Making the Move, in #JustOneParagraph

After a couple of weeks of cryptic remarks and references buried in blog posts, I was able to spill the story yesterday. (If we're Facebook friends, you may have read the short version already. This is the just-slightly-longer one.) Tall Paul and I started down the road to home ownership back in the spring. It's been a bumpy one, and we've been keeping our progress--and the frustrating lack of it, sometimes--quiet. But we'd just gone into a sale contract when we left for our family trip to New England in mid-June, and on the last day of July, we closed on the house next door to the one we've been renting since the fall of 2008. As my husband (accurately) put it in his own Facebook update,

"At 11:16 this morning, Florinda and I officially became homeowners! Well, we own a tiny part, it'll be 30 years before we own the rest."

We worked things out so we'll have most of August to move, but we've got plenty to do between now and then (including purging a bunch of books!), and we hope it'll be our last move for a very long time.

 



 

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Weekend Recap, in #JustOneParagraph

On Sunday, we rested. Well, we rested a little. We went to the movies in the morning (Who goes to the movies at 10:30 AM? Oh yeah, we do). Later, during the warmth of the afternoon, I couldn't quite muster up the mental energy for reading books or writing reviews about them (I have Monday for that–a medical appointment in the morning, but no work for the day!). Instead, I played games and read blog posts on my iPad–at five PM, it held no unread posts, and it stayed that way for just over an hour (because I put down the iPad to have dinner with my family and didn't refresh it again until just before 6:30). (And by 10 PM, it was at zero again–a clean slate for Monday morning!) During the time in between, we cleared out shelves and cabinets, loaded boxes, and made stacks. The books that will be guests of honor at my giveaway party next weekend are piled all around, and the ones that will move with us are being packed away. One group is ready to travel to their new home next door, while I hope many members of the other group will be welcomed into the homes of my book-loving friends.

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The Boys and Me, in #JustOneParagraph

It occurred to me, as we went out to dinner last night, that I'll soon be the only female member of my household for the first time in fifteen years…and yes, that's counting the dogs. There was even a nearly five-year period when the girls outnumbered the guys around here, although we've been at parity since we lost Gypsy in 2010. But now, as three of us get ready to move next door, our girl is preparing to move to the opposite corner of the country, and it will soon be just the boys and me again. They're not the same “boys” with whom I shared my life and home fifteen years ago; I was seven years and nearly two thousand miles away from meeting them (and no one had met the younger one, since he didn't yet exist), but as I contemplate this next stage, I have a feeling of coming back around. I hope we'll be able to add a dog back into the mix before too long, too.

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Saturday, in #JustOneParagraph

So, after doing my customary Saturday-morning runaround, I will return home today to…watch paint dry. Our front door is supposed to be painted at noon–assuming the painters saw the note–and then it has to be left open for four hours to dry, so we'll have to stay home with it. If they haven't seen the note, we may be waiting even longer to see if they actually show up to paint it at all; considering that they painted the building almost two weeks before the schedule said they were supposed to, we're not sure what to expect here. Then again, an excuse to lounge around the house on a Saturday afternoon probably isn't a bad thing.

 



 

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