Lycorne With an I instead of the Y it's French for Unicorn. I just like this spelling better.

On the thirteenth, I had my first appointment with the nurse, and then one with Dr. Peck. The appointments went well, just long, my first appointment was at 1:30, and I didn’t get out of the clinic until a few minutes before 5. At this point everything seems to be going well, and it appears that I should be able to have things the way I would like. What do I mean by that you ask? Well, for starters it means that I will have a midwife rather than a doctor, and I’m looking into have a water birth. Sure it’s early yet and a lot of things could happen before April 25th, but currently there is no reason for me not to have a midwife or waterbirth.

I am greatly looking forward to our move to Trempealeau by the end of the month. It’s going to be a relief to have our own place, and not be sharing living space with Karen. Lately she has been really upsetting Shane a lot and while I do my best to stay completely out of it, just the raised voices of them arguing can set me a bit on edge. Luckily whenever it happens I just tell myself to relax, there is only a few more weeks of this.

While I’m happy that Shane and I are moving on, I’m still sorry about the pain and upset he’s going through now with his mother’s behavior. While I find it difficult to dredge up sympathy for her, I really wish this wasn’t so difficult on Shane.

What can I say, I get hundreds of spam emails every day. Like everyone else, I hate it. I do what I can to keep a handle on it, but I can’t even control my own. Since Shane and I announced to our families of our upcoming family addition, I have been receiving many more spam mails, and now they are coming to my personal email box. While the person who added me to babytobee.com may have thought they were helping me, I really really wish that instead of signing up my personal email address, they had sent me a link to the place and perhaps a line or two of why they thought I would find it useful.

How do I know it’s not something I signed up for? Well that’s easy, I have an endless number of possible email addresses to choose from since I own my own domain. Whenever I sign up for things on the web, I am always picky about the email address I use. I select an address that will allow me to have some indication of whether or not, the site I went to sells my email address to other lists as well. This also allows me to block that email address if I start receiving an unreasonable amount of spam at it.

Bottom line everyone? Don’t sign someone else up for an email list. Even if you think it’s the best thing in the world, or right up their alley. Always talk to the individual first, either in email or person, and it’s really much nicer to send them the link to allow them the choice. I will admit that I have sent people invitations to lists, or places before, but I do believe I have always talked to the individual first. And while I may send someone an invitation email, I haven’t signed them up on a list, they’re the ones that I allow to make that choice for themselves.

While I could make separate posts, I’ve decided it’s not critical for me to do so. Instead of making a couple short posts, I’ll make this one and include the information I would have put in each.

On Friday we meet with our future landlord. I recall mentioning that Muriel owned the property, but she recently had a hip replacement, and can no longer handle the step to and from her place. This is why she has moved in with her daughter and son-in-law who have a ranch home with everything on one level. Muriel’s daughter and son-in-law are the ones that will actually be handling the rental.

While I can’t recall her son-in-law’s name of the top of my head, he’s a nice individual and quickly addressed all our concerns. They live in Mindoro and he works in Galesville, so he’ll be close in the event that something happens at the rental. He also mentioned that Muriel has 5 dogs and several birds (hence the animal smell in the house). He’s already told us that as far as he’s concerned, the place is ours, and he’s offered to allow us to move in on the 15th for a half-month rent. Now all we have to do it get him the deposit and rent, and it’s a done deal.

On Friday night, we had a RiverRail session at Dennis’ again. It went as smoothly as always, and was just as much fun as expected. We had talked about missing it or only attending part of it so that we could see Skeeter Lewis again. Shane and I had our first date listening to Skeeter Lewis at Riverside park during the Forth of July Festival La Crosse has every year. Unfortunately this year without our own vehicle, we were unable to listen to him play jazz.

We had received word that he would be playing at Skipper’s on Friday night, but while we having such fun at Dennis’ we decided not to end the evening in a smoke filled bar, even if it was to listen to some wonderful jazz. Besides, I had awoken early, missed my afternoon nap that day, and was quite tired. I actually went to bed once we arrive home, and for anyone who knows what I night owl I am, yes it was very unusual.

On Saturday, Bob had asked us to go to Caledonia with him, to met his friend Rosa. She is a very nice lady, and while I could go into much more detail, I think my husband summed it up nicely yesterday in his blog. If you’re interested you can see what he wrote here.

This morning, we had an appointment to view a 2 bedroom apartment in Trempealeau at 10:00. As for the apartment we viewed, while the price may have been right it was just too small. It would have worked for the two of us last year, an the price would have been inline with that, but it just won’t work now. One of the main problems was there was no place to set up the home office, and the other was that both of the bedrooms were rather small.

Since we were already in Trempealeau, we went to the Wildflower Cafe for breakfast/lunch. While we were there, we mentioned to our waitress, Alice, what had brought us to town that morning. Once that she found out the we were looking for a reasonable priced three bedroom rental, she brought us a telephone number of someone who had just such a place to rent. Shane talked to the owner, Muriel, on the phone while we were there and received more of the particulars on the place, as well as the location.

Once we finished our lunch, we drove to the place to get out and walk around the yard. Once we were walking around we found the side door wide open, and while did call in, no one answered our call. Shane called the owner immediate, to let her know about this. She said that we could go on in, check the place out, but be sure to lock up when we left.

The building is a double-wide trailer on a basement foundation. The basement is rented out as a separate apartment, so we don’t have access to that, but we would have half the two car garage. As I mentioned, we were looking for a three bedroom apartment, this duplex has washer/drier hookups, the kitchen is a bit small (but manageable) with new appliances, a nice sized dining area, a huge living room, a 3/4 bathroom (no tub, but has a shower), and three bedrooms. One of the bedrooms has a build-in bookcase, but no carpet, and paneling on the wall. This is the room we will be using for the office. Of the two other bedrooms, both have carpet, one a deep rose with a nice light walls (looks like they have been replaced from the original paneling to panelboard, but much better looking than painted paneling), the other one has darker carpet (a mixture of browns I believe) and paneling on the walls.

I should mention that most of the place has paneling, a lot of which has been painted over, which I guess helps some when you absolutely hate paneling as much as I do. In the dining area the paneling has one of those paint treatments that has one base color and then two other colors “sponged” on it, so it’s mild and not overbearing. The living room appears to have panelboard in a heavy floral pattern, but that’s not too bad. The hallway has the paneling painted yellow (which I don’t necessarily like), but it was a nice boarder next to the ceiling. The laundry area though is this icky light green painting on the paneling there, and it looked like perhaps the washer was there when it was painted since there is an area where you can still see the paneling.

The kitchen, dining area, and living room, have all had new flooring, and it gives the appearance of hardwood floors. I don’t recall about the hallway, but I think it’s carpeted. The carpet in the bedrooms while it may not be new, appears to be fairly new, and definitely in good condition. The main reason I think it may not be new, is that with their better noses, Shane and Bob could tell that the owner did have pets in the house, and carpets are most likely to hold the aromas the longest. (Especially considering there wasn’t furniture in there and the only other thing to hold odors would be he window treatments.)

There is also a 24X24 cement patio, with a sliding glass door it from the between the dining and living room area. There is also 3 foot fencing around it. Shane like the patio, as do I. We both see many possibilities in this place and are quite excited about it. We have an appointment with one of our prospective landlords tomorrow to do a walk though. (Ok there were a few small issues that we wanted to talk with him about, like one of the bedrooms looked like it had a roof leak, different locks on the doors since their the kind that it’s easier to jimmy than lock. We’d prefer a deadbolt lock.)

We had a great weekend for Labor Day, but since we were at a SCA event called Autumn Rose I have written up all the information in my SCA log so you can see how our weekend went here.

The down side was that we didn’t arrive back until almost 5 pm on Sunday, and we were incredibly tired. We laid down for naps, and I slept until 8 pm. This meant that we didn’t make it to my aunt and uncle’s for my Great Aunt’s visit. I am disappoint to have missed her, but at the time sleep was all that was on my mind. It was a long weekend with us leaving home about 7 pm on Thursday and not arriving back until a little before 5 on Sunday. I’m also not used to camping, even if we did have a building to sleep in.