More pics and a yard sale story

Here are a few more pictures of the place we are staying right now. It has been a very nice space for us. The dogs are fun (although they do take work), and we have especially been enjoying the ice/water dispenser in the fridge door.

These are my favorite flowers here. They are right by the entryway. They bloom every morning, and by noon they have usually fallen off (from the heat, I suppose). But they reappear every morning, and they are so bright and cheery.

Last weekend, we had a yard sale (our last one here, thank goodness). Now that we have some experience with yard sales in Tallahassee, I felt like I had most things figured out. I know that if you say 7am on the sign, someone will be there at 6am. (In fact, there is a good chance someone will stop by the day before to get an early look.) There will be some negotiating in terms of prices, and electrical items will need to be plugged in so it is clear that they work. But one thing happened at the yard sale last Saturday that I did not expect. Brian thought it was a pretty funny story, so I thought I'd share it here.

Our yard sale was set to start at 7am, so I wanted to have everything set up by 6:30 at the latest. I got everything out in the yard and organized. I hauled out a chair and the radio and prepared to greet customers. The first person came around 6:30. She was a younger-looking lady (like me), and spent a little time looking at the stuff we had spread out on the driveway. Finally, she decided that the nail polish collection would be a good gift for her young daugther. I asked for $10 (there were over 20 different colors of polish in there), and she counter-offered with $5. We agreed on $5 (I really wanted to get rid of stuff at the sale), and she gave me a $10 bill. So I headed inside to get some change. I only had one $1 bill (this was our first customer), so I came back with 5 dollar coins. Dollar coins are relatively common, so I was taken aback when this lady looked at the coins and returned them to me. "That's not real money!" she declared with certainty. I explained to her that dollar coins had been around for a long time and were real money, but she refused them, grabbed her $10 back, and left in a huff. Now I'm not really a super morning person, so I realise that I was a little out of it still. But it did set a bad tone for the start of the sale, although after selling a few items, I did get over it. I was just so blown away that this lady had never seen a dollar coin before and accused me of trying to swindle her.

Some pics

To go along with the news only posts from the last weeks, here are some pictures of this summer's happenings.

We moves from here:
To here:

We also went to a very nice going away party for Brian given by his work. There are several people who are leaving at some point this summer, so it was a joint party. There was a lovely chocolate cake for the occasion:

Along with many friends from the court, and plenty of Mexican food:

We have also been spending a lot of time with animals, both dogs and ferrets. Here you can see Eve, showing off her climbing skills by scaling the laundry.

Keeping busy

Well, this month is moving along quickly for us, as we try to finish stuff up before moving northward. I am spending long days in the lab to make sure I can finish everything. We have our apartment choices narrowed down to a top three, and we hope to have a friend check them out in person next weekend. We had our last yard sale today (I hope it will be a long time before I need to plan one of these again), and all the leftovers went to charity already, so they are out of the house. The yard sale was a little more tiring than I expected, since Brian hurt his kneee quite badly yesterday, so he has been staying off his leg as much as possible. That is good for his knee, but that meant that I had to handle setting up for the sale myself, and I sat in the yard selling stuff for most of the morning while Brian took care of his knee in bed with Tylenol and ice packs. Luckily. now he says it is feeling a bit better. I need to go, to help pack ice on the knee again now. Wish Brian a speedy recovery!

Good news from NSF

I heard from the archaeology program director at NSF today. He is going to recommend that my project proposal gets funding, based on several positive reviews. This is great news!

This week

We have been busy this past week, packing up our stuff in preparation to move everything out by Tuesday. Here are a few pictures from the evenings.

A package arrived from D&R (well Rachel actually sent it), and we all really enjoyed opening it. The ferrets love wrapped presents, since unwrapping them is a large part of the fun. I never thought of giving the ferrets baby toys to play with, but it is a great idea. Thanks guys! (And thank you as well for the other items in the package too.)

We are continuing to spend time with the dogs every day as well, which makes my days a little busier (since the ferrets and dogs do not play together). Here I am after a tiring day, lounging around with Bowie and Tilda.

The dogs

We've been here for a week now, and it is high time we introduced the dogs we are watching. First, we have Tilda (aka Tilly). She is the older of the two dogs. She is whitish and has a shaggy coat. She is the more social of the two dogs--will follow me around when I am home and will hand out with guests. Tilly is the dominant dog in this house.


The other dog is Boaz (Bo for short). He is a younger dog with lots of energy. Tilda does not want to run at the end of a walk, but Bo is always up for anything. He has a really silky-soft black coat and a funny tail that looks like a drum major hat (more pictures to follow--watch for the tail). He is a little less people-dependent. He likes to sit in his chair in the living room, but when we had some friends visit over the weekend, he mostly stayed out of the way and hung out in the doggy bedroom. His interests include squirrels.

Both dogs like to sleep in bed with us, which is what they are used to doing when their owner is around. Tilda always wants to sleep where I want to put my feet, which can be frustrating. Here she is at the foot of the bed.

Bo will join us in bed sometimes, but he also has a seperate dig bed in the bedroom that he uses as well. When he is in bed, he likes to get in your face in a friendly way. Brian likes it, as you can see below.

Overdue Update

Well, it's been almost a month since we last updated so it seems one is due. I kept meaning to post pictures and update but I guess I'll do that in two separate steps.

We have begun to move out of our place into the home we are watching until we leave for NY or NJ. The home comes with two great dogs, Bowie and Tilda who we call Bo and Tillie for short. Bow is a longer-haired black dog and Tillie is a big fuzzy white dog. I don't know breeds, but we'll get pictures up soon. The home we are watching is also nice and the ferrets are taking to it well.

In other news, we've had two weeks of garage sales and sold much of what we owned. Almost all the large furniture that we wanted to sell is gone, and we sold many smaller things too. Of course, we still have too much stuff from the perspective of having to box and move it all. Hanneke has been single-handedly leading the charge on boxing and preparing for our move, which is very helpful since I have spent a lot of time working to prepare for NYU stuff. Our old place looks strange now and, aside from going there to pack or meet people to sell items/furniture, we are never there. The fish tanks are empty and shut down, almost everything valuable has been moved out (e.g. computers, etc.), and there is little to no furniture to sit on.

In other news, I am apparently allergic to dogs. This has lead to a lot of Zyrtec, Claritin, and Benadryl, which makes me tired all the time. But the dogs are fun and I'm getting used to the tiredness. Neither Hanneke nor I are used to the dogs piling into bed when we try and sleep, though. Last night, both dogs beat me to bed, which meant I had basically no place to sleep. They eventually gave up some space and I fell asleep. Hanneke has very mixed feelings about the dogs sleeping in with us, but the dogs seem to value it (they slept with their owner too).

We are still moving things out of the old place, but it is getting more and more empty each day. We hope to be entirely out of it soon. This is a time of more and more change each day, and that will only continue into July and August. We'll keep you updated as it occurs. Pictures to follow "soon."