Moved in? Yes. Finished? No.

Wow, a week has gone by. I'm not sure where it went. Let's see...

I went back to work after two months off. Ok, to be fair, it only FELT like two months. It was, in reality, only five days. In going back to work, I had to start getting used to my new commute. The rental house was only seven minutes from where I worked, now I'm about thirty minutes away. I can hear you asking all the way from here...why did you move farther away?!? Well, where we were living was "too expensive." We could not afford any of the houses there, and still continue to get by on my salary. So, we had to move to a part of town that we could afford, and that meant a longer commute. But, as you know from things I have said, we got a bigger house out of the deal, and my wife has a somewhat shorter drive to school as well. So, I'll deal with the longer commute. In a weird way, the more time spent on the road gives me more time to decompress and "shift gears" from working-mode to husband-mode.

Speaking of school, my Everlasting SoulMate started back to school in earnest this week. She goes three days a week now, and is taking evening classes. I don't see her until after 9pm on school-nights. So, she's been spending her days working on unpacking and organizing the kitchen. She's about got it together, and we just finished painting the walls this weekend. It looks pretty good. When we get it mostly back together after our painting-party, I'll post some before and after shots.

I've been working on getting the technological side of the move taken care of. We got our satellite TV installed the day after we moved in, but I just got our Internet connection back on Wednesday. So, I have been busy getting the network, servers and our workstations back up and running. As you can see, I was successful, but not without a few interesting moments. I'll do a geek post in the near future about the network legerdemain I had to do.

The kittehs are pretty much settled in. Treelo generally hangs out close by when we're home, but I never know where I will find her when I come home. She has several spots she likes to sleep in. Hubbard is enjoying the upstairs. ESM posted a letter from Hubbard on her blog the other day, detailing his experiences in the new house. Definitely check it out here.

We have a new nickname for the house. You've all heard of "Happy Acres" I'm sure. Well, this is "Half-Vast Acres". Say it fast and without a pause on the hyphen, and you'll get the full meaning.

As we've been living here, we are slowly discovering all the crap that was done in a rather half-hearted fashion. Now, I'm certainly not the end-all and be-all of home renovation and maintenance, but I am pretty sure you should shim up and level kitchen cabinets as you put them in, and not try to fix anything that doesn't fit by filling the gaps with caulk, and certainly not use an interior door in an exterior door location. That's just a small sample of things we have found.

To be fair, this is not a huge slam on the gentleman who lived here before us. He was a pretty nice guy, but he had lived here a long time and was used to things being the way they were. A new set of eyes will generally see those things that have been ignored, and I'm going to try my best to fix most of them. They won't all get done tomorrow, certainly, but most will be fixed in time.

I just realized I had not posted any shots of the new house, so here's one of the front. And, now that all things tech are working again, I hope to post more often.

Later Days,

--Sundown , Out.