Home Sweet Home

We’ve moved in, and now call the new house “home”. We still have plenty of stuff to bring over, but we have sufficient necessities in order to actually begin living in the new home. Tonight we brought over the cats, which really cinches it for me.

The new house is great, now that we’ve (mostly) finished painting it. Much to my surprise, I quite like the couch that Carina selected. It’s enormous, and consumes a great deal of space in the living room, but it’s super comfy, and it seats about a thousand. I quite enjoy stretching out on the couch: it’s markedly more comfortable than the tiny IKEA couch at our old house.

We had a cookout yesterday, and invited friends and coworkers. We also invited several of the new neighbors. Mark and Carolyn are a retired couple that live behind us, and brought yummy brownies. They’ve lived in the neighborhood for eleven years, and know most of the folks on their street and our’s. They’re an extremely fun couple with which to have a conversation. Matt and Susan are the young couple next to us. They’ve been there for about a year. If I had to guess, I’d say they were Carina’s age. They came over later in the evening, and stayed late chatting with us in the backyard.

One thing I’m really looking forward to is being neighborly. Our old house has an alley on one side, beyond which is a duplex. None of the tenants of that duplex ever stayed for long, and as such we never really got to meet any of them. On the other side of our house was an older couple who were nice enough, but not exactly the kind of folks with whom you wanted to interact beyond polite formalities. I am a bit disappointed that I really don’t know the names of anyone on our old street; and I hope very much not to repeat that same mistake here.

Of course, that’s unlikely to happen even if I tried. Since this was my grandmother’s house, I knew casually at least a handful of her neighbors. Two houses up from us is Francine, who has now lived on the street longer than anyone else (my grandmother moved in several years before Francine, so when my grandmother passed away, the honor transferred to her). Across the street from us are the parents of a group of kids that went through school with me and my sister. Bob was in my sister’s class, and his sisters were in the grade below me. Bob lives about five houses down from us. (We’re using his parent’s wireless network until we get Speakeasy hooked up. Thanks Bob!)

So while we still have a lot of stuff to bring over, and then a lot of work to do on the old house, things are moving along nicely.