One of Uncle Joe’s aides, Barbara, is scared of the dogs so I told her that I would either keep them outside in the fenced in side yard or in Tom’s and my area of the house. Tuesday I left them on the upstairs porch while Tom and I dropped off the rental truck and shopped for a refrigerator.

Around 1pm I got a call from Uncle Joe that Louella was wondering about the house and what should he do. I told him to let her out into the side yard and I would head home shortly. While on my way home, she dug under the gate of the side yard. The guard had changed by this time and Phyllis was on duty and put her on the downstairs porch. She escaped again through the door from the porch to the garage which is usually closed but was standing wide open when I arrived home. I went looking for her me and found her on the front terrace. The only explanation that I could think of was that Louella had used her mind control on Uncle Bud to open the door from the upstairs porch to the other section of the house and then she climbed down the front staircase, and then later she commanded him to open the garage doors for her.
Fast forward to last night: I left both dogs on the upstairs porch again and came home to find Rahab waiting inside the east terrace door for me. Just Rahab. Louella was still upstairs.

As I don’t believe Rahab has mind control powers, the dogs must have learned to teleport.

Wednesday afternoon I needed to pick up copies of the house key - I had left the original at the locksmith’s that morning as the copies had to be hand cut.
When I returned home, Uncle Joe was on the phone with Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud (the 96 year-old) had driven down to his house about ten houses down the road to do his shredding. (Someone told him that his identity could be stolen from his mail so he shreds his mail - all of it - even the catalogs - the whole catalogs - and he gets a four inch stack of mail everyday.) When Uncle Bud punched in his alarm code, it didn’t register and the siren went off. He couldn’t get it to stop going off. When the alarm company called, he understood them to tell him to pull it off the wall, so he yanked the entire keypad out of the wall.
So I get home and Uncle Joe is telling Phyllis, his aide, to walk down and sort everything out because the police are probably on their way and he doesn’t want them carting Uncle Bud off to jail. I got the stroller and walked down with her. On the way, George, the mailman (who stops in every afternoon for a piece of cake and a glass of milk), stopped us and said he had tried disconnecting the battery from the alarm, but that hadn’t helped, so he had flipped the main circuit breaker to shut off the alarm. Phyllis and I arrive and Uncle Bud is going on and on about how he now has no power. I flip the breaker and all is fine for 60 seconds, and then the siren starts to wail again. I turn off the breaker, I talk to the alarm people who say that his system is old and they’ll need to send out a sales rep next week to give him a bid for a new system. I ask them to please send someone out now so that Uncle Bud can have power in his house. She transfers me to someone else who says someone will be out the next day at 2pm.(No one shows.) I go in the house and look at all of the outlets in the house for the plug to the alarm. Can’t find it. By the way, Uncle Bud’s house has the wall colors from the 1960s and could be a designer house today. Phyllis asks what’s behind a door in the garage, the one place I hadn’t looked because the baby was beginning to fuss and there was a ladder against the door. She moved the ladder, we peeked in, and there was the alarm plug. I had to find a screwdriver to unplug it from the outlet, did so, Uncle Bud is still going on and on about the house not having power and what is he going to do and that awful noise, I flipped the breaker back on, and presto - lights with no siren going off. Uncle Bud was amazed. I am now the cat’s meow. Kendall, Phyllis and I walked home.

…when asleep.

We rented a HUGE Penske truck on Saturday, loaded on Sunday, drove and unloaded on Monday, returned the rental, found internet service and bought a refrigerator on Tuesday, and Wednesday Tom rode a $59 Airtran flight back to Atlanta. Tom is going to be working on the house to get it ready for selling. Rahab rode with Tom in the rental truck, and Louella with me and the baby in the Corolla.

We had a huge moving sale last Saturday. We couldn’t have done it without our housemates’ help…and we’re all still friends! We got rid of a good bit of furniture and lots of odds and ends that we liked and were nifty, but that we just don’t have room for in the new place. It’s so hard to let go of stuff. But they are, after all, just things.

Here we are taking a break:

I’m stressed about moving, but don’t have the hands free enough to write. So here’s a cute picture instead.