hadn't even gone to Bay City 24 hours earlier like Gretchen had. So we all slept the sleep of the dead and if anybody snored we did hear it.

At one point in the evening I was down to my last $5, by the end of the night I was up about $15 (from my starting point). I think I came home about $40 down. We played at the Soo on Saturday and then headed down to St. Ignace. We toyed with the idea of heading over to Petosky, but cooler heads prevailed and we had lunch (on the casino) instead. A few more games and then it was time to go. It was a great trip and we had so much fun I am surprised we survived. I can't wait to do it again.

I Just Crawled in...

And boy are my knees sore. Mom and I crawled all the way to Westbranch on Wednesday. 69 was really bad and I never got about 40mph. But we got here withoug incident.

This morning we were all up at about 8am in order to head up to the Soo. We got on the freeway at around 9am and by 10am we had gone 20 miles and I was ready to cry. I am a very good snow driver and I was hanging on by a thread. We could not keep the windshield clear and the very small path in front of us disappeared regularly so it was impossible to tell if we were staying on the road. Everytime someone passed us we were thrown into absolute zero visibility; I would go so far as to call it negative visibility. None of the exit ramps were passable to getting off the freeway was not even an option. At exit 237 (we started at 212) I finally had to pull over to clear my windshield. I was terrified of sliding off the embankment so I pull over very slightly and stopped. Little did I know that there was about 15 cars that had not passed me and everyone of them came to a complete stop. I ignored that fact and got out to clean the windshield and de-ice the wipers. Unfortunatly, when I got back in the car had stalled and would not start. Aaaargh!

So we called 911 and were told that a wrecker would be on the way. That was 10am. We waited for about hour in a freezing cold car (we only had 9 degrees) for the wrecker to show up. Finally, a cruiser arrived and sat behind us to make sure we were seen by oncoming traffic and then and hour later the wrecker showed up. He towed us into Roscommon and dropped us off at the local McDonalds. Unfortunately, it was Thanksgiving and the McDs was closed. Fortunately, the McD was attached to an open gas station. Gretchen had been calling her friends in town and Jeremy agreed to come out and get us. But he had to drive through the same snow we did. He showed up about an hour later and we headed over to the car dealership where the wrecker dropped the car. While we were unloading mom's trunk into Jeremy's trunk I tried the car and it started. After discussions about driving back in an unreliable car, and waiting for the frozen condensation on the inside of the car to thaw we decided to go ahead and leave the car there.

We were all back at Gretchen's safe and sound at around 2pm. A long interesting day. We just finished our cobbled together Thanksgiving dinner which was delicious and we are planning to try the drive again tomorrow morning. We will have to get at least as far as Roscommon to get mom's car. Wish us luck both in getting there and in our gambling.

TV

I am not getting into Desparate Housewives this season. I am sick of Susan, I am sick of Bree being so stupid (I really hate it when they make a smart woman act so stupid), I did like the kidnapping of the boys, but other than that I think I will drop it from my line up. Maybe I could talk them into switching with Grey's Anatomy. I really like that one and if it was on in the 9pm slot I could watch it easily, but right now I have to tape it, or stay up way past my bedtime like I did last night.

We are expecting snow tonight and for the rest of the week. I talked mom into starting her drive early so that she could be here around noon. That way Lyle could leave for his classes after putting Jackson down for his nap. I will probably take off from here around the time that Jackson should be waking up and hopefully be able to take the rest of the day off.

Scenes from a Mall

Well, I decided that if the rest of you can post to a blog without Jackson as material I should do it too. I do have a life outside of Jackson and things that I think about posting, but then Jackson does something cute and it all going out the window. Ironically I had to name this blog "jkzynda" because I had already named the other one "ezynda." Such is the chaos of my life.

Speaking of chaos, I went to the mall yesterday. Jackson needed new shoes and new sleeper and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, Target and other discount department stores only sell "spiderman" or the equivalent in all things child related. [I realize this is going to overlap a lot with Jackson's site, but since he is 98% of my world right now that is inevitable.] So, I hit up Penney's and find nothing, I head over to Payless and hit pay dirt, two pairs of great shoes for half off. On the way back I notice something called "Child's Place" so I run in and they have the perfect sleepers in size 24months (no one carries 24 months; it is either 18 months or 2T). Anyway, back to my life, the mall was insane. You would have thought it was the day after Thanksgiving instead of the Saturday before; it was just that packed. The Disney Store was packed, the toy store was packed, and all 6 picture places were jammed with precocious children in the Christmas finest and their anxious parents. I felt sorry for the workers hanging out just inside GNC and the piano store since they had absolutely no one in the store. I did not feel sorry enough that I would actually go in and pretend to be interested in what they were selling, but it did seem unfair.

This is going to be a crazy week. Mom is coming down tomorrow (yay!) and making me rice soup (double yay and nanny nanny). We will have our regular playdate with Sammy on Tuesday; hopefully here so that I can use the time packing everything up that I need to bring with me on Wednesday. On Wednesday, as soon as we wake up Jackson, Mom, and I will head over to Brighton to drop Jackson and six tons of stuff off with Lyle's mom. Once Jackson is settled Mom and I will slip out and drive up to Gretchen's. On Thursday morning Gretchen, Gordon, Mom, and I will drive up to the Soo to gamble. Depending on our moods and how much I am missing Jackson we will either stay one night or two and then head back down to G's for the night. The next day (am I on Saturday or Sunday) Mom and I will drive back down to Indiana. Meanwhile on the Zynda side, Lyle plans to call his mom on Thursday to see how she did with Jackson the night before. If she is doing fine she will keep him for a few more days (her choice) if not, he will drive up to Brighton for dinner on Thursday and bring Jackson home on Friday. If he is still in Indiana he will join J&R for dinner on Thursday.

Well, my Christmas clock (the extent of my decorating so far) just went off which means I only have about an hour or so left until Jackson wakes up from his nap. So, if I want to nap I better get to it. I will do a quick post on Amazon and link this to mom's site soon.