Little helper

Before too long, LT will be giving up his room to the new baby. Don't worry about him though, his new room will be bigger, have more widows and even a nice little balcony.

If LT's new room sounds a lot like my office, that's because it is my office and I'm getting evicted in a few months. The way I see it, I've basically got three choices,

1) Actually going into the office every single day. M-F. All year.

Clearly that's not going to work.

2) Move my office into the currently unfinished basement.

Kari calls it 'the dungeon' although compared to our old house, it's a freaking paradise. The crawlspace of the old house earned the well deserved nickname of "spidey hole" with the not to code and probably not even legal hole that had been haphazardly dug out from under the existing structure. The new basement is really pretty nice, as unfinished basements go, and I could probably manage just fine with my office down there. However, it is a little too reminiscent of something I might have done in high school. Now that I'm a father and all, I feel like I should do things in a little more proper and acceptable manner (sometime ask Kari about my newspaper window shades). So that leaves us with...

3) Finish the basement and move my office down there. We'd also get a nice play/family room, another bathroom and a legitimate guest room. So after some serious stressing out over the decision (because that's what I do) we've decided to finish the basement*.


We have to get everything out of the basement before the work begins and yesterday morning LT gave me a hand while Kari was at yoga. For some reason he was really into the bumbo chair, which had been in storage for many months, which is supposed to be only for little babies who are just learning to sit up on their own. He was never a big fan of it when he was the appropriate age for it but he sure had fun with it yesterday. Somehow though, I don't think the chair's designers intended it to be used by a kid that could pick it up and carry it all the way across the house in order to have a nice seat for playing with his trains.




LT was also a big help by going through the mail while I carried stuff up from the basement. He opened some of it (I think that's a felony, son) and filed the rest inside the window shades.



* And by saying we are going to finish the basement, what I really mean is that we are going to hire someone else to do the work. Had my grandfather said those same words, the actual meaning would have been very very different. He built the house my dad grew up in with his own hands. I installed a towel rack once and even fixed a leaky swamp cooler but that's about the extent of my handyman skills. I often lament that I don't have the same ability to create real real physical things of quality like my grandfather. I write computer programs and lately I don't even do much of that. I spend more time thinking about how to write computer programs and telling other people how to actually do it. While there is some value in that, it can feel very abstract compared to the act of physical construction.