Pooped, peacock and otherwise

We are exhausted. Moving stinks. We are completely, officially in and have been for nearly two weeks now; our first night here was Saturday, June 22. The days after that included many, many trips back and forth from the old house to move all the "little" things: artwork off the walls, stools, lights, a drum set, whatever didn't fit in the green boxes and everything in the garage. And then we got to move all the downstairs stuff from the garage, where it had been waiting while the floor was curing.

We have a lot of stuff. We lived and traveled in Asia for 10 years, so we consider that an excuse for having all our cool Asian stuff, but in reality we just have a lot of stuff. Thankfully, we also have some excellent family members who actually volunteered to help us move. Steph's sister and brother-in-law were with us for a day, schlepping our stuff up to the new place. Bryan's Dad, Nelson, and his girlfriend, Barbara, were absolute rock stars, doing whatever needed to be done for several days: packing, hauling, organizing, and, best of all, feeding us. Barbara's fun, bubbly personality disguises her true identity as an absolute workhorse (which she says comes from growing up on a farm). Somehow she managed to work for hours and still look cute and clean in a white shirt and flats. Gold stars all around!

In the ensuing days, we've worked day and night to unpack and organize. Having rented moving boxes was an excellent incentive to get unpacked; the rental package included two weeks with the boxes, and we knew we would pay extra for every day after that. We did pretty well; we only paid for two extra days! Most of it even got put away, although a few things ended up in piles on the garage floor. Watching those boxes go was a huge relief!

Our Indonesian and Korean pots work beautifully on their shelf.

Art is going up around the house.

The deck is where we pretend we're on vacation.

Although our determination to get moved in has us working like crazy, we still have to run kids to their activities (competitive soccer for both and marching band for Hayden as well), buy and make food, and, apparently, go to work. And return things. And buy different things to replace them. And make previously unplanned purchases, such as, say, a power washer to clean all the peacock poop off our beautiful concrete. And then Bryan spent most of a day cleaning the concrete -- which looks much, much better. We just need to learn how to train the peacock to poop in the garden ...

We are actually attempting to train him to stay off the deck while we're eating. He gives us some pretty forlorn looks while we shoo him off the concrete, but he seems to be learning.

Larry wore out his welcome on the deck.

Bits of the landscaping are gradually coming together as well: We have gravel for our fire pit area and memory garden areas, many plants are placed and ready for planting this week, and I'm planting the Stepable plants I bought to fill in the crevices between concrete slabs in the front. We're watering all our baby plants and realizing that, although we planned deer-proof landscaping, we didn't account for a peacock. And Larry likes the Irish Moss Stepables, Elderberry and Dicentra plants, plus our new apple tree, as well as several others. We'll be buying plant cages next -- or maybe having peacock for dinner.

Rachel has been taming and beautifying our yard.

The fire pit area has gravel ready to go and is waiting for perimeter curbing.

Stepables awaiting planting.

Yoda the cat meets Larry the peacock.

Where's Larry? He sleeps in these trees. Does his silhouette give him away?