That’s right, the big move-in day is tomorrow! We have our final walkthrough this afternoon and Denise and I are beyond excited!!
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A couple days, a successful surgery and a healthy chunk of change later, our little patient is home and doing fine! She gets her bandages taken off on Friday. Then her sutures get removed in 10-14 days and she’ll be good to go. She’s supposed to have “restricted activity” for 8 weeks but if today is any indication, she may have other ideas. Oh well, at the very least we’re keeping her from doing any jumping.
Oh, and she also successfully went #1 and #2 outside today!
Apparently discontent with the already high number of changes in our lives recently, Denise and I took the plunge and decided to get a puppy that we both fell in love with yesterday. She’s a 10-week-old American Eskimo/Papillon mix named (Captain) Morgan.
Morgan and Denise
Oh, but that’s just the start of the adventure! After only owning her for a mere 2 or 3 hours, Denise came back downstairs with her after showing her to her parents. As she was bending over to put Morgan down, she suddenly kicked away and fell awkwardly onto the berber carpet downstairs. She immediately started to yelp loudly and her front paw seemed to dangle oddly.
So… off to the vet we went. We learned that she had a clean break of the two bones in her lower limb and she’ll need to have surgery tomorrow. As you can probably imagine, that won’t be cheap!
It’s now 11:30pm and we’re home… puppy-less. She’s staying overnight at the vet and probably tomorrow as well. Denise is obviously a little broken up over the whole matter and she feels a little guilty for “breaking our puppy”. But hopefully in a week or so, she’ll be good as new. Both of them. 
For those that didn’t know yet, Denise and I are building a house up in Blaine. We were fortunate enough to stumble into a really good situation and we’re really excited about it! We have a tentative closing date of November 26th or sooner (obviously we’re really keeping our fingers crossed for the “sooner”). They should be able to give us a firmer date in a couple weeks when it all gets framed in.
So far, we have the beginnings of a foundation complete with basement walls. They just backfilled it a few days ago. Check out pictures here.
After a series of delays for various paperwork-related reasons on the buyer’s end, we finally closed on the condo and moved out yesterday. We’ve now officially taken up residence (temporarily) with the in-laws in Cottage Grove. We expect to get some good news from the bank within the next couple days on the short sale we’re pursuing up in Blaine. So hopefully we’ll be living here a month at the most!
For some post-move pictures of the condo, click here.
About a week and a half ago, we completed a task that we began over a year ago when we undertook a whole series of home improvements… we finally put our condo on the market. Quite shockingly, we got an awesome offer on it a mere 3 days later! And just like that, a 12-year chapter of my life will come to an overdue close when we move next Thursday, 7/10.
Making the transition somewhat difficult is the fact that we may not be able to move into the house we fell in love with last week up in Blaine until the middle of August, although that could possibly change (knock on wood). So the tentative plan is to have the movers store our stuff while we shack up with Denise’s parents which is, unfortunately, way down in Cottage Grove!
I experienced a definite highpoint in my life tonight. The wedding? Not even close. I actually got to meet Chocolate Rain guy (Tay Zonday), perpetrator of one of the most viral videos of the last couple years! We were at Leeann Chin and he just happened to walk in. So, much to the embarrassment of Denise and my mom, I went and asked if I could get a picture with him…
For the uninitiated…
It’s good to be back but at the same time, it kinda sucks that it’s over. Here are some stats from the road:
- Total distance driven: 4,365 miles.
- Number of states driven through: 17, not including the District of Columbia (MN, IA, MO, IL, KY, TN, GA, FL, SC, NC, VA, MD, PA, NJ, OH, IN and WI).
- State capitols driven through: 7, once again not including D.C. (Des Moines, IA; Nashville, TN; Atlanta, GA; Richmond, VA; Harrisburg, PA; Madison, WI and St. Paul, MN).
- Most expensive gas seen: $4.19 somewhere in PA.
- Number of Wal-Mart trucks seen: 51.
- State with most dangerously conservative drivers: Iowa.
- State with most dangerously insane drivers: Florida.
- Money spent on tolls: somewhere in the $30-40 range… stupid northeast.
- Philly cheesesteaks consumed by yours truly: 2.
- Number of viscious sea gull attacks resulting in loss of pizza: 1.
We had a blast at Six Flags Great America today! Although Denise hated the very first ride we went on, the Superman Ultimate Flight ride. Don’t get me wrong, Denise is no wuss when it comes to rides, she pretty much goes on them all. But she hates the ones where it’s only the harness that lowers when you get on that’s keeping you from a painful, messy death. And the Superman ride is the epitomy of that.
Similar to the Batman ride (which we rode on twice and loved), where you’re hanging from the track, the Superman ride throws in an extra twist. Just before it starts, the chairs spin you forward 90 degrees so you’re facing the ground which, as the name would indicate, gives the illusion that you’re flying like Superman. I thought it was a blast but Denise, not so much.
And as long as I’m apparently reviewing rides, the Raging Bull has to be the freakiest roller coaster I’ve been on so far! The only disappointment of the day is that the new Dark Knight coaster was just days from opening! We’ll have to come back for that one. 
Anyway, we left around 5:30pm and drove a few hours up to Baraboo, WI, near the Wisconsin Dells.
Today was a travelling day. We drove from Cleveland to just past Chicago in Gurnee, IL, so we can go to Six Flags Great America tomorrow!
The big highlight of the day is that I got to cross another fast food joint off my list of chains that I had never been to, Fatburger. All in all, quite tasty.
We spent the afternoon today touring the Gettysburg battle site. The overcast, rainy weather matched the eerie feeling I got. The entire battlefield area seems virtually untouched since 1865 except for the monuments littered everywhere. It looks exactly like every picture/painting/movie I’ve ever seen of it. It sounds very corny and cliché but walking around out there you can almost see everything happening before your eyes and imagine what it must’ve sounded like.
After spending a few hours there, we headed west on a very picturesque drive through the mountains of western Pennsylvania. A few hundred miles later and we’re in Cleveland, OH.
We spent the day and afternoon hanging around Atlantic City. Among the highlights, Denise getting attacked by seagulls! Turns out the seagulls on the Boardwalk are fairly aggressive, to say the least. This is mostly because the little old ladies (which AC is FULL of!) insist on feeding them, despite the signs posted everywhere that explicitly instruct you not to!
Anyway, I unfortunately missed this whole episode but here’s how it was described to me. She was bringing her slice of pizza down the Boardwalk to meet up with me for lunch when she felt a tapping on her shoulder. She thought it was either somebody or something bumping into her shoulder but she turned only to find a very gutsy seagull sitting on her shoulder! Before she could react he had made a grab for, and got, a pepperoni off her slice. When she got to where I was, she was almost in tears. Don’t worry, she and I can laugh about it now. Well, I do anyway…
When we’d had enough of AC, we took a long leisurely drive (partly to avoid tolls) up to Philadelphia and across half of Pennsylvania to Gettysburg.
After walking what had to have been at least 5 miles yesterday, we got kind of a late start today. Once we got going, we headed towards Independence Hall. Since we were in Philadelphia and in need of sustenance, I just had to have a real authentic Philly cheesesteak. And there just happened to be a famous place right across from the parking meter we found called Sonny’s Famous Steaks. I ordered up a “Classic”… a cheesesteak with Cheez Whiz and fried onions. It was absolutely delicious!
After lunch we walked a few blocks to check out Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. This kind of stuff has been especially interesting to me since I finished watching (and really enjoyed) the HBO John Adams mini-series right before the wedding. Before heading out of Philly, we just had to check out the Rocky statue. Ok, that was totally my idea but I dragged Denise along. We got our pictures with it too but I can’t really upload it yet since we’re once again without highspeed internet access. What is this? The 90s?!
Tonight we’re once again looking out on the ocean from a top-floor room. This time we’re at the Showboat Resort & Casino in Atlantic City, NJ.
We had an exhausting day today. After grabbing some food, we took the Metro down to the Mall. Our first stop was the Museum of Natural History. But we were very disappointed to find out that the Museum of American History was closed. I had been telling Denise about it–and had gotten her plenty excited about it–since it’s the museum that has a whole bunch of pop culture artifacts. But fortunately the site told us that some select exhibits were currently on display at the Air and Space Museum, which we were planning on going to anyway. However, our hopes were once again crushed when we found out that, in preparation for the Museum of American History’s reopening this fall, they had taken back all of their exhibits so we were completely out of luck. Oh well, we’ll have to come back.
Afterwards, we walked to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, we walked past the Washington Monument to the new World War II Memorial, alongside the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial and then past the White House (we also walked past the Treasury building and Ford’s Theatre).
After having a free drink and appetizer (thanks to horrible service at the hotel sports bar), we embarked on what proved to be the longest, most annoying 120-mile drive before we FINALLY arrived at our hotel in Philadelphia at close to 1am. We got stuck in what had to have been the worst traffic jam either of us has ever been in thanks to some construction in Maryland. And that includes the traffic we had to deal with back home when the 35W bridge fell!! It had to have taken close to two hours to finally get through! Not only that, we hit another one (although not as bad) in Delaware. Does the northeast not know how to do road construction without completely shutting down interstates?! Between that and $4-5 tolls, driving up here is proving to be a pain in the a**!!
We started off the day in Myrtle Beach with a leisurely game of mini-golf at one of the more ridiculous courses I’ve played at called Mt. Atlanticus. Then we had some breakfast/lunch at a local greasy diner, did a little souvenir shopping and we were on our way north.
7 hours or so later, we were pulling into the Grand Hyatt Washington in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C. I gotta say, this is the second night in a row that we’ve lucked out in the hotel room department. Last night, we somehow managed to get an awesome 10th floor suite with a balcony with a private ocean view at the Caribbean Resort & Villas. Tonight, we ended up with a very nice penthouse room at a 4-star hotel with direct, underground access to the Metro and located a mere 5 blocks from The Mall!
