Transplanting a Seattleite

I brought A. to school, then walked with M. I had a nice long chat with J. Then there was a zoom with J. and E., which was about picking the door (easy) and whatever else we had questions about (ugh my bad for asking about engineering). Fingers crossed!

R. picked up A. and got her dinner and then headed off to see Bob Mould at the Bull Run in Shirley, while I drove down to the South End to have dinner at The Elephant Walk with D. and F. Fun! I’ve never had a chance to really chat with F., and even with D. we usually had an interloper except one of her previous trips to Boston. This was so much fun! And the Elephant Walk was fantastic. Good cocktails. Great food. Nicely demarcated dairy free options. I hugely appreciated all of it, including dessert and port. I did not appreciate having to figure out how to get home, but oh well. Not everything is easy. SpotHero worked out for me, finding me parking at The Smith, an apartment building with a garage, not too far from the restaurant. I arrived early and settled in at the bar. Apparently their friends the night before were somewhat spectacularly late because they had not been obsessively monitoring traffic and pre-booking their parking.

A Verizon tech showed up to deliver a new router, and relieve us of a two channel cable card in a Tivo box, and the old router. Woot!

A. went to school, and we got her there on time. Yay us!

I walked with M.

I called a whole bunch of phone numbers. When I chatted with a Verizon agent to remove our “landline” (actually a VoIP phone) and our cable, and increase our internet speed, there appeared to be no way to evade the “optional” Home Device Protect service, which you can cancel at any time. So as soon as I had the new service, I worked on getting rid of the Home Device Protect. I called. I chatted. I got nowhere. I searched on reddit. I downloaded the Verizon app and signed in. Still, nowhere. Finally, I dug into the introductory email for Home Device Protect, which had, buried in small print in a foot note, a number for changing or canceling the service. This got me a human! This human told me I had the wrong number, but she gave me the right number AND transferred me. That got me a different human, at Verizon, and he was very helpful and removed Home Device Protect.

So if they sign you up for Home Device Protect, dig around in that original email and find the number! Here is the paragraph from my email:

“Enrollment and Cancellation: Verizon Home Device Protect continues to renew each month until canceled. As a reminder, Verizon Home Device Protect is optional and you may cancel at any time without penalty and receive a prorated refund of your monthly charge. If you cancel after the first 30 days, coverage will continue for an additional 30 days after your cancellation date. If you have questions or wish to cancel your plan, call Asurion Customer Care at 844-769-1991.”

I drove to the dentist. A. was very late getting out of school, so R. and A. were quite getting to their appointment at the dentist, but it all worked out. We made more appointments, and I drove A. home and fed her dinner. I unplugged phones, and R. collected some as well, and I will list them on FB marketplace. We are also in the middle of an extended discussion of what other than a TV we should have wherever we have a TV, definitely in Future House but also where we live now. I was reminded of all the ads on smart TVs, so we’re probably going to keep Apple TV or a related device (Fire stick or Nvidia Shield I guess would be related products, but probably they don’t have a better mix of options for us).

After we got back home, I did a zoom with I., since I was not feeling up to it on Sunday. That was nice, except the zoom quality was terrible and kept freezing. So we did some investigating, and R. had to reset a bunch of the mesh to get it to work properly. It does now seem to be working properly, even in my comfy chair in my room (which inevitably is where it was absolutely the worst).

That was a very productive day! Also, I washed sheets and noticed one of the tomatoes from the farm share wasn’t looking good at all, so I took other tomatoes from the farm share and turned them into a very nice sauce, and put the remaining 3 tomatoes that looked fine and put them in the fridge. Later, I had part of one of those in a BLT, which was extremely yummy.

I had a stir fry for lunch, with peppers and leek from the stir fry.

I’m too chicken to turn the Getting Up On Your Own project over to A. on a school day, but she had a haircut today at 11:30, so I told her last night she was responsible for setting her own alarm and getting up and she completely did it. I tried to limit my reminders for getting ready to leave, and she really cut it close but we were fine. Far less negative vibe / complaining / criticizing and then feeling guilty and apologizing. Yay!

We have a CVS appointment this afternoon, so probably we are sleeping in Sunday, so I guess Monday will be our next experiment.

Obviously, a day with some history, but aside from that, I went for a walk with M. I had a video meeting about the door for the shower in the future master bathroom. I took apart lego haunted mansion, and listed some stuff. Some stuff was picked up, and more will head out the door in the next few days.

In theory, I will have my first Dutch lesson in about five years tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

T. came over and picked up his TV and the stand for it. The stand is awesome and super stable. He wants YouTube TV so I signed up for that and did the share so he could access it.

I got a decent amount of continuous sleep last night, which is really wonderful in so many ways.

I got out of the house (R. got A.’s lunch together and helped with breakfast) at 9 to get to Florence for an 11 am walk through of the various kitchens with the metal artist and with the kitchen designer. That was productive. We also had the MEPFP and OAC, and SC from HVAC was on site and is very ready to switch to a different vendor, and I am entirely in favor of. So we’ll get hot gas reheat throughout, which is wonderful.

There was an issue with one of the ducts in the main kitchen — it was not going to fit through a space it was intended to go through without some significant adjustment and as we were talking it through, SC was like, wait, why is it so big, this room isn’t that big, so it is almost certainly going to be downsized to something more reasonable AND so will whatever it is connected to. Woot!

I won’t be getting shelving at the end of the bar alley, because the beams are just going to complicate it a little too much to make it worth the effort. I’m back to thinking about a neon sign there.

I’m pretty tired, and will head off to bed soon and hopefully get another decent night’s sleep. A. and I had a long talk, and I think we’re making some headway on talking about some of her big, uncomfortable feelings, many of which are really typical of this age, and the rest of which are really typical of autism. Sometimes, ya just gotta say it out loud to let go of it.

Look, it’s a Monday in the first weeks of school, so I do recognize that this is always a little rocky. But this morning, I got up at 8:30, because I didn’t get to sleep until after 1:30 this morning. I woke A. up after I got through the laundry I forgot in the machine (weirdly did not smell, so I hung it up to dry and fingers crossed).

R. came down after that, and started making coffee, which is annoying, because the last thing I need when I’m this exhausted is someone underfoot. I saw a plate on the counter (I’d emptied the clean dishes from the dishwasher during my meltdown last night), asked, “Is this for you?” He said, “No,” so I started putting it in the dishwasher. At which point he said, “It’s for Ali’s pancake” and I completely lost it. I couldn’t start my tea, because he was using the kettle for coffee. He got up _after_ I’d already gotten up later than usual and after I’d already started waking A. up, and at no point in this whole process had he said anything about planning on taking care of the morning routine for A. I mean, obviously he meant to be helpful, and I did acknowledge that explicitly in my morning meltdown, along with, I get what you meant by saying, the plate was not for you, and also, do you understand how maddening that was. You had to have known that I wanted to know if I could put that in the dishwasher or if you were using it _which you were_. He didn’t realize he’d gotten up too late to start the whole process for A. Also, he couldn’t remember how I make the pancakes. Just all the things.

Anyway. I was very clear about the importance of Using Your Words, and if you are going to help out (thank you for helping out last night, which I did say out loud, Using My Words, because it was actually helpful that he got A. some real food to sop up some of that lake of chocolate milk she swallowed), then we should plan that the night before. Also, totally pointless, because I gave up on sleeping in in the morning and having R. get through the routine, because every single time it resulted in A. screaming and ranting and I had to get up anyway. Not Restful. And that isn’t years ago, either. That’s like, last school year. That’s how we settled into, fine, you can pick her up in afternoon routine, which is a genuine improvement over me having to do both sides of it while supposedly I’m doing the afternoon, but actually I wind up having to drive her in the morning, too.

They actually have a really good relationship. One of the reasons I’ve been pushing on the idea of me traveling alone more is because they definitely need more time to figure things out without me getting sucked in by screaming. (I want to be absolutely clear. All this is autism stuff. It’s genuinely screaming. People are genuinely distressed. This is not people being manipulative. This is people running off the end of their rope.)

R. drove her into school. She was apologetic about the previous evening. She was only about five minutes late to school, which is honestly somewhat amazing. I asked her to really work to get along with R., because he is trying to be helpful, they both made an effort. I walked with M., and ranted a bit about the whole thing, and we talked through an interesting story idea she had, which was fun.

A little side note on that. She was thinking of having one of the vampires of Shadow’s Brook consult / do work for the government on matters supernatural. Some of that would be supplying background, but some of it would involve actually dealing with threats / bad actors / wtf that involved other supes. This is obviously a common device in lots of series out there, and often it becomes a way of describing how even supernaturals can wind up suffering at the hands of malicious bureaucrats. I find that obnoxious, so I asked how she intended to deal with that issue. She didn’t have a plan — no one ever seems to — so I suggested maybe this work fell under some kind of treaty between the supes and the government, perhaps negotiated by the fae, as that would be the kind of thing they might do. She liked that idea, and then I asked about enforcement and since she’s brought up the idea of a geas to do enforcement to prevent supes with magic from using their magic after they’ve been convicted of serious enough magical crimes, I suggested perhaps any bureaucrat that is read into working with the vampire on this kind of consulting situation might have to swear and oath that connects to that kind of enforcement. It was a fun thing to think through; I’ll probably eventually use the idea myself elsewhere.

After we had a walk and visit, I had a brief conversation with D. from the builder, which was enjoyable. I then went and laid down in a dark room for about an hour, which was very helpful.

T. came over. He picked up the bag of spices I found in the pantry with his name on it. He’d forgotten them. He wanted to see the progress on the guest bedroom. Also, he wants a TV stand and his TV from his bedroom. He had an idea for one, and I thought it looked a little suss, so I did some research on other options, came up with a plausible one, ordered it. I had made fried chicken and salsa (sort of) without garlic or onion in it, so I put a piece of chicken and some salsa in a bowl for R., walked it out to where he was playing bridge on the porch and got his signoff on the plan. It should arrive on Thursday, and R. can assemble it, try the TV on it, and if all is well, he can drive it over to the dorm Friday or over the weekend and install it with T.

Things are definitely better now (I mean, fried chicken, amirite?), altho I am not caught up on sleep. I’m probably going to go continue dis-assembling lego next. Altho when I went to put the bucket away (I got it out of the tub to give to A. in case the bad judgment wrt chocolate milk led to vom) where it belonged, there was no space, so this morning I pulled out the foot cleaning appliance and set it next to the tub because it has some staining. If it can clean up well enough, I might list it on FB marketplace, so that might distract me from lego dis-assembly.

I had not updated my plan at Verizon for … a long time. I mean, other than to figure out how to return the cable box that T. decided he no longer wanted which was probably a year ago now.

I’ve had some discussions with various folks in the family about whether we could get rid of the “land line” (it’s not, it’s verizon voip) and whether we could get rid of our TV plan. Ultimately, everyone was basically unopposed. So I tried to figure it out on the verizon website, failed, and went to chat. I got rid of the phone and the TV, and have gone from 75 to 500 on the internet, and the whole thing is going to cost at least $100 less. Tech shows up in a couple weeks, and we’ll have to figure out returning the Tivo cable cards, but that’s about the extent of it.

I basically don’t watch TV (I do watch some stuff on Disney Plus occasionally). Years ago, I was still watching some NCIS shows, and TRMS and then Alex Wagner, but of course that’s all different as of this year and I had stopped watching before this year anyway. But R. and A. both wanted to know how they would watch This Old House and America’s Test Kitchen. Worst case scenario, the money I saved on Verizon goes to YouTube TV, and that’s fine. But I did want to do better than that if I could.

Step one: PBS website. You can definitely watch some This Old House there.

Step two: But if you go to the This Old House app, you can watch all of it. And cast it to your TV if your device supports that. Woot! Problem Solved!

And now: ATK, the tougher nut. Amazon Prime has some seasons. Philo may or may not have some seasons for free; I couldn’t get it to work. PBS has some of at least one season. So it seems clear that ATK vibe could be satisfied, somehow. Worst case scenario, a year of access to all of it via the ATK website is about $50. Which is less than YTTV for one month. I’m scoring this a win as well.

I’m trying to decide if I want to tackle the news subscriptions today or not. Probably I will go play my game for a while instead.

A little backstory on this project. I’ve been doing living room planning for the new house. I got to wondering just what exactly we would need in terms of equipment for the TV. I picked out the TV, with a focus on good sound quality, knowing that apps for all the streaming would be built in. But then: DVD? Playstation? XBox? I have no idea! But we don’t have cable at the new house, just internet, so the Tivo is not going there with us. And then I got to wondering why I hadn’t done that here at this house. And so here we are.

On the list of very many things we don’t do around here, xbox and playstation are extremely high, so those may be next on the decluttering list. But first! Game! (Sliding Seas is still fun, altho slower now that I’m past level 200.)

I don’t even know what happened. Oh well!

My hairdresser is back from maternity leave, so my hair is purple and other colors again. Woot! I went to the bank (finally!) for cash for the tip, so I have cash to give to my walking partner for her birthday tomorrow.

I walked with M.

I finally sat down and worked out the dining room layout, talked it out with R., and figured out all of the components. I think. We’re still not sure about the rug, and I have to measure where the registers extend to. In walking through the tabletop ordering process, I noticed some questions that I have started handing off to R. (do you like rubio monocoat type stuff).

The mattress arrived for the attic bedroom. It is extremely comfy. R. set it up with the bedding, including the Pottery Barn husband / pillows by Inventive Sleep or whatever, and the colors are really great. The catalonia modern forms sconce arrived, but we have not taken it out of the box yet. R. was going to ask the electrician to install it tomorrow, after telling me, and after I told the project manager that R. was going to install it post-inspection. I was like, hey, we sat there and walked through a contract where we agreed we were never going to ask the workers to do anything; we were only going to go through the project manager. D’oh.

And we finally, finally! got through what was the hangup with me planning on getting a storage unit for furniture delivery pre-certificate of occupancy. R. thought I wasn’t going to be there to take delivery. I’m like, of course I’ll be there to take delivery. Come on. Altho now that I think about it, I may have him go receive some of those things. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find a way to route all the purchases through people who will local-store it for us until it can go into the finished house. Circle will do that for sure.

I drove out to the new house, and it’s very exciting because wallboard is happening! The granite cap on the bricks looks amazing. And the enormous slider to the pool room now slides easily. Woot!f

Some bad news on HVAC; Enertech is definitely not going to have the units with hot gas reheat available by the end of the year. Or who knows when they might. So we talked that through, and subject to space for the ducting, we’ll probably have a separate dehumidification system for the basement (other than the pool room, which has a pool pack, whatever that is).

R. drove A. to and from school, since I was out at the construction site. I was very tired by the time I got home.

T. has moved out to the dorm. Very exciting! And also, now very quiet in the house. Also, suddenly space in a variety of locations that had been crowded.

R. has been quite adamant about wanting to put a wired light into the closet in the new attic room. I was like, but battery lights are so awesome now. Nope.

So then I said, hey, let’s do the modern forms catalonia, since I’ve put that fucker in several key places at the new house because previous choices failed and I have some real concerns about that light. I kinda want to get my hands on it and make sure I really like it. He’s like, no, has to be a wall sconce.

But he’s drunk and went to bed early, so I dug around on lighting websites As One Does (or at least, as I have spent entirely too much time doing), and learned that yes, you can indeed install that one on a wall. So I figured out how to order one, and paid attention and used the 10% off coupon (on top of the 20% discount), which brought it down to a moderately more plausible price. We will now have closet lighting in that room that is way nicer than most other rooms in the house. Pretty much like the entire room, in other words.

I’m trying to decide if I’m going to leave that one when we sell the house, or bring it with us, and I think the answer will depend entirely on how I feel about it once I’ve seen it in person for a while. I did get it in the brass, rather than the nickel, even tho nickel would probably work better in that room, so it’s pretty clear which way I’m leaning.