More of a 'To Do' List, Really

This morning's coffee time is more like a starting line. There's no cream, just milk, so I feel in a rush to get to the store.

School work lately is very self-directed. Many real life things are included like resume building and driver's education and keep your room clean and your laundry caught up and PLEASE get rid of the clutter. A provincial credit course - hopefully our last - in in progress. This unit is Biology and we're having fun supplementing with the Crash Course Biology videos. The kids are keeping up with their peer run book club. We're looking at Romeo and Juliet this month. I really need to share a blog about our Shakespeare experience. I very well may have got this one thing right. Recently we switched from Saxon math to Teaching Textbooks. The Boy is working his way through Algebra 1; The Girl has recently finished it and is waiting for her neglectful parents to obtain Algebra 2. She's very patient. Both kids, having put on the writing brakes, have been cajoled onto working through an upper elementary/early high school writing program. It's bare bones, but introduces the important writing styles, gives examples and sets out a choice of assignments. And, of course, the calibre of writing emerging from their heads is super.

Today's school work is called Home Ec. Cleaning up and being on stand-by for the new fridge to be delivered. Hopefully. The cooler and bins are waiting to be loaded and set outside, but that won't be happening until there's an actual new fridge in my house. A grocery trip this morning is so overdue that The Boy has volunteered to come along and help. Poor hungry teenager. After lunch, I have a meeting and The Boy will come along as he has a volunteering gig on Friday afternoons. The Girl has a social engagement, which is not surprising.

Today is the day that packing up our house will officially commence. In 4 short weeks we will have a new house. The books are the first to be packed. I can do without them for 28 days....right??

♥Mrs. A.

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...Or Not A New Fridge!

While I enjoy today's morning coffee, I will tell you of yesterday's un-adventure. 

Expecting a new fridge to be delivered, the kids and I spent an hour or so getting ready. 

I put the car out on the road and shoveled the driveway. The kids cleared off the fridge of magnets and other bits and bobs such an appliance seems to accumulate. They emptied the freezer portion and crammed those contents into my little deep freeze. It was a toss up between the rainbow sorbet and the spring rolls, though. One of them wasn't going to fit. We had spring rolls for breakfast. 

We packed up the fridge contents into the grocery bins and the picnic cooler and stashed those in the backyard. It was -16C (3F for my American friends) but I figured the produce would be ok for an hour or so. 

The kids suddenly remembered their school work and disappeared as I started cleaning the fridge. The outside, the inside, that gross spot under the fridge. It was a lovely clean fridge. 

It was a lovely clean, OLD fridge that had remained in its spot a few years ago when the new flooring and baseboards had been installed. The Boy Child was recruited and we wrestled that fridge out of the kitchen without damaging the baseboards. It was a close call. 

We watched The Rick Mercer Report. It counts as school work. 

We had lunch.

Some of us ate half a jar of olives for lunch because the olive juice was found to be a little slushy when I was searching through the bins in the backyard for the ketchup. 

I called the building manager and left a message. We went on with our afternoon. The kids headed downtown - on foot because what if the delivery truck came while I was driving them? Their idea. Considerate teens. 

About 3pm, I put the fridge back in the kitchen. The baseboards survived but I am having a hard time caring about that. I rescued my produce and bins from the backyard. Hindsight tells me the produce should have gone into the cooler with the milk and cream. I repacked the fridge. 

The fresh, new, polite, professional and excited-because-he's-going-to-fix-ALL-the-things Building Manager can't explain why the fridge wasn't delivered. So I explained to the kids that the fridge was going to stay packed up until I had another fridge in my living room waiting to be swapped out. 

4 more weeks until I get my own house where I can argue with my own self about fridges. 

♥Mrs. A. 

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A New Fridge...

Yesterday the Boy Child was found in his natural habitat. Leftovers for breakfast. It seems he can balance a canned drink on nothing but good looks and gravity. 

I'm enjoying a quiet coffee this morning. Mr. A is away from home today for work. The teenagers will stay in bed for as long as I let them. (Cue clunky sounds of feet and waking up from upstairs as soon as the words were typed...)

Today will be interesting. It seems that a new fridge will arrive around 10am. There's a long convoluted story surrounding the circumstances that can be summed up shortly: Give notice that you're moving out; receive new fridge. 

After 15 years at our townhouse, Mr. A and I have bought a home. It seems a little surreal, this waiting period between house purchase and actual house occupation, but I know that it will get very real, very quickly. The timing had to be very precise in order for us to give proper notice here at our rental. Careful planning and a quick closing date allowed us to give our notice at the end of February as we had hoped. 

To cover all our bases, we ended up contacting the elusive building owner directly to let him know we were leaving. As he is one of the most uncommunicative people on the planet, we were shocked speechless that he quickly acknowledged our notice. We were a little surprised that he asked us why we were leaving. In the end, there was an actual communication trail of emails that went on and on until I stopped responding to him. 

To answer his initial question, I immediately wrote a very direct, very descriptive email which outlined our ongoing problems with the property maintenance, the poor management by the onsite (and ever changing) building managers and  the awful new neighbours and their illegal activities which are allowed to continue. The owner replied that a new fridge was on its way and was there any way we would consider staying on as tenants?

We were treated to an account of Blame Game from this owner-guy. As we expected - and have experienced over the years - he blamed the most recent building managers for the lack of...well, everything. Those building managers, on their way out, treated us to a rendition of the Blame Game themselves, assuring us that it was a lack of willingness the part of the owner to take care of our issues. 

So today we get a new fridge. I'm sure the new tenants, whoever the poor saps are, will enjoy the working lightbulb, the matching crisper drawer that fits the fridge it's in, the tight door seals, the energy savings and the quiet operation of a new fridge. 

Today is also the day the new building managers, poor saps, will come to 'inspect' our townhouse. It seems the owner has told them this is routine. Once a tenant gives notice, a pre-move-out inspection is done so as to be able to plan for the work that will need to be done between tenants. Interesting, since there is a record of multiple maintenance requests just waiting to be filled for our unit. 

It seems odd, all this attention. Especially since we had been attempting to contact someone for the entire month of February. If giving our notice to leave is all it took for us to be listened to, I would have done it years ago!!

♥Mrs. A. 

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So...It Snowed...

 

We got a bit of snow! It seems it will be joined by another friendly neighbourhood storm currently making its way up the eastern coast....which means that it seems we will just continue to accumulate snow for the foreseeable future. 

I had occasion to think about snow this morning...at 6:30 while I shoveled it. 

We knew this snow was coming. There were weather warnings. So I did the responsible grown-up thing and cancelled our weekly out of town trip to The Girl's fencing lesson. Not a popular move for my parental ranking. Especially unpopular since there was no snow or inclement weather at the time of the decision. 

The Boy - upon hearing of the impending dumping of snow - immediately began negotiations for a 'snow day' should the local school board declare one. This is curious. We don't use schools. We only very loosely follow the school year calendar and that has more to do with sports and jobs than school days. I said there would be no snow day...it was going to be a normal school day for us. This firmly cemented my reduced popularity in the parental polls. 

So, it will be a normal school work day for us. I will be sure to intersperse it with regular shoveling breaks. It's the first day of winter weather and there's no way I'm going to be reelected. 

❤Mrs. A.

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Life In The 'Hood #2

Today I looked out the window and I saw this:

There was a man in my tree. Of course, 'my' is a term I have absolutely no right to use. It's not my tree. It's just situated next to my yard. Again, not really my yard, but for all intents and purposes, I'm Queen of this postage stamp. Back to the man in my tree...

The man in my tree was here to divest the tree of some of its limbs. You see, there were a few incidents this summer. Some of the local kids discovered they had attained the required height for climbing this particular tree. Not a problem. The problem began when a couple of them started running off at the mouth. Things heated up nicely when they argued that they were not staring in the neighbour lady's windows. Unfortunately, they were arguing with the neighbour lady who was sitting in her living room behind her six-foot fence. She wrote a letter to the building managers and copied the owners.

Mr. B and I got involved when we clearly saw unsafe things happening. 7 and 8 kids crawling all over each other in the tree ignoring my tree-climbing 'rules': stay off any dead branches as well as those thinner than your arm. Then there was the day I found a few of them using bricks to gouge the bark off the tree. Sure, they put the bricks down when I asked them to, but then they tried to rip branches off the tree...and proceeded to swing from them when they were only partly successful. I asked the building manager to step in because of all of this and I was concerned. The kids had stopped listening to me and it was becoming incredibly inconvenient to look out the window all day. Someone was going to get hurt.

So much to my surprise, the tree guys showed up today - a month and a half after the last kid lost their copious amounts of summer free time - and did a very good job at trimming the tree. I was surprised because there had been no response to my - nor the neighbour lady's - complaint. I'd like to say that the building manager/out-of-town owners are the proactive, pride in ownership, get-'er-done types but I'd be lying. They're more the squeaky wheel, bring along the property standards guy and then they start to wake up type of people.

But, in the end, the tree has been trimmed. One more thing around here got taken care of..or 15 things, if you count the number of kids who can't spy on the neighbour lady before falling out of the tree, cracking their backs on 'my' fence on the way down.

On a more personal note, The Boy and The Girl both learned a thing or two about how the professionals trim a tree and then clean up after themselves. The Boy was quite intrigued by the ropes and harness. The Girl is responsible for all the photographs. And for talking the tree guys' ears off - from well out of the way - throughout the entire job.

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Life In The 'Hood

Some neighbours come and go quickly. Some live quietly. Some neighbours lay it out all over their driveway for everyone to see. Some share food. Some neighbours need to learn manners. Some teach your children. Some play nicely with others. Some have pets. Some have jobs. Some keep strange hours. Some neighbours just keep to themselves. Some are friends and some are just downright scary.

It's interesting living in such a ...diverse neighbourhood. I've earned my stripes in this neighbourhood; done my time; learned the ropes. I've called the police, the property managers, the ambulance - each on more than one occasion. I've looked for lost children, lost pets and lost mail. I've been the mean lady and the nice mom. I happily invite friends in to our crowded space and I've successfully banished the Jehovah's. I've been surprised by strangers on my roof and I've kicked strangers out of my yard. I figure after ten years in these trenches I can now say a thing or two every now and then.

Today The Boy was playing outside while I was inside preparing lunch. He thundered in the house, slamming the door like he was being chased by the fires of hell. Generally this does not happen. The Boy normally needs to be dragged in from the Great Outdoors by his heels. Even for food. I was upset to find out that he had been heckled.

There he was, practicing with his new Diabolo when some idiot individual started hooting and hollering out their back door, finishing up with a very clear: 'Get to school, kid!'

Nice.

The Boy saw this adult person was who was yelling at him. The Boy was very anxious about going back outside after he had already made a successful escape to safety. However, under the guise of wanting to see his Diabolo tricks and in the spirit of getting back on the horse after falling, I went outside with him and he enthusiastically showed me his complete repertoire.

Lucky for us, we were treated to a repeat performance of Get To School Kid. This one, not as good as the first as it was preformed by a less confident, very stubby seven-year-old and it was abruptly choked off when he noticed me standing there. The Boy was not frazzled and was happy to resume his practicing. I went back to the kitchen to finish up lunch while listening to The Boy yell a running commentary to me through the patio door.

Outwardly, I encourage the kids to ignore such immature, ignorant behaviour. Inwardly, I'd like to take a page from Mr.GetToSchoolKid's book and slap him up the side of the head with a witty Get a Job, Idiot. I think the 'hood is rubbing off on me.

And there you have it, folks. Just another day in the 'hood.

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