TIRING DAY...
On Sunday, we had a real estate agent from Royal LePage come around and look at our bungalow and take measurements and discuss a reasonable asking price. The next day, there was already a sign up on our front yard, which still feels "wrong" when it comes to a house I've lived in for twenty-three years, since I was six years old (yeah, I know, like I never talk about my childhood).Anyway, we got phone calls last night from two real estate agents from Re/MAX who wanted to show two interested parties around our house. We didn't think we'd have to make the place presentable this soon, so we couldn't do everything we need to do today, but, one thing we did do was move two bookshelves to the garage. Why is that a priority? Our house is a two-storey bungalow, with the top floor having the kitchen and living room on one side of our house and the three bedrooms and the bathroom on the other, and a hallway connects all these rooms (and the stairs) We have accumulated a lot of books over the years, enough to fill a small-town library, and space is at a premium, so two of the larger bookshelves of the dozen or so bookshelves in the house lined the upstairs hallway, and these bookshelves are pretty deep, like at least 30 cm, so they restrict passage in an already narrow hallway to the point where people have to take turns walking down it, which is something we can tolerate when we're living in the house but, if we're trying to sell our house and create as much of an illusion of "space" as we can, the hallways, as they were were not presentable.
So, this morning (Friday), my father took down all of the hundreds, if not thousands, of books on those two bookshelves, and he and I shlepped both downstairs, and the bookshelves are solid wood and are fairly heavy, but the hard part was negotiating the stairwell, which goes down five steps to the front door and then turns around and there are six more steps to our finished basement, and garage, where we're storing the bookshelves for the time being. THe first time, I had to twist the bookshelf around the front door landing, and from the front step to the front door is barely the width of the bookshelf, so it's not as easy as it sounds. Then, going downstairs, the clearance under the ledge on the top floor over the stairwell is narrow, so we had to carry the vertical bookshelf horizontally, which isn't fun. With the second bookshelf going down, my mother suggested going out through the front door and bringing the shelf down our sloping driveway, which was a little easier. After bringing down each bookshelf, we had to bring down the individual shelves, which were also fairly heavy, and then we had to make many trips with the books themselves, which were put on the bed in John's old bedroom, now a general guest bedroom, going up and down the stairs, which is pretty tiring when you have to do it a lot of times over and over. 2 hours later, we had the weird sight of a "wide" hallway in our house, which we haven't seen since we added those shelves some five or six years ago, and my dogs can pass me and I don't have to squeeze against the wall.
Then, after that was done, I thought I would start writing about my sixteenth year, but, when browsing the Rotten Tomatoes forums, AntiVir, my antivirus program, started giving me virus warnings (in German; Hell, yeah, I want to "Löschen"!), and I discovered I now had TV Media, CashBack and several other exotic pieces of Spyware, which I must have got when I was looking for 8-bit videogame screencaps at The Videogame Museum; motherfucking vgmuseum.com! It used to be a great resource, but, now, while the screencaps are still there, it's more like a place to go if you want some "drive-by" Spyware automatically installed on your system. I tried the holy trio of Lavasoft's Ad Aware, Spybot S&D, and Hijack This!, but, no matter how many times I killed them, the Spyware kept on resurrecting itself like the bad guys in The Sixth Day (because you all saw that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; sure, now he's governor, he's against runaway productions, but he seemed okay with the concept when he filmed that one in Vancouver, and Terminator 3 was originally going to be filmed in Vancouver as well.). So, I had to reboot and press F8 over and over and run the programs in "Safe Mode", which did work as far as I can tell. Still, it was very, very tiresome.
Before the people actually came aroun to our house, we had to do something about our two big, loud dogs, so, while the people were looking at our house, my mother was driving around the Vaudreuil area with me taking care of the dogs in the back seat. Not as easy as it sounds, since they do get frantic, but after a while, they calmed down. One's half-golden retriever and the other's half-Labrador, so, at least, they can see out of the windows, unlike poor Sledgehammer, a terrier-poodle-miscellaneous mix, who never enjoyed being driven anywhere because all he could see was the door handle.
The good part about today was that we got to have KFC for dinner, since there was just no time to cook.
I'll see if I can get the story of my sixteenth year finished by tomorrow evening, but, yes, I was foolish to promise one a day because those things just take hours to write.
posted by Steve Brandon @ 2:02 AM
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