Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the major ultrasound day for the new baby.  So Dominica and Liesl will be coming down to Irving early this afternoon for that and I will be meeting them there.

I got up very early this morning for an early rates release call and, it turned out, that since they made us start taking our SafeWords to work again as of yesterday that, of course being out of habit, I left mine there and didn’t have it so that I could log in remotely this morning.  Argh.

I worked from the office this morning and then, during lunch, met Dominica and Liesl at the doctor’s office.  The ultrasound went well.  The baby is doing well and looks good.  We got to see his or her little face for the first time and managed to avoid finding out what sex he or she will be.  We didn’t find out with Liesl and we are attempting to not find out this time.  So far so good.

The ultrasound went quickly but then Dominica had a normal appointment immediately following it as well.  So to keep Liesl happy I took her out to the lobby and let her play with the foam blocks and the other little girl who was waiting there with her mommy.  Liesl had a lot of fun playing and we probably got thirty or forty minutes out there.

I just grabbed a sandwich on my way back to work and ate at the office.  Dominica and Liesl went and did some grocery shopping before heading for the house.

I worked until almost six then ran over to the apartment to pick up the air mattress that is needed at the house for the weekend and then jumped into rush hour on the George Bush so that I could sit in stopped traffic for almost an hour.  Ugh. I need to remember to take my iPod with me when commuting because I could get through a book from Audible in no time.  Otherwise I am bored out of my mind listening to the radio.

Tonight is our very first time cooking food in our new house!  Veggie sausage and peppers.  Dominica made that and we ate while we watching a little of Harry Potter: The Half Blood Prince on BD in our bedroom.  Once we were done eating we got right to work on getting the house ready.  Our first house guests, the Grices, arrive tomorrow night and there is so much to be done before then.

Our main focus, since Dominica worked on the kitchen much of the afternoon, was on our bedroom which is, by far, the biggest disaster in the house.  There is just tons and tons to do there.

The closets seem to be drying out decently well.  We are hopeful that they can be salvaged and that we are not going to have to do any sort of major mold remediation right now.  If we can just get through until we have the money (and time to plan) to do a renovation of the master suite then we will be able to rip out those walls and floors completely and start over with everything new right down to the studs – and perhaps aluminum studs to even further mitigate mold risk.

I went into the office this morning.  I had to drive back up to Carrollton at lunch so that I could stay home with Liesl while Dominica took Oreo to his vet appointment.  His new vet is really close to our new house which is great.  Only about five minutes away.

Oreo did very well at his checkup.  The vet was very pleased with his progress and his itching has mostly gone away.  He is into a “normal dog” category for itching.  He is still very cold much of the time, that is a big deal still.  But otherwise he is doing much better.

The vet snipped some of his warts.  Dominica and the vet joked about what a warty dog Oreo is.  Must be something in his body chemistry.  He has always had several pencil warts.  Dominica asked about Oreo’s horrendous stomach skin tag.  The vet said that she could just snip it off – and so she did.  Oreo was a very brave little boy who didn’t make a peep.  Such a good dog.  She cut it off and sewed him up and bandaged him.  No issues at all.

On the way home Dominica stopped at McDonald’s to pick up lunch as I have been missing lunch the last few days and if she didn’t pick something up quickly I would miss it today as well.

I ate and ran back to the office to work for the afternoon.  I worked until quite late, around seven.  Liesl was still asleep so I was not concerned about getting home quickly.  At seven I went over to the apartment to get the last of the stuff.  The gang was all up at La Cima but we really couldn’t make it out today, far too much needs to be done.

I managed to get the final load of stuff.  The guitar, the last server, a few odds and ends and a big pile of dress clothes like dresses and suits.  Unfortunately trying to get them all down the stairs proved to be a bit much for me and some of the clothes fell down the apartment stairs.  Ugh.

Dominica got Liesl up and showered just before I arrived home.  We drove out first to Lowe’s.  We picked up some additional LED bulbs as we totally love them now that we have tested them, one new hanging plant that will be going up shortly and the chemical that we need to treat the mold.  We also hit Walmart and then went on to Denny’s for dinner.

We tried to eat somewhere other than Denny’s but it is always so late by the time that we try to get food that nothing else is open.  Dinner was good, though.  Liesl likes it there.  It is quiet.  We are often the only people there.  And she loves the ranch dressing that they use with everything.  She likes to just dip her fingers it in and lick them off.  She also likes their mac and cheese.

After dinner we came home and installed the new lights.  We replaced the flood light in the back yard with the LED outdoor flood that we are trying out.  We went from a 150W incadescent bulb to a 16W LED that looks better and seems to illuminate more.  It is estimated to save around $350 over the life of the bulb.  Not too shabby of an investment.

We moved our bedroom to all LED too.  Four bulbs at 6.5W each.  So our entire bedroom is lit with just 26W which is great. Down from around 300W previously and it looks so much nicer too.  We are going to slowly replace everything with LED where we can and fluorescent where we cannot.

Our house is currently insanely inefficient.  Everything in it from windows to doors to appliances to lights was as bad as you could get.  The washing machine and fridge were major first steps and some of the high profile lights are getting switched.  We are seriously looking at replacing many of the windows and doors as they are all ancient and you can feel them leaking air.  Not so bad in winter but will be a major problem for us come summer when we are attempting to cool this place.  The lack of insulation in the attic is a top priority as well.

After switching the lights we put Liesl to bed and then did the mold treatment in the closets, laundry room and hit both of the “under the sink” locations that had been identified yesterday as well for good measure.  The stuff is salt based and safe around food and clothing which is awesome.  Fingers crossed that this does the trick.

I hooked up the SAM-SD (HP Proliant Dl185 G2 running OpenFiler) tonight, after a full year of it being disconnected, so that we can start getting access to all of our already converted movies and television shows again.  We have been missing that.  We didn’t get a chance to really test it out tonight but at least I can see that the server is up and working and is connected to the network and the almost two terabytes of data is all intact.  Pheww.  That thing has been moved an awful lot so we were worried.

For the moment the server is just sitting on chairs.  We were trying to figure out tonight where we are going to put it long term and were worried about how much noise that it would make in the house.  From tonight’s test of a “worst case scenario” in the garage, it is pretty quiet.  Too loud for me to work in the garage with it on but fine for people in the house.  Once we start to “finish” the garage it should be fine.  Totally silent in the house and just background noise in the garage / office.

It was after two in the morning when I finally managed to head off to bed.  I have to be up early tomorrow for a conference call just after seven.  A short night for me.

Tomorrow, during lunch, we are having the “big” ultrasound that we had to reschedule from last week.  So I will be meeting Dominica and Liesl there for that.

Oreo was doing well all evening.  His stitches don’t seem to be bothering him at all.

Today is our mold inspection.  I got up this morning and worked from home for an hour before the mold inspector arrived.  She came at nine thirty and spent a couple of hours going over the house and then sitting with us to discuss the findings.

We do, of course, have mold.  That much we knew.  No getting around that.  There was a very small amount found under both sinks, pretty par for the course I guess.  The inspector did not find mold outside of what we had already seen, though, which is really good.  There is every possibility that all that we have is what we see.

We discussed what could be done about the mold and, overall, I think that the prognosis was rather positive.  The inspector thought that we could recover our carpeting and maybe even our padding and directed us to some EPA approved mold treatment chemicals that would do a much better job than bleach and be safer as well.

Our humidity in the house is excellent for retarding mold growth so we are doing a really good job there at least.  We’ve managed to probably stop any further growth at this time.  We had a sample taken of the major growth in the laundry room so that we could find out if it is just normal mildew or if it is something bad and unhealthy.  Not that normal mold is healthy, but it isn’t toxic either.

We will get more details from the sampling on Friday or possibly Monday.

As soon as the inspection was done Dominica and Liesl went to the apartment to work on packing up the fragile items, like plates, that are still there so that we can get them all out today.  I stayed behind to do mold remediation  and wrap up work before it became lunch time so that I would have a little bit of time to help with the packing.

I pulled the carpeting out of the closets and put them in the garage to dry.  Hopefully that will eliminate most of the problems there.  Now the pads are exposed and just might have a chance to dry out a little more, as will the baseboards.

I moved the dehumidifier back from the laundry area to the closets to really get the pads dry.  I thought that I should clean its filter even though it wasn’t very dirty, just to give it all of the power that it could get.  When I took it off I discovered that the entire condenser was a frozen block of ice!  Oh boy.

I spent over an hour thawing out the condenser.  What a mess.  Probably a quart of water came out of that thing after I let it sit out and blew a air dryer on it for a while.  No wonder it wasn’t pulling as much water as I had expected that it would!  It will be far more productive now.  I waited until the dripping stopped and switched it back on.  Fingers crossed that nothing is wrong with it.

Then it was off to the apartment where I quickly loaded both the BMW and the Mazda with boxes that Dominica had prepared.  With so much going on today, no chance for lunch yet again.  Once the cars were loaded I ran to the office to work from there for the rest of the day and let Dominica go back home.

After this there is just some clothes in the front closet, my guitar and a Sun SunFire V240 server left to get which I can easily do with the Mazda tomorrow.  We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Liesl naps very late which works out with my work schedule. I rather have to work quite late now so that I do not drive home in rush hour.  In rush hour it appears to take forty five minutes to get home.  When rush hour is over it is more like fourteen minutes.  Quite a waste to try to go home early.  But if I wait until seven I can get home right as Liesl is waking up from her nap and so I don’t miss time with her and don’t waste time driving.  That is what we did tonight.

Once I got home we went out for dinner at Denny’s just up the street from home.  They have a new veggie burger there now that we like which is a big deal as recently almost all of the big, national chains have dropped their veggie burgers – all at the same time which is really weird.  How can that possibly have been losing them money?

The house is really coming along.  The PS3 is now hooked up in our bedroom to the television.  We haven’t tried using it yet but it is there just in case.  Liesl is pretty happy using the iPad to watching things when she does want to watch something.

I got up this morning and drove into the office.  I’m running pretty low on clothes so it was a struggle to find anything to wear at all.  I’m sure that Dominica is not very happy that I get to escape the house today as there is so much to do and so many issues that need to be handled that she has to take care of on her own.

The plumber called today and is coming up this afternoon.  What a relief it is to have someone come so quickly.

I was so busy today that I worked right through lunch.  There is just so much to do.

The plumber found the issue without a problem.  The drain from the laundry room didn’t connect to anything in the wall. The plumber said that to him it looked like it was pulled out from up on the roof.  So every drop coming out of the washer was going straight onto the floor inside of the wall.  Ugh.  His guess was that this was not recent and not likely from the foundation work which could not have moved the plumbing this far.

He had to cut into the wall a bit to fix the plumbing.  American Home Shield is sending someone out on Friday to patch up the drywall.  Awesome.

So now, as of this afternoon, we can finally do laundry.  A full week of owning the house to get to the point that we can safely run the washing machine.  What a long week it has been.

Dominica immediately started doing as much laundry as she could.  She is so excited to be able to do it finally.  This is going to make a major difference.

The new washing machine is a very high efficiency model which is great as it will likely pay for itself in just a year or two compared to the old model.  Okay, maybe not that quickly.  But it will pay for itself and it really wasn’t expensive anyway and there was a fifty dollar instant rebate for getting an energy efficient model.

After work I went over to the house and packed up a load for the Mazda.  Brian decided to make a run with me as well and so we also packed the TrailBlazer.  That got most everything.  We can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.  There is only so much left to do.  Originally Dominica was going to drive down tonight as well but we decided to let her keep working at the house and that we would do a load tomorrow with her coming down too – possibly in the morning instead.

While Brian was at the house he helped put the television on the television stand in our bedroom.  Now I can at least consider hooking it up soon so that we can watch things again.

More unpacking tonight and dinner ordered in again from Coconut Thai.  Dominica ordered dinner before I got home so that I just showed up and we ate.  Very easy to do that way.

Tomorrow morning is the mold inspection.  We are pretty nervous about that.  That is not covered under any home warranty so whatever disaster strikes we are paying out of pocket.

We were up pretty late tonight working on the house.  One of the few chances to stay up late since I am working from home in the morning to deal with the inspection.

It is a very busy week.  Plumber today, mold inspector tomorrow, Oreo’s vet appointment on Wednesday, the babies ultrasound on Thursday and the drywall guy coming on Friday followed by the Grice clan in the evening.

One of my photographs that I took when living in Newark has been used by a law firm there located in one of the buildings near 1180 where we used to live.  I used to walk by this building in the mornings on my way to Wall Street and they liked my picture of their building so asked if they could use it on the site.  This is a picture of the Gateway Center in downtown Newark near Penn Station.

I got up at eight thirtyish this morning.  We were awoken in a panic by a knock on the door.  We thought that the appliances were being delivered an hour earlier than expected.  It turned out to be the Salvation Army coming to pick up the dresser that they had already picked up on Wednesday.  Not sure how that confusion happened.

At nine thirty our appliances arrived.  The old washing machine got pulled out and we ran back to see what was going on behind it.  To our horror we realized that we had mold!  Just great.  Now we really have a project on our hands.

So we did a bit of mold research this morning to see what we need to do.  We also got a mold inspector called and hope that they get back to us soon.  Now this has gone from a major inconvenience into total mess.

The next big disaster occurred when they went to install the refrigerator into the kitchen.  It turns out that the kitchen cabinets are not true and the countertops are one half inch skewed – just enough to not allow the fridge to fit into the kitchen.  So we called Bennie and he is going to come up on Friday night and shave off part of the cabinets so that we can use the fridge.  So for the next week we are going to have the fridge sitting right in the middle of the kitchen.  That’s going to make getting everything put away so much more convenient.

The first thing that we did was a load of laundry.  We are still very much in a panic about the laundry.

No sooner did we do a load than there was water all over the floor again.  Well, I guess that the issue was not with the washer after all.  Now we need a plumber.

Thank heavens the house came with a warranty from American Home Shield.  We called them immediately to see how this whole home warranty thing worked and learned that it was very easy and that they would get a plumber out to the house for us for just a sixty dollar “co-pay”.  They won’t be able get someone out until tomorrow but at least we know that someone is coming and it won’t cost us a fortune.

So, another day now without being able to do laundry and the floors are wet again.  Not nearly as wet as they were, but rather wet.  Not fun.  This just keeps going and going.  We are never going to have clean clothes again.

Now that we know that we have mold and that we have plumbing issues we not only have to deal with those things but we also don’t have anyplace to put our clothes and other belongings.  The biggest rooms affected are the two master closets and without them what do we do?  They are the two largest storage spaces in the house.  Considering our main task for this week is to put things away we are in pretty rough shape.

We spent the day unpacking.  Tons of progress made today.  We are getting very depressed, however, with the house just being one disaster after another.  The mold and the plumbing are huge issues.  We have no idea if they will be nothing or if they will be massive disasters.

This evening the mold specialists called back and made an appointment to get out to see us on Tuesday morning at nine thirty.  At least we know when they are coming now and we know that it will probably be four hundred and fifty dollars.  Not cheap but it could be a lot worse.  But that is just an inspection.  No remediation.

We had a tough time getting food today.  Apparently no one delivers on Sunday.  We ended up trying several places.  Many were closed, one was “too far”, one had their only driver have a car accident.  It just went on and on.  Finally we found a place called Joe’s.  We ordered hot subs from there for lunch and then ordered pizza from there for dinner.  The subs were much better than the pizza.  We are very thankful that we found them because they deliver all day and are open later than the other places that we were trying to order from.

Tomorrow I am going to make an attempt at my first day commuting from Carrollton down to Irving.  We will see how it goes.