Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Our first week in our new house.

Ok, so I’m writing this a week and one day later so my memory might blur some stuff together but I’ll do my best to get it all in order.

We arrived on Monday March 9th, I had been following Clayton the entire trip and when we got to our road Clayton kept driving past. But I knew to turn there and so I ended up being first at our driveway. I stopped in the road; the driveway had not been plowed and it appeared to have about a foot of snow on it. (oh and by the way I never did mention that Clayton and I had walkie talkies and we talked to each other all along the way. I recommend getting these for anyone who travels with others in separate cars that are going to stay close by while driving; they were really great to have) and so while I was stopped there looking up the driveway and all the snow on it I keyed up and asked Clayton if I should just plow through it, he’s all ‘Yes of course, over’, so I attempted to, I thought the gentle approach would be fine but didn’t get very far at all. I backed out and moved forward on the street so Clayton could get his truck up to the garage. And of course he made it without much trouble at all. He basically gunned it with tires spinning but he got the momentum needed to reach the garage. So I backed up and thought to myself well at least now it will be easier for me, as I have a set of tracks to follow. I did manage to get about half way up before my tires started spinning out and yeppers, I got stuck. (my mom’s voice inside my head I heard, you should by a bag of kitty litter, that is what they use out there when they get stuck in the snow) Well we didn’t buy any kitty litter and they didn’t have any just laying about in the garage. So we ended up putting two welcome door mats in the fronts of my tires hoping they would grab a hold and get unstuck. Clayton got in and gunned it and my tires just spun and spun and the car didn’t move. But it did move backwards just slightly enough to end up about a foot away from a tree truck. Clayton calls me over, get in he says, I’ll push from the back and when I push you gun it. We rocked it back and forth a bit, my tires spun and I started to spell rubber burning into the ice (if that is even possible, well I spelt something) Then he told me to get out and he got in and I went to the back and started to push and push and I pushed till the front of the car started to pivit to the right. I thought well we can just push the car sideways ha, that didn’t really work, but the pivoting to the right was sort of a good idea. While the back end slightly moved closer to the tree truck the front end kept moving to the right, we ended up pivoting the entire front end of the car so it was pointing down the driveway. We were free from the ice that bound us. Clayton continued to drive down the drive way to the road again, and backed up, revved up and this time he got enough momentum and speed that he made it to the garage while tires still spun mind you. Ok note to self, Listen to mom, buy some kitty litter before next winter arrives……so in the meantime we had let Sparky in the house unattended to roam and sniff and check it out on his own. Guess what we found when we finally got the cars safely parked inside the garage…yep his first poopy accident on the hard wood floor…..

Tuesday, March 10th.

Well, our second day in Wisconsin we decided we needed some food in the house so we left Sparky in the house while we went to the grocery store. Well the poor dog, Since February 24th he had been taken away from his own house (his comfy beds and couches that he was so familiar with) that is when we started staying at my mom’s while the hard wood floors were resurfaced in the San Jose house. Then after four different hotel room stays he’s stuck inside an unfamiliar house with nothing inside and we leave him alone for a couple hours. The dog has developed a strong disliking to be left alone! While we were out shopping, Sparky was freaking in the house, when we arrived home I heard his howling, barking and he really didn’t seem happy we left him. I opened the door and down on the floor I see a wood piece. We thought maybe he got bored and chewed on the dining room table, but after closer inspection he tried to gnaw his way out of the house. Then once inside the house I smelt something funny; later to find another pile of poop left up in our bedroom floor then also found a puddle of pee on the hardwood floor where he had pooped the first time. Sparky was not happy we left him and we were not happy with Sparky!!!!!


Tuesday evening comes around and I decide to take Sparky for his evening walk. We ended up going down to the end of the road where there is a farm and the farm has cows, lots of cows. Sparky for sure loves the snow, loves the woods and loves all these new smells. Well we approached the farm, and all the cows where all lined up three or four rows deep next to the barn where they are fed which just so happens to be right next to the road. Sparky and I stopped to watch, then we watched them, the cows stop to watch us. I think I said hello to them, “hello little cows” I said…..Then I see one of the cows jump up on another cow and I think wow, he’s going to mate with the other cow, cool? But as it turns out that is not what he was doing, he wanted to get away from us. We were really doing nothing, but had stopped we weren’t even walking or moving and Sparky even sat down on the road, but that cow wanted to get further away from us and jumping over the cow in front of him was his only choice. I thought to myself as half of the cows started to move away from us they seemed to move forward and around the barn, that they seemed a bit skittish of us. Then soon after they realized there was nowhere for them to go that direction, the entire heard started running back towards us…crap we created a stampede. Literally they all were running along the single lane dirt road within their farm just wide enough for three or four cows to be side by side. They ran so fast that they could not turn the corner. I felt horrible, the cows on the edge were running into to barbed wire fence, then as more rushed past, the fence actually broke. Not just one post, but two posts were knocked over. Slowly Sparky and I turned and headed back. Within the kraal that the fence broke on five cows ended up away from the rest of the heard. They ran to the end of it, but that meant that Sparky and I had to pass them again. I really can’t believe how scared they were of us just walking past. But as we reached the end of the kraal, they freaked out again and the five of them ran past us back to the others. Luckily the fence that had broken was still within the enclosed farm. At one point before the big guy ran back he stopped and looked at his, I swear he looked mean, dairy cows aren’t mean are they?

Wednesday arrives and so does our trailer with all our belongings! I watched from the window inside the house as Clayton went out to meet our driver. Clayton pulled his truck out to the road and parked it so that trailer could be dropped off in front of the garage and that his truck would not be blocked in. The truck and driver slowly backed in and at about that same point my car spun out and got suck this trucks tires spun too and could not be backed up any further. We had a great driver though; he was a persistent man with a mission to get the trailer up as far as possible so that when we brought down the ramp to unload our stuff it ended right at the edge of the garage. The man must have tried over a dozen times to back it up, each time spinning out before reaching the spot where we wanted him. And then finally he stops, got out and asks us, “do you have any kitty litter“ (ha! just kidding he actually asked for sand) but we didn’t have any of that either, we left a bucket full of sand at the San Jose house thinking we wouldn’t need it little did we know how useful it would have been to have. Finally he pulls out one last time and down to the road again and this time got enough momentum and got it right where we wanted it. And so Clayton and I were happy, our truck arrived safe and sound but wouldn’t you know it had to be on the coldest/windiest days of the week and just after I caught a cold. We managed though to unload everything to our Bed that first day, only leaving the heavy furniture to unload on Thursday. Clayton hadn’t really been sleeping too well in the little double sized bed we have in the spare bedroom, just not big enough for a man, a woman and their dog. We managed to get the king sized bed, box springs and frame up to the loft by the end of the day on Wednesday and all three of us slept the best night sleep since our journey begun.


Thursday and Friday came and went and we finished unloading pretty earlier on Thursday, then we started unpacking and we unpacked all day on Friday, Saturday and even again on Sunday. We also decided to chisel Ice! We had like 4 inches or more built up on our driveway and it was really sort of fun to chip away at it. We also managed to clear our deck as it had over a foot of snow with ice underneath as well. By the end of the weekend, the house was pretty much unpacked, however we still have a few things to do like hang pictures. While these two pictures are of the deck area, it shows about as much snow that was originally on the driveway when we arrived give or take an inch as a few days had gone by since I took them.


Over the weekend however, we decided we needed to go shopping again, needed more food and to get some other items. So instead of keeping Sparky in the house to destroy again, we put him in the kennel out in the garage. I put his dog house inside with a nice blanket inside of that so he'd stay warm and cozy and I put his two favorite pillows on the other side, in case he didn’t want to be in the dark. We hadn’t bought a dog door yet so he didn’t have access to the outside portion, but I took him for a walk before we left to make sure he didn’t have to pee and or poop while we were gone. Well when we got back, this is what he had done to his pillows!!!! Can you say green pillow batting……Sparky is such a little trouble maker!!!!!




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