Tonight was the annual business meeting and dinner of the little credit union at work. Eighty-eight people attended, and we had a really nice time. Drinks, dinner, a bit of business (5 minutes or so) and then dancing. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday evening. Monica and I had a nice time.
This week, we finally put the Department of Motor Vehicles behind us. On Thursday, Monica was able to trade her permit for a driver’s license. Unlike the last time, her examiner was really nice. They just took a short drive around the neighborhood – she didn’t even have to parallel park ( you can’t imagine the worrying she has done about parking). It isn’t that she can’t park, but she was very worried about having to do it while being watched. This driver’s license has been more trouble than anything else we have had to get done. It seemed that nothing about it was easy. I’m proud of my Brasileira for sticking with it and putting up with the aggravation – Congratulations, sweetheart.
We have less than two weeks before we get our new house. We were at Ronnie’s (a famous garden shop here in DE) 
earlier this week, where a nice guy named Sam took my scale drawing of our front yard and came up with some ideas for landscaping. I will need to remove some nasty-looking shrubs (aren’t they icky?) from the front yard before we can get started planting the new stuff. I am planning on doing that this week, even though we don’t own the house yet. I also noticed a problem with the gutter system that I decided to tackle today.
The old gutter was in very bad shape, and I decided to replace it. When I removed the old gutter, I found a hole chewed through the fascia board by squirrels. I had seen this exact thing before in my last house. I had to make a trip back to the home center to buy some aluminum fascia trim (squirrels don’t chew aluminum) to put behind the new gutter. The additional trip meant that I didn’t get finished, but I can get the new gutter up tomorrow, I hope. I am using Raingo vinyl gutter – it’s easy to install and I think it’s more rugged than the aluminum stuff. My dad had it on his house, and it worked well for him. Of course, if something happens and we don’t get the house, I just donated a gutter to someone else.
I need to totally rip out that old kitchen – right to the wall studs- and pull up the old ceramic floor. Although I would like to order cabinets, I need to wait until I put the walls back together to get the measurements. I will be adding insulation and the wall thickness may change a bit. Although I can’t really do anything in there yet, I’ve got scale drawings and plans about what I want to do. There’s a bit of difference between hanging a gutter on somebody else’s house and taking a wrecking bar to their plaster walls, so I have to be patient about getting that started.
My son is gainfully employed once again, and everything’s going well with that. The new (to us) Nissan is performing well and has caused us no problems yet, if you don’t count that one time that the car wouldn’t start. It turned out to be a fuel delivery problem. The car wouldn’t run until we delivered fuel into the gas tank……grrrrrrrr
Spring is here! Trees are beginning to get leaves, the grass is green and the heater is running less and less each day. It means a bit more to me because this is the first time that Monica has seen springtime. She’s made it through winter and deserves to savor the changing of the season and the return to green colors from our drab winter grey.
It’s getting late – more to come soon.
Greg
Leave a Reply