Farewell, wallpaper. We are stripping the walls of the beautiful flowers and getting them ready for some paint! We have two types of wallpaper--the kind pictured was easy to get off, the rest is a bear: wet it, score it, wet it, peel little chunks of one layer, wet it, scrape little chunks of the other layer. There is WAY too much to do to be done by Friday. The youth are awesome--a group of girls helped with the walls and we are very happy for it--it was fun for all of us who were doing the work too. Anne's parents and brother are going to be up here and staying with us from this Friday to next saturday (8 days). It will be a good time, though I will have to work 3 of those days and we will be doing house or holiday stuff on all of the others. I really like Anne's family, so it should be fun. I also look forward to friends stopping by a lot.
Work is ok. We are making a lot of progress on a nearly-impossible IT job. IT is nice to accomplish a lot each day, but it is lousy to have to have such pressure to code so much in so little time.

Life is good. The house is pretty well sealed up and unpacked.
Work is getting way too much like "emergency project after emergency project."
My dissertation draft came back and it has very good and managable comments/changes. I think that it may be only one or two more small revisions before it is done. That scares me but I am ready for it...ready beyond ready.
My parents' computer is dying (they are still using my old celeron 300a @ 433 that has been overclocked for the past...5-7 years...man, I cannot even remember when that was the cool system to have, but it has been a while. I am doing my first NEW motherboard/processor computer build in quite a while. Anyone know if DDR (memory, guys, not dance dance revolution) and DDR2 are different enough to warrant getting a DDR2 motherboard?
By the way, we have under 4 weeks until the due date (Jan 11th)!

We are still in the unpacking like mad stage. Anne is organizing the baby stuff, and doing quite a fantastic job of it. We just got this kitchen table (on clearance, along with all of on-clearance chairs) and they seem to fit pretty darn well. I hope to see some games and Big Fish, Lil' Fish cards slapped on that table soon.

Man, so far, we have been running around like mad cleaning and fixing things. There are a million high-priority and easy-to-fix things when you buy a house--even a house that is reasonably taken-care-of. We have gotten one car in the garage and mine will fit in once we get rid of the half-space that is entirely garbage. I could write about stupid house stuff for a long time, but fixing toilet tanks is not very exciting. I cannot wait until we get to the *unpacked* stage. Given the number of boxes we have, this might take a week or two.

In other news, work is good. We are working on an emergency project that involves us working with SQL servers and I have had to learn (by immediate application) about vertical data structures. I kind of like this stuff. I am sure we will see more of it in the future. Anyway, life is darn good now!

Thanks. I am overwhelmed with gratitute for everything that everyone did and said with the move. Everything went smoothly and moved in well. This whole "garage to garage" thing was wonderful. The thing I am most grateful for are parents (all of them...Anne's, mine, and our grandparents and their parents and so on). Parents have made the house possible and then have been relentless in making our lives and the life of our to-be-baby (5ish weeks left!) better and easier. Had my parents not been so helpful, we would be moving into a much smaller and older house that would have more problems and such. Not only that, but they were given a lot of help from their parents and so on down the line. I really like how my grandma speaks of her parents and her grandparents. Apparently, this kind of love has a lot of precedent and I am really pumped up to pass it on up the line now too.

Anyway, I think yesterday was the happiest day I have had in quite a long time...perhaps on the line with the wedding day. Wow. A HUGE thanks to everyone who helped move on Friday and was around to celebrate on Saturday (all day or half-day). I really felt loved and I enjoyed everyone who was here.
Don't worry if you couldn't be here, there will be PLENTY of time to do this. Our doors are open to all manners of get-togethers.
As of now, the plastic and cardboard is off the floor and we are ready to keep getting the place in order.