Tag: moving house

November 2019 Run Review and Excess Photo Dump

On the 9th, the first freeze of the season arrived with sleet during the last 1/4 of a 20 mile trot. The sun graffito mocks me.

All change this month with a house purchase (and move), Thanksgiving (and return of the Holiday Run Streak), Impeachment yonder and a snap General Election here.  First, monthly stats:

Miles: 141
Runs: 19
Avg:  7.4 miles/run
Long: 20.4 miles
Pubs on runs: 8, and total: 14
Best pub: King Edward VII

 

The 2019 Holiday Run Streak is the first in a couple of years (these always seem to fall on odd-number years) but at the end of the 2017 effort my inflamed soft tissue injuries dating back to the Ridgeway Challenge were only a few months away from curtailing ALL running for the entire summer of 2018.  In fact, return to form has never completely occurred albeit this year represents a noble effort for an old man.

The rules are dynamic, and this year include a minimum of 3 miles per day but use the ultramarathon training schedule I recently started as a guide for the days with longer runs.  More at the first weekly update, here.

One nice discovery this month was the Harborne Walkway, an old railbed converted to paved foot/bike path running from Harborne into (at least) Smethwick.  Exits onto busy roads but also tunnels under or uses old rail bridges to fly over them.

“Stand for something,” reads the sign one of the background women is carrying at the Mary Macarthur monument in Cradley Heath honouring the trade unionist suffragette who, among a long list of achievements, led a strike of women chain makers here in 1910.  Spotted on a long run on my way to the Wetherspoons a couple miles away:

Another rainy run turned up this monument to the 2nd Boer War with another towering woman (I reckon this is Brittania) flanked by two artillery men:

 

This was the day after Remembrance Day and the sad, solitary tribute of poppies at the base seems fitting to a war about gold, diamonds, and the Boer’s resentment of their British overlords prohibiting slavery nearly a century earlier.  These ladies’ diaphanous gowns were worth the stop:

The running plummeted after the house purchase led us into a pre-move refurbishment rabbit hole.  This is beginning to recover with aforementioned Holiday Streak…its weekly updates will supercede the monthly ones from today.

New House Day 10: Moving day…house becomes home

 

“What kind of house is this,” he said
“Where I have come to roam?”
“It’s not a house,” says Judas Priest
“It’s not a house, it’s a home”
—Bob, of course, and we take the term “a home” in both contexts

This whole thing has been strange.  That first evening when we were standing around the place deciding what to do on Day 0 (god…was that just a week and a half ago?), Jackie reached up and scratched a hole in a corner of some wallpaper then ripped a shred from it.  Later, we both admitted that a terrible feeling of, “should we be doing this?” ran through our heads.  We own the motherfucker…but it still seemed like nowt but a rental.

Then, there was all the work.  It was all too much to do and we set an ambitious and unattainable schedule with the goal of getting the bedrooms and living room painted and plastered and the other ceilings ready for plastering.  We completed all that and a bit more:

Day 0: Take possession, inspect/plan (DB 4 hours, J 2)
Day 1: Wallpaper, initial carpet removal prep (DB, J 10 each))
Day 2: Wallpaper continues, sanding and washing walls for paint DB, J 10 each)
Day 3: Locksmithing and painting (DB, J 8 hours each)
Day 4: Painting, wash ceilings,intercom repair, J met movers at old shack (DB 8, J 6)
Day 5: Painting, plaster ‘key’ coat (DB 11 hours, J 6 + half day NHS)
Day 6: Plastering ceilings in 2 bedrooms (DB 10, J at NHS)
Day 7: Plaster ceiling in living room, last of stairwell wallpaper, paint cutting in (DB 14, J 3 after full day NHS)
Day 8: Packing the move at old house (DB, J 10 each — not including what we’ve piddled with for weeks)
Day 9: First ceiling sandings, paint touch up, carpet removal, bath fixtures, clean up ahead of moving day (DB, J 10 each)
Day 10: Moving, unpacking (DB, J 12 each)
-> Total man hours moving house to home: 184 — equivalent of 4.9 work weeks at 37.5 hours per week not including the time and noble efforts of our three removals guys, today.

Now, surrounded by boxes in our own place it is finally beginning to sink in.  We’re home.

New House Day 8: Old house

9 hours into packing for the Monday move Jackie’s mobile music collection prophetically start playing “Tequila.”  She poked her head out to the conservatory where I was finishing taping the last of the garden boxes and pantomimed a person taking a shot….

I cut the only lime in the house and poured the first of a few shots of agave.  Sublime.  Speaking of Sublime, Santeria was the next song up.

We spent the day packing.  A nice break from the construction work at the new digs (and scheduled as such and on time and under budget, so far) we still feel weirdly like none of it is real.  Very odd for people who have moved house together (forget our transient lives before hooking up…TOGETHER!) 20 previous times including (with one or more cats) 3 transatlantic shifts and one from Athens Georgia to Tucson Arizona (nearly as far and involving a van towing our car and all our shit).

We’re pros.  But, this is still new territory.  Final pre-move efforts on the West Brom end, tomorrow.