Thursday, September 11, 2008

New house news

(As promised to 2ndSoprano, this meandering post contains new house pictures.)

Last Saturday night, we visited our new neighbors. They were having people over for a birthday party for their three year old. Yes, these are the same neighbors from whom we'd been anonymously (I hope) siphoning bandwidth. I was so locked into meeting new people, I missed the opportunity to fess up and request forgiveness for tapping permission to tap into their network.

The Comcast guy was scheduled to come hook us up (literally, and, I guess, figuratively as well), on Monday. Sunday evening, after an unsuccessful attempt to cheaply furnish the new house with undervalued treasures from the Kane County Flea Market, I tried to connect again. The network, which had been unsecured for days, was suddenly encrypted. Yikes! We've been detected! There went our last link to the outside world!

(We didn't even know anything about the Bears beating Indianapolis until the next morning.)

This may seem like nothing, but I feel awful about it. We should have gone straight over on day one and asked for permission to connect to their network when we first found it. Anyway, the Comcast guy showed up as promised, and as of Monday afternoon, we are on our own bandwidth. Most of us thought we were missing TV when we lacked it, but now that we have it, we're not watching so much. Not so with Ro', who has resumed ordering us to play her favorite On Demand shows.


"Daddy, come put on Barney!" Is age 2 too early to teach her how a remote works?

Once we closed on the house last week, there were some loose ends to get taken care of. Things that weren't part of the house as delivered by our builder. Minor items, really, like landscaping*, window treatments, furniture, well water treatment, and downspout extensions.

(For some reason, my snarky sarcastic icon is failing me... imagine, if you will, that it worked, and that I placed it here.)

* - Seriously, the yard is so overgrown, the world's largest kindergartner disappears in the weeds when he goes out back chasing butterflies.





Early on, back in the pencil-to-paper stage of our house design process, I had advocated a prairie style design. We eventually eschewed (love that word) most prairie-style influences, in favor of a less horizontal, less formal, more generalized Craftsman-style house. Of course there is some overlap in these styles, and the preponderance of right angles in the house, inside and out, is a testament to this.


Prairie style in some respects... notice how clearly you can see our property line?

As a consolation prize for giving up a prairie-style design, the house came, instead, with a prairie-style yard. Which now needs to be dug up, and replace with copious amounts of grass seed.


Looking out to the back yard.

This process ain't cheap, and will eventually set us back thousands of dollars. Oh, and same could be said for those other items I mentioned a moment ago. They cost money, too. Mucho dinero. Y ya no tenemos much dinero.

Where am I going with this? Good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a really good place for a piano in the dining room.


Yup, right on that wall.

The bad news is that we've spent our piano money, such as it was, on other quite necessary things. So although I miss piano terribly, and though I think Jill and Jay miss it (we haven't talked about it, actually), and although I was sure I'd be playing Nefeli by now, truth is, it could be quite some time before Jillian, Jason, and I can restart our piano adventure.

Nefeli - Ludovico Einaudi

Nevertheless, I'll keep coming back here, and urge you to do the same. There's more to life than piano, after all. I do promise to let y'all at the Pianoworld and Einaudi forums know when we turn our attention back to piano-related material.

In the meantime, say hello to Baby Joey, almost six weeks old now.

2 comments:

AnthonyB said...

Well, I think I might know someone who will keep scouring craigslist for a while to find a relative of Old Bessie.

I hope that yard has a better future in store as well. I must admit that portions of the field/garden tend to look like that at this time of year due to my laziness. It's a good thing sunflowers don't really care all that much being so tall.

Anonymous said...

Very nice house! Thank you for the pictures. Sorry I didn't see them when you posted, but we were out of town for the weekend.

I don't know- I kind of like the wildflower, overgrown look. Grass is so overrated- it just needs mowing all the time! If I had the money, I'd plow ours up and put in--- astroturf???? LOL