Cleaning Struggles

This was something I knew was going happen.

I tried to ignore the signs of it, but deep down, I knew it would play out this way.

...Mr. Cap won't do housework.

He'll cook and clean the dishes, so it's not a total lost cause! But anything extending past the kitchen seems to be completely off his radar. 

I'm trying a tatic currently of splitting the house in half--if you get the top floor, you have to do all cleaning (in that area) as well as laundry. If you get the bottom floor, you have to do all cleaning (in that area) as well as the cooking.

Last week I had the top floor and dutifully vacuumed, cleaned the bathroom, and went to the laundromat (which might be another post in itself. I have very bad feelings towards the laundromat for some reason). Mr. Cap cooked food! ...and stopped there. I will give him props in that he furiously vacuumed the 1st floor when he realized we were about to have company on Sunday evening. But the bathroom was never touched (again, something that seems to not even register with him).

This week I have the duties of the 1st floor and he has the 2nd floor. I'm really hoping he does the laundry. If we go a week without that, the load the following week (my week) will be outrageous. I don't even know how two people produce so much dirty clothing in only 7 days... 

In all, I'm feel rather disheartened that the cleaning has all been falling on my shoulders. He hasn't done any of the laundry since we moved (and all of it has to be done at the laundromat or my parents' house since we still don't have a washer/dryer). I really appreciate him being willing to cook, but I feel like the trade-off isn't very well divided. We both work full time jobs 5 days a week, and we both have activities that happen on weeknights (so we're out of the house longer than a normal 9-5 day). I've been managing to handle the cleaning, but it's been making me feel really negative towards him. And I don't want that. 

Mr. Cap always talks as though he prides himself on being very pro-woman, but I think he spent too much time in his mother-run household. Even if he thinks he respects me as an equal, I really feel as though he also expects me to take care of almost everything in our living space. The fact that cleaning his living space isn't even on his radar of life events shows me that he's far too used to being catered to by his mother. 

I really don't want to become his mother.

February

Oh dear, I've neglected this blog quite a bit. 

Today I figured out how to log on to the mortgage website we're going to be using, and I *think* I got our automatic payment plan set up. I think. I guess I'll find out come March 1st if the payment was withdrawn...

In other news, the weather has been very snowy here recently. It seems like every other day we're getting anywhere from 2 to 8 inches of fluff. On Wednesday I decided to venture around the building to shovel off our back steps (because the snow was so high, I couldn't open the back door anymore). I ended up mid-thigh in snow, attempting to clean off the porch. This *was* as difficult as it sounds. 

Mr. Cap stood in the window watching and occasionally waving as I attempted to clear off the steps. Luckily he was watching when I managed to dislodge the 3-story icicle from the side of the house--and also luckily, I managed to dodge most of it. I'm a little bruised on one arm where it hit me, but otherwise I'm in one piece (can't say as much for the icicle).

February has been mostly uneventful--and I kind of like it that way. Mr. Cap seems to be getting a little stir crazy (which is actually...really odd for him. He's usually a huge homebody), and I'm hoping all the snow melts soon so we can actually get outside a little bit more. I'm putting together a post on more of my experimenting with the Tarot and such, so that will probably be up at some point this week.

Sick Day

Today I was out of work on a sick day (head congestion...why won't you stop?), so I decided to continue cleaning up around the house to make it more "presentable".

The progress is slow, but at least I feel I'm making some progress. Mr. Cap and I will be out of the state all day on an "emergency visit" to see some friends on Saturday, so I'm glad I had an extra day to do a little more around the house this week--albeit a sick one.

Currently I'm doing some cooking for tomorrow/the weekend. Made some baked oatmeal (with a few modifications to try to be a little more healthy) which should give us 3 breakfasts over the next few days, and I'm just finishing up a BBQ chicken pizza (my own recipe) in the oven. With that, we'll be all set for lunch tomorrow.

I have to say I'm really liking our shiny new gas oven. It's so pretty and clean inside, and the stove top cooks things SO FAST. After using electric for most of my life, I think I'm in love.

Feeling more like a homebody today, and I'm very much enjoying it. I wish I could stay home and just do things around the house all the time...although knowing me, I would get lazy pretty fast and end of reading blogs for the majority of the day.

The Flood

Our garage flooded this evening. D:

Mr. Cap and I were leaving the house a little after 6pm to stop by the store and pick up a few organizers, and I was hurrying out the door without really looking around me.

"Hey wait," Mr. Cap said as he stood in the hallway. "Do we have a leak?"

I looked behind me and noticed that there was a damp spot on the carpet right next to the entrance of our mechanical room.

Why yes--it did appear we had a leak.

When we opened the door, we found the floor was wet. Not flooded, but it looked like something had spilled all over the room. Luckily all we had stored in there were some of the empty boxes left from unpacking, and a couple other items that weren't easily damaged.

We looked around the room to see if we could locate a burst pipe, but had no luck. So I said "Well, let's still get to the and we can figure out what to do on the way there. I'll call my dad."

When I stepped outside, I noticed that there was a stream of water leaking out from under our garage door. When I looked at the other condos in our building...I noticed that their garages were leaking, too.

Mr. Cap opened the side door to the garage, and let me know that there was currently about 4 inches of water sitting in there. He opened the main door and a small flood poured down our driveway.

At this point, I decided it would be neighborly to stop by next door and let them know what was going on. I met the very nice lady that lived next door, and together we got to experience the horror of her opening her garage door and finding about a foot of water inside. She was panicked because they'd been using their garage for storage instead of parking, so her family had a lot of stuff that was possibly damaged. I then left a slightly hysterical message on the answering machine of the condo manager, letting him know that for some reason the garages of our building were floods (as where the mechanical rooms in all our condos). I crossed my fingers that he's get the message on a Saturday night,

The couple that lived in the third unit in our building weren't home, but the lady next door had their number so she called them to let them know what was going on. At about this point I got a call back from my father, and I headed over to his house (about a 15 minute drive) to pick up some laundry I'd left there, and to explain the situation to him. Mr. Cap stayed behind with the neighbor/s in case anyone showed up to help.

While I was gone, the fire department showed up and discovered that the sprinkler system's pipes had frozen (hurrah!). They turned that off, and the water flowing into our condos finally came to a stop. At this point we only had the water damage to worry about.

The condo manager showed up around 7:30/8:00 pm and left us a large fan to start blowing on our hallway. this was actually sufficient for the water Mr. Cap and I had received, however it turned out that the other two occupied units in our building had ended up with a lot more water than we had. At least a foot of water in their garages, and fully soaked mechanical rooms.

Mr. Cap and I came out lucky, but I really hope our neighbors do alright. It also started snowing during this whole debacle. Pretty, but a constant reminder that the temperatures are getting really cold here this year.

The Second Night

Last night we were supposed to have a snow storm--an expected foot of snow in the city I work in, and about 3-5 inches at our new home. My boss warned me to take my time getting in this morning, so I went to bed with the hopes that I'd be getting to spend the morning working on unpacking while waiting for the snow to let up.

Unfortunately for my plans, we ended up getting an inch of snow. Tops. We got more snow on the day we moved in (a day that was only supposed to have a dusting/no snow at all)!

The weather men really seem to be off the mark this year...

On the bright side, school was cancelled so the commute to work was an absolute breeze. I wish the traffic was so light every day!

The First Night

The first night sleeping in our condo was...really strange. I think the fact that I've been sleeping on a mattress on the floor for almost 2 years has made it difficult for me to sleep on a supported bed. I woke up with the entire left side of my body and my back hurting. Oh well--nothing a little Advil won't fix!

After that, Mr. Cap and I realized that we couldn't find out shower curtain. So morning showers occured without one, and I think the walls in the bathroom were all made a bit cleaner due to this (that's my positive spin on things!).

But other than that--not bad! It's so strange to wake up in a new place and think "I can do whatever I want here". The "whatever I want" mostly consisted of running around looking for missing hair products while half-dressed, but it's still a step in the right direction. 

The Move

It's crazy to think that we now have all of our furniture back. After almost two years of having all of our Earthly possessions stored in a pod (thanks, U-Haul!) today...today is the day we got them delivered. 

The move also happened to coincide with a surprise snow storm (hello, 4 to 6 inches of mashed-potato snow!). 

Everyone was a bit surprised when the big snowflakes began to fall. All the weather reports for the day had claimed that there would be a slight dusting of snow, or just some rain. Well, no rain happened. But we quickly came to realize that we have a wonderful view when all the trees are covered in snow!

Unfortunately, as pretty a it was we still had to get all the boxes and furniture into the condo. The poor guy delivering the pods to us almost didn't make it up the hill on our street. That was slightly horrifying--both of fear of him being pulled back down the hill by the thousands of pounds shoved into the pods, and also the fear that everything inside would be smashed up just before it made it back to us.

Thankfully he had some amazing driving techniques and was able to safely make it over to our unit (mental note--need to make sure I replace my tires soon. I'm not sure if they'll get me up the hill in weather like this, and it would suck to have to park far away and trudge up the hill...).

Mr. Cap and I weren't sure how much the guys were willing to help us (since they are only meant to unload the pod), but they brought all of the heaviest stuff up into our condo. It was a beautiful thing. We were worried for a bit that our couch wasn't going to fit in through the door, but eventually they found a way to get it done. This way included removing the front door, then deciding the back door was acutally a more viable option...but still, it worked out! And I'm so pleased to have the furniture inside the house instead of inside a pod, that I don't even care how they got the stuff in here. Suffice to say, all the large furniture pieces (except for our mattress and box spring) are now safely tucked away in their new homes. On Monday Mr. Cap and a friend of ours are going to bring the bed over to the condo. So until then...there is a lot of unpacking to be seen in our futures.