For the last week, Jen and I have been dog-sitting for our neighbors up the street. Their dog Ros is a beautiful, good-natured Doberman who likes to run in the park and chase squirrels. We’ve been taking her for walks twice a day, and after the initial dread of waking up early was gone, I started looking forward to it. It took us a while to figure out her rythyms: she didn’t eat anything until Jen figured out that she liked having company. She doesn’t like walking on grass-she prefers the sidewalk. There’s a particular spot in the park that seems to agree with her delicate sense of modesty.

It’s really interesting what you notice differently about the neighborhood when you’re out waiting for your dog to finish examining the base of each telephone pole. There’s the fellow down the street with an enviable garden in his front yard. His privet hedges are immaculate. Behind that, the lawn is full of huge flowering bushes and plants, in that effortless but hugely difficult rambling-English-garden sort of way. His gladiolus are tall, healthy, and straight, blooming endlessly in multiple colors. Ours are crooked, confused drunkards who get the crap beat out of them every time it rains. I wish I knew what his secret was to gardening.

There’s the newly finished house next door, which, rumor has it, was purchased for more than we paid for our house, gutted, and rehabbed. It looks good in a bland sort of way. They replaced slanty cedar shingle with faux-shingle vinyl siding, which looks too clean for my taste. The windows are all big and new, but they’re the kind with fake mullions that are too narrow to fit the lines of the rest of the house. Strangely enough, I like the garage best—it hasn’t been altered from its original condition, and it features an old-school ‘no parking’ sign and bubble thermometer above crooked barn doors.

Up the way towards the park, the people who bought one of the larger houses in the area decided to enclose the property with one of the strangest fences I’ve seen in a while—an X pattern in wide planking, backed with green chicken wire. The house is was beautiful last year, but I’m sensing a slide into mediocrity—they saw fit to park a mildew-covered popup trailer in the front yard…wait a minute, who am I to be casting stones…?

Last night, we decided to lengthen our usual route by walking down the trolley path to Opie’s for some ice cream. The evening was cool, the sun was behind clouds, and the trees were filled with birdsong. Ros ranged out ahead of us, and I told Jen about my discussion with a bank regarding a home equity line of credit. From what the guy on the phone told me, our house has appreciated a lot more than I’d thought it might, and he was more than happy to extend a generous amount of money at a rate that surprised me. Depending on what two other candidates say today, we’ll be on the road to a new kitchen by Thanksgiving (Turkey Day is the yearly deadline for any Lockardugan renovation plans).

Ros sat at our feet while we contemplated the true meaning of new appliances, eating chocolate ice cream and enjoying the simple pleasures of the evening.

I’m looking into various methods of borrowing some money to have our kitchen updated. From some of the stuff I’ve looked at online, it appears that Maryland is one of only a handful of states that require a free credit report to be issued upon request by law, which is pretty nice. (The national law thing they just passed doesn’t take effect for my side of the country until September.) Step one of the process is going to be cleaning up the credit reports. Step two will be paying somebody $7 for a credit score, so I can then estimate out what a monthly payment will be.

I’m still on the fence as to what approach makes more sense—a home equity loan or a line of credit. The loan is a fixed-rate, immediate payment deal, while the line of credit is a long-term, variable rate bag of money that can be spent willy-nilly, and then after 10 or 15 years comes due. Trouble is, I don’t want to suffer through a hike of 15% interest rates on $20K down the line- personally, I’d rather pay for something fixed that I can bank on.

Next is a call to the accountant to make sure that we can actually use this as a deduction (I’m not sure, but the convoluted way we file taxes makes me think that we deduct.)

Then, I have to shop around for some lending institutions to see who’s got the best rate and who will play ball with us fairly. BoA is basically out—they have enough of my money as it is. I have to dig out the info on our initial lender tonight and see if I can go through them again.

After signing away our firstborn children, we can then sit down with the kitchen people and actually rehab something. This would be HUGE for the Lockardugans, because our current kitchen flooring consists of flattened Dell computer boxes. And that’s an improvement.

All of this makes me very nervous-I hate bankers about as much as I hate going to the doctors’, because of the legal complexities involved. Too many stories of “hidden fees” and “legal fineprint” worry the shit out of me. I don’t want to sign away something we’ve worked too hard and too for, and I especially don’t like signing over a chunk of our house. I’ve spent some time looking for tips about the process online so that I don’t steer us into a bad corner, but my fears of screwing it up sometimes paralyze me into inaction. So this exercise is more about staring down the big bad monster than it is about running and hiding (or merely doing nothing at all.)

On deck for the next Big Adult Move is life insurance, and concurrently, a will of some kind. If I get hit by a bus, I want my wife to get the house, not the State of Maryland. Again, the specter of Large Legal Documents makes me shiver in dread, but I’ve been putting it off for too long now (I was thinking about this as Jen and I flew over the dark Atlantic on our way back from Ireland, and quickly turned my attention back to the showing of In Good Company. A brief sidenote: American Airlines shows the same films BOTH WAYS across the Atlantic. Thanks for that, shitheads) and it needs to be done.

This is the day after it was applied, when we could walk on it. It’s really coming together, and the fellow doing the work is doing a fantastic job.

Somewhere in America, a floor sander is whirring. It’s removing the top layer of dirt and wax and crud and stain and age from our oak floors, and collecting it in a bag to be disposed of somewhere else. Rick showed up at 8:30 this morning to do the dirty deed (and let me just tell you, this is an awful day to be sanding floors in Baltimore: the humidity we had been avoiding for a month suddenly landed like a sack of cement yesterday) and he was sweating before he got any of the tools out of the van. We closed the door behind him and RAN for the coffee shop.

I’ll back up a little bit here and say that the Cauzzi family is doing well. Jen and I brought barbecue to Todd and Heather, and in between feedings, they were actually able to enjoy some food of their own. Declan and Callie are tiny sleepy little people, mostly zonked out between meals for as long as we were there. Jen and I both got our baby on, however— we traded Declan back and forth for about an hour, and he slept through the whole thing. Great going, you guys. They are beautiful.

The rest of the weekend was a blur of cleaning, moving, packing, shopping, and more cleaning. All our first-floor furniture is on the front porch. We took some time to set up the automatic sprinklers and tend to the gardens (which will be in full bloom the week we’re in Ireland, I’m sure) and square away the cats, who are probably doing laps in sheer terror as the huge metal machine grinds away at the floor above their heads. I took a crowbar and pulled the disgusting ‘wainscoting’ from the living room wall—it was built out from the wall by about 2 inches, covering that much of the oak flooring—and tossed the wood out the window and into the garage.

Sunday we avoided the humidity by heading to the Arundel Mills Mall in search of some clothes to replace the 1995-era rags I still wear. Six hours later, we came back home and finished preparing the house for demolition. Some high points:

• A queen Sleep Number bed with the digital control is considerably less than we thought it would be, which means it’s on our list of Stuff To Buy When We Get Home, right after an air conditioner.
• For the first time in my life, I own a suitcase. Instead of jamming all my crap into a duffel bag (you may laugh, but I made it from here to Italy and back again in a $15 duffel bag) I own a wheeled Samsonite suitcase, in fashionable black. This is progress.
• I may have found the replacement for my Syracuse hat. I bought this aleady beat-up hat used at Saks North Avenue for $.95 in 1991, and it has been the only hat to correctly fit my misshapen alien head since then. It’s been through art school, camping trips, to Italy, Bimini, California, and countless other places; it almost drowned in the Atlantic Ocean until the co-sponsor of our diving trip cried, “WILSON!” and jumped off the boat, swam back, and got it; It went everywhere I did, and it’s showing its age. I tried on a women’s Adidas hat yesterday, and it seemed to fit my head correctly (the brim is not three feet too wide, which makes most hats look like a duck swallowed my scalp) so I bought it.
• We are taking the Italian good-luck frog with us to Ireland. May he watch over us as we drive on the wrong side of the road.
• I have two green bell peppers growing in the greenhouse. The gladiolous in the perennial bed are as tall as the bedframe.

Tonight we are being graciously put up by our neighbors M&S, who (I’m pretty sure) have air conditioning and a queen bed. Hopefully after four days, they will still be speaking to us.

Here’s the kitchen floor after two layers of crud came up. Note the lovely tarpaper and gunk on the otherwise untouched and remarkably intact hardwood.