Loooong weekend

It started Friday night. I started dinner (roast beef with carrots, potatoes, and onions in gravy) and Jess went to go pick up Jeff at the train station. Jeff came out to help us pack, throw away, and move stuff all weekend. It's good that we had him to rely on: we worked all day Saturday and most of Sunday and we aren't even close to moving yet. But with his help, we managed to throw out 12 contractor bags of trash and get a lot of items shuttled over to the new house. Dinner was fantastic (if I do say so myself) and cooked in the new oven, finished in about an hour, where it would normally take over two-and-a-half hours. That I just love.

Most of the day Saturday, we worked on throwing stuff out at the old house. It's a pain in the ass to move, but one needs to go through one's stuff about every five years to inventory. For us, it's been more than six years. The last time we moved, we swore we wouldn't do it again for as long as we could possibly avoid it. Well, it's time, and it doesn't seem that long ago that we did this before.

One of the things I attempted to do (and it shouldn't have taken long) is to install some rollout shelves in the overhead cabinetry where there aren't any. I'm handy about the house for such small projects and having installed this type of thing before, I anticipated that six of them would take me not more than an hour and a half. The first took over an hour. That should have been a clue. Usually, when you're dealing with screws, it's best to drill a pilot hole so that you don't chew up the wood around the hole or worse, split the wood. The trick was getting a drill into the tight cabinetry. We didn't have a drill that was small enough, so I decided I would drive a nail into the wood for my pilot hole. The hammer was too large, the nail too long, the wood too hard (well, actually, that's a good thing) and my patience too short. It took forever to create four holes for the screws to go into. And I still had three more to go. I was not happy. So Jess had a brilliant idea...go get the Dremel from the other house; he seemed to recall it had a drill bit accessory, which it did. If only the Dremel wasn't such a plastic-y and cheap metal piece of shit, it might have worked. But in the first ten seconds of drilling (and this wasn't heavy duty drilling, mind you) an important part of the assembly broke off. So we went to another plan. There was another attachment that would work, so we tried that...and promptly broke that, too. Shit.

I spent another three hours completing the remaining three shelves. It was ridiculous, but at least I got them installed. It was one of those "I'm going to get this done if it kills me" kind of projects because it should have been so damned easy and it totally was not.

Going through the big pile of crap we have in the basement was a challenge too. That's where most of the contractor bags we threw out came from. Much of the stuff had gone down there during our move to this house, and some had gone down over the course of living here. We went through most of it, sorting out the stuff we wanted to keep and piling up the stuff we wanted to throw away. Let's just say that the throwaway pile exceeded the "keep-it" pile by about 25:1. And there is still plenty of stuff left to throw out.

Saturday night, we fired up the Trivection again for yet another meal. I stuffed and roasted a chicken in the upper oven with potatoes, french green beans, carrots, and onions, with an extra plate of stuffing cooking in the lower oven. It was pretty good, though I would have liked to have an extra hour to brine the chicken before cooking it - that would have made it really fantastic. We finished and went back into the kitchen so that I could fix dessert - Oreos crushed into ice cream, ala Cold Stone Creamery. It was delicious. For details of the dinner, click here.

I'm taking vacation Thursday and Friday to get more done and hopefully will be completing most of the move Saturday and Sunday.

If you're coming to the gay bloggers event in NYC May 6-8: on Saturday, May 7, we will be having a barbecue/housewarming at our new home. It will start around 2pm. We're on Long Island but not far from the city: it's about 35 minutes by train, and we'll pick people up at the station. If you'll be in town, RSVP here.