Dismantling

So we have a new house, papers are signed, money has changed hands, and we have a key and a garage door opener. Here's the house we chose:

Nothing too special, and a distinct lack of lawn, but it's pleasant inside and we think we'll be comfortable there. It's smaller than our current house -- smaller lot, smaller driveway, smaller square footage -- but I think we can learn to live in a small house again.

We now have two weeks to organize the move, so I've started packing books. Fortunately we saved all the boxes from our move 3 years ago. Spiders are living among them, so one can't just go out to the garage and grab a box -- one must gingerly grab a corner of a box and take it to the front yard to inspect it, then de-dust it, rubbing it on what's left of our front lawn, and only then bring it inside to be used.

Today I decided that it was time to dismantle the tortoise pens. Our landlord gave us the OK to set up new tortoise pens in our new backyard, which means we have to bring along all our cinder blocks. So I laboriously picked up each extremely heavy cinder block, knocked all the dirt and leaves and dead spiders out of it, and stacked it with the others next to the gate. Here I'm about one third done, with one pen mostly dismantled:

Here are some of the little critters that were living in one of the uncovered cinder blocks:

So THAT'S where cockroaches spend the winter!

And this is hard to see, but if you look at the inside corner in the foreground of this brick, you might be able to see a black shape with lots of legs and a little red hourglass? And it was very much alive. I decided to leave this one alone for now.

And here are two boos, helping me stack bricks.

Ha ha, helping, yeah right. See those two colored disks that Baby B is holding over his eyes? Those are toy "coins" that are supposed to go in his toy cash register. Instead, he dropped them into the stack of bricks, which meant that Mommy had to go get the picker-upper-thingie and manipulate it way down into the dark and grab the little toy coins and then DROP them just as I got them almost out of the cinder blocks...

Their little toy cash register was not my friend today -- earlier, when I was getting ready to go outside, the boos brought it to me and complained that it wasn't working. I inspected it and discovered that the slots where the toy coins are supposed to go were filled with all sorts of other stuff. Cursing, I tried tweezers, pliers, a letter opener, and finally a screwdriver, which I used to take the cash register apart and out popped all the stuff that they'd jammed it with: toy cars, pieces of a plastic toy fence, a marble... Grrrrr. Here they are, the little angels, having snack and making a puzzle, while the toy cash register watches over them serenely:

When we moved out here 3 years ago, boos were 11 months old and we couldn't do any of the packing ourselves -- just impossible. Now boos are 3 years and 10 months old and maybe packing is a little easier. Maybe.