I’m sitting in the living room of an Airbnb rental, five blocks from my house, working remotely. My wife is reading to my daughter in the chair across the room and our dog is standing on the foot of the same chair so she can let us know whenever a dog walks past. We’ll be here until Friday (hopefully) at which point we can return home.
There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph and it will probably take more than one post to do it. But I may as well get started. I picked this up again because I was thinking about how I spend a bunch of time complaining in Slack, etc. about all of the various challenges we’re facing and I think I’m kind of spamming my friends. So, I’ll start updating the blog again for a while and we’ll see if that helps with my need to vent without monopolizing the conversation elsewhere.
I’ll start with a good thing. I got married. Last time I posted was August, 2016 and I’d been dating someone for a few months. Later that month we went camping at Big Bend and then to a “star party” at the McDonald Observatory. Around then was also when her lease was up at her apartment and the apartment had had a bunch of maintenance issues including flooding because the parking lot funneled rain water run-off at her front door.
I asked her to move in with me and she agreed. Those book shelves in the previous post are completely full and we have three more like them I made when I took a welding class. Plus her four tall book cases and a barrister’s bookcase and a couple of 4×2 Kallax shelves in the two other bedrooms (kids bedrooms now, more on that later). We have a lot of books these days, most of them hers but a growing percentage for kids.
We visited New York in December of 2017 and when we got home I proposed. We were married in February of 2019 and our daughter was born in January of 2020. You’ll probably notice the timing of that last date as it was the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic. I went back to work after my two weeks of parental leave and then came back after we were all sent home to work in March. We had family stay with us for a while but once I was home again and the disease was running rampant around the country we holed up and it was just the three of us for a long time.
We ended up taking turns in nursery with the baby at night. Sleeping in the glider chair caused a herniated disc in my lower back. PT and a cortisone shot got me back to the point I could be useful again after a couple of unpleasant months. My wife’s job started flirting with the idea of bringing everyone back in the fall of 2020 and then again at the start of 2021, summer of 2021, fall of 2021 and now again at the start of the spring semester 2022. The vaccines came and it looked like fall of 2021 was really going to be it but then the Delta variant spread and we stayed home again.
I say the vaccines came but there is still no vaccine for kids under 5 years. Ours will be 2 years in January, having spent her entire life cocooned in the house. We’ve thought about putting her in daycare a few times as the case load has dropped and it looked like we might be in the clear for a while but it never came to pass. My mother-in-law came in the fall of 2021 to help us which was greatly appreciated and she’s coming back in a week or so because it looks like it’s finally back to campus for real next week never mind the giant Omicron surge. She’s coming back because we need the help with child care and work but also because we’re expecting our second child at the end of February.
In the mean time a bunch of things went wrong with our house. In 2020, our refrigerator and water heater failed. Due to the pandemic and increasing supply chain issues getting replacements took a while but we managed. February 2021 was the great Texas grid collapse during Winter Storm Uri (Snowvid). We had a ton of snow and ice and our infrastructure wasn’t prepared. Power failed at home which put us in a hotel during the pandemic during the winter holiday surge of vanilla Covid. That also caused a bunch of minor issues with the house to become more serious. The back gutter failing on the back of the house, water starting to leak in the windows below it, accelerated rot on the exterior trim and the sheathing underneath.
We initiated a project to install a whole home stand-by generator. This project is finally nearing completion with only one more inspection and the initial test run happening in the next week or so. It took almost eight months from start to finish.
Late this spring the HVAC unit in the master suite finally gave up for good, dumping water on the floor and other excitement. We replaced it with a multi-headed mini-split system. That system added smaller wall units into the two second floor bedrooms which solves the issue of the nursery room being too hot in the summer / cold in the winter. But it meant we had to evacuate the house for a day to avoid exposing the kid to potential disease.
I found someone to replace our gutter and add additional ones but they said the back edge of the roof-top patio needed to be repaired or they couldn’t warranty the work. So I found someone to do that only to have them say it was a bigger job than they thought and back out. I finally found someone to do it after a month or so and several tries and that project exploded into replacing the entire patio, the trim and sheathing on all of the house below the patio, and now a bunch of damaged drywall on the inside of the same wall.
All of which brings me to today. My very pregnant wife, not-quite-two daughter and I are staying in an Airbnb for four days while a bunch of drywall work and painting is done in our house. Hopefully everything goes well and we go home Saturday to the house-of-Theseus.
It’s been an interesting five and a half years. It has been some of the hardest times in my life but also very rewarding. I suppose I’ll have more to say if I stick with this but that’s a starting place and I can fill in back story as things come up.