One night stand

I’m working in my old Northern Virginia Verizon office for a day, en route to southwestern Virginia to cover the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl for D3football.com, and instead of making Verizon or D3sports.com pick up a hotel room for the night, I decided to spend the night at 406.

And it feels pretty weird.

I have been fairly worried lately about the house. We took it off the market in mid-October because nobody was buying houses anywhere. Thanks, economy. Well, since then, there hasn’t been nearly as much traffic around it, from either our realtor or our friends who might check in on it on occasion. So I was trying to prepare myself for the worst.

And it turns out the worst was unnecessary. The house is actually in fine shape. Looks like we left it. Or like I picture we left it. I’m amazed, after walking through it now, how much we actually got done, and a lot of it in the final weeks.

Plus, for some reason, there's this extra detail work done on the stairs we didn't know about.

Not much to nitpick right now, either. The fridge was plugged in, which seems like a waste if nobody’s looking at the house. At least one of us will be back in the D.C. area in January before we put the house back up for sale, so it can be plugged back in then. And the thermostat was set 10 degrees higher than we asked. No wonder the electric bill last month was so high. And the grass needs to be cut and the leaves raked. I will try to take care of the leaves on Sunday, if the weather cooperates … and if we still have a rake here, come to think of it.

There’s a box of canned food that was supposed to go to a food bank. Nothing I can eat tonight or really for lunch tomorrow, though there’s a can of soup I would be interested in -- if I could only open it.

Of course, the telephone was disconnected months ago. There’s no Internet and nobody to steal from. Our next-door neighbors appear to have abandoned their house. Not sure if they’re in foreclosure or what, but a month or so before we left, they bought a massive Yukon Denali. (I prefer the anagram Denial.) Remember what gas cost this summer? Then the week we left I was talking to one of the people who lived in the house and they said they were going to have to move because they couldn’t afford the mortgage.

But hey, they had a nice new vehicle.

We have little to nothing here in the way of furniture. I brought a towel so I could shower in the morning. The washer and dryer are still here, of course.

And, thankfully, so is the couch. Night, everyone.

Caitlin was here!

Elizabeth's best friend from Virginia paid Minneapolis an unexpected visit last week, as Caitlin's mom had a business meeting here in the area and she got to tag along.

One of Elizabeth's regular laments had been that she likes her new school but misses her old classmates. So it was fun to see the two of them interact a little bit, though most of that happened outside of my view. (And I have a little 10-year-old source who's not talking.)

So we let Elizabeth miss a day and a half of school. I know they went to the Science Museum of Minnesota, and that Caitlin and her mom had dinner with all of us and Caitlin slept over here one night. Elizabeth spent a night with them at their hotel.

For a short while, Robert had two older sisters telling him what to do. And to be honest, if you had your back to them, it was hard to tell who was talking. Elizabeth and Caitlin have very similar speech patterns and use a lot of the same phrases. If Caitlin had dark hair, whew, you'd never know.

We're talking about driving out to D.C. for Barack Obama's inauguration, so she would see Caitlin then. And Elizabeth wants to go to summer camp with her this summer ... though that is still up for discussion.

A farewell to 406

As requested, took some pictures of our house in Sterling, literally on our way out the door.


In the master bath, I did most of the tearing up of the old (old!) linoleum tile and I managed to lay the easy tiles. Cate finished it off, though, doing all the hard parts.


The kitchen got new hardwood floors. Cate had done a deep clean on the cabinets a couple weeks earlier and we had replaced every appliance in here in the course of our five years in the house.


The living room has new hardwood floors as well. Note the incredibly disposable rug.


Another angle on the living room.


Cate stands in the entryway.


I don't have time to do a good photoshop job on this and the phone doesn't have a delay timer ... or a stand ... to get us both in the same picture.

Elizabeth is SOL

The state of Virginia gives standardized tests to each grade schooler annually called the Standards of Learning and fourth graders are in the middle of them as we speak. Elizabeth starts her third day of testing on Monday, with this set covering social studies.

They're multiple choice questions, so in the end, she knows she can pretty much always eliminate some answers before resorting to giving an answer, even if she's not sure. However, Elizabeth was distraught to learn that she got a question wrong on the math portion on Friday.

"How many meters are in a kilometer?" she asked us at the dinner table that night.

As I usually do when one of the kids asks a question like that, I turn it back around at them. "Well, Elizabeth, how many meters are there in a kilometer?"

She hesitatingly responds, "a hundred?"

I told her the bad news and she was visibly shaken. That's when we realized it was a test question she'd gotten wrong.

Last year she somehow got two questions wrong for the entire week, but she didn't know that until her scores came back over the summer. (Not like there is ever any danger of her not passing.)

I don't know if she was worried by the result, but tonight we spent an hour and a half reviewing U.S. and Virginia history. Thankfully for me, a lot of it overlaps what we learned in American History class since so much stuff happened here. Zebulon Pike? Not mentioned.

We'll see how she feels when she comes home from school tomorrow. The area which needed the most review seemed to be the branches of government, and that's without even talking about checks and balances or overriding the president's veto or all the fun stuff in that area.

They don't even have to know who the governor is. In fact, a study sheet she brought home from school had Mark Warner's name and picture on it under executive branch. He hasn't been governor in more than two years.

Now I guess I'd better get to sleep. I have to get up and make Elizabeth a good breakfast in the morning.