This past weekend, as beautiful as the weather was, was spent painting the house and dragging more boxes out from our rental in an effort to get the house as ready as possible for the big move on Saturday. The more boxes we can get over to the house now, the less time we need the movers.
We’ve been getting to know some of the neighbours. At our current rental, the next door neighbours smoke pot. In the new house, the next door neighbours…smoke pot. Which doesn’t bother me so much until the smell is wafting into our house. However, the new folks seem a little more conscientious about it. There aren’t 18-to-21 year old young men hanging out outside my front door smoking skunk weed at the new place.
The other neighbours have two young boys close to the age of our own kid and they’ve already been playing together. They seem pretty nice. The husband collects and restores vintage video game systems and is possibly a bigger nerd than me.
They were happy that we appeared to cleaning up the house. Apparently we weren’t the only ones to have noticed the previous owners weren’t exactly house proud. So over the weekend, Kerry got rid of a lot of their junk via Kijiji and I spent three hours dragging their leftover stuff to the curb to be picked up for today’s garbage collection (yes, I put it on the curb after 7:00pm as per D.D.O.’s by-laws). In addition to broken shovels, lamp posts, and plaster garden cherubs, there was a full garbage can with a smell that would turn the strongest of stomachs. I do not have the strongest of stomachs. It weighed a ton as I’m sure the heavy rains of the past two weeks soaked it and contributed to the foul stench. At the condos, when garbage is collected, you drop your bags on the corner. It doesn’t look too attractive, when you realize how densely populated these condos are, to see these huge piles of garbage. After dividing some of the garbage into bags to lessen the weight, I realized this can was beyond saving so I just took it to the curb in the hopes the garbage men will just toss the whole thing into the truck.
My point, and I do have one, is that all this work resulted in a very sore back this morning. I used to have back problems to the extent that I would throw it out because I turned the wrong way and would have to spend the day in bed. The reasoning for this is simply that I don’t exercise enough, particularly with regards to strength training.
Our neighbourhood has a newly opened gym with pretty reasonable rates. I’ve been thinking about joining as the gym at the office is always crowded at lunch and going before or after work isn’t an option as I have a kid to pick up and drop off. I think this new place might be a better option and maybe I could stop throwing out my back every time I do yard work or paint a wall.
John from Saint John 