Hey there.

This is obvously a long overdue post, but as you might imagine we’ve been rather busy over here.

And, so as to not bury the lead, I am typing this from the living room of our new home in Vermont. (Specifically, I’m sitting right next to the old loveseat that used to be in my office back in Fulshear…because we’re between couches at the moment.)

Yes, we closed on the house 10 days ago. Which, as it turns out, was exactly 20 weeks from the day we sold our house in Texas.

20 weeks…
That’s what it takes to move (vertically) across the country.

Although I’m not going to lie to you. I’m kind of amazed this little plan worked.

Don’t get me wrong, I drop everything and YOLO bail better than just about anyone. I’ve done it several times in my life and I’m rather good at it.

But, back in the days when I did this more often, I was young and single. So if I screwed things up it was just me who had to live in the park for a week, or suffer a 40-hour bus ride sitting shotgun to the onboard latrine, or become marooned in a small town in northern Utah with no means of transportation, or sleep on the floor and eat loaves of enriched white bread and tap water for a month in Baltimore…

This time I was trying to pull off one of my Great Escapes with a wife and child, so a certain level of comfort had to be taken into consideration with every step. Which made this a slightly more complicated proposition.

But I’m happy to say that all the dominoes fell in precisely the order that I set them up, and so here we are.

Now there’s just the ocean of stuff that came out of that truck to go through. And since there is essentially ONE closet in the entire house, there’s been an awful lot of panicked looking around followed by, “um, hey, do we really need this?” happening of late.

I’m also confident that I could build a small Sri Lankan village with the amount of boxes and paper I pulled out of that trailer, all of which is clearly multiplying in size overnight and oozing its way across the front yard.

Although I gotta say, it’s not like just because we’ve got all our stuff inside the house that I’ve suddenly stopped having to maneuver through hoops to get things accomplished.

For example:

• Plumbers were here a couple days ago to fix the low hot water pressure in the tub, hook up the washer, review the possibility of running a propane line for the dryer (and installing a converter since it’s technically a natural gas dryer), fix a leaky sink, and set up the icemaker/water line in the fridge.
• Exterminators were out yesterday to take a quick walk through the house and start working on a pest control plan.
• Landscapers came today to review the lawn for regular mowing/tractor brush hogging, pruning the wild lilac bushes back a bit, using the tractor bucket to move some debris, and clearing an excessive amount of day lilies that are growing along the front of the house.
• An electrician is coming Tuesday to install a few light fixtures and a drop chute behind the wall for television cords.
• Piano movers are coming next week to get rid of that antique piano that’s there on the left in the earlier picture of the couch. The one that’s taking up WAY too much space in the living room? Yeah, that one.
• Our contractor came back with an estimate that was triple the amount we originally expected to pay on the home renovations we need done, so we’re having to make some difficult decisions about what we can live without for the time being.
• A dumpster is being dropped off on Tuesday so we can finally clear out all the rapidly replicating paper/boxes.
• A living room rug was delivered yesterday and our new couch should be here in about another week.
• A dehumidifier for the basement is…actually that one should’ve been here today but it never arrived. Hmm. Will have to check on that.

This is totally becoming more of a to-do list than an update about our move, isn’t it?
Sorry…

Once we get more of the above accomplished and this little building turns from being a house into a home, I’ll try to do a walkthrough tour for you or something.

But, if you’re super interested, here’s the first drone flight I took around the property this evening.

And, because I’m pretty much exhausted all the time right now, here’s another flight I took the following day (today) after I passed out waiting for YouTube to finish processing that last one…

As for Daphne, she’s settling in pretty well. I think there’s still a little trepidation about the overall permanence of things here…

But I think generally she’s doing well with all of it.

And if we haven’t been absorbed up by the Trash Heap on bath salts that’s taking over the front yard, I’ll try to give you all an update on how things are going before the end of the week.

See you soon.