Our new home

I figured since its been about 2 weeks, I should probably do a post on the actual place we live. Stalkers out there take note: we will perform IP searches and report you to the police.

Kidding! Ha!

No, seriously, we will.

Anyways!

We live on the northwest corner of the Shug Jordan Parkway (we call it the Shug Knight. Just sounds more gangsta, doesn't it?) off of Richland Road. It's a relatively new development (2008), with each house on about 1/4 acre. Here's a shot of the street with the other houses. Pretty nice, right?

Yeah, they're a little cookie cutter, but they're new and we didn't have to do anything, which was pretty nice. And all the people we've met so far are super nice. (Incidentally, it took us, like, a year before we met anyone in our old neighborhood in Black Rock, but that's another post) Anywho...

If you haven't guessed by now, that's our house's front porch on the right of the picture there. Those are our chairs we will sit on in the evening before dinner when it isn't hot as Hades outside. And here's a front view of the house

It's a nice color. I like it.

And you see the garage peeking out the back of the house.

Inside is pretty nice, too. It's pretty much a great room with living, dining and kitchen areas in 1. Here's the kitchen and the "dining room", situated in the middle of the house, basically.

And here's the living room if you literally rotate 180 degrees from the position I took the above photo.

The picture is a little dark, but you get the idea. To the right of the picture, is a set of french doors that leads out to a little patio area and the back yard.

Domino's decapitated body make an appearance to provide scale. And that's my grandparent's patio table and benches in the background. They're more than 50 years old and they made the trip all the way! (a little banged up, but nothing a coat of paint and new nails can't fix.)

The rest of the backyard can be seen in the following pictures.

A fenced in back yard makes Domino and his owners very happy.
















And then there are the upstairs bedrooms, 1 for guests and the other for our office. Fufi makes his home above my desk where I spend my time these days.

And that's it, folks. That's our house!

Blueberry picking

I ditched the home office today to go blueberry picking. We scored big
time.

I see blueberry crisp in my near future

First Impressions

We've been here a week. So, I guess that qualifies me to provide first impressions. Here goes.

1. People are super friendly in the South. Everywhere we've gone we've been welcomed to Auburn profusely and continously. As a northeasterner, I find this slightly disturbing because I am expecting the catch. But there may not be one.
2. Auburn itself is a delightful, small college town. As such, all pretty much revolves around the university.
3. The university is gorgeous.
4. The sun is a lot stronger here than what I am used to. I also had a hard time catching my breath while working out. Indoors. Maybe it's because I haven't worked out in 2 weeks and my fitness level has dropped, but still, it's hot.
5. Working from home is a very civilized way to work. Except that I go stir-crazy by 3 pm and have a mini-freakout. I need to resolve this.
6. We are in the rural South. As it was put to me earlier this week, "Drive 20 miles outside of town, and you've traveled back in time 50 years." (Full disclosure, we have yet to do this.)
7. The bbq is "chipped", not shredded or pulled. And so far its been very good.
8. The produce, specifically, fruit, is 20 times better than up North
9. Did I mention it was hot? Yes, I believe I did.
10. Like Lincoln, NE., life revolves around football season.
11. I will not be eating chittlings (or chitterlings as they are referred to in other parts of the world).
12. I don't like my kitchen sink faucet. It's too high up and I splash water all over the place when using it. Very annoying.
13. The summer thunderstorms are really good. They remind me of my childhood.
14. We've found a working farm that runs a fall CSA. We've been there to pick blueberries which were ridiculously good. The lamb steaks were amazing as well. We shall be spending more of our $ there.
15. DSL is not awful. Is it the best? No, but I can upload and download at a reasonably fast speed. So, that's good. (I still prefer cable, though)
16. Satellite TV is a racket and I feel like I am getting raped. I was fine getting basic cable back in CT because I never watched TV.
17. On a related note, tv antenna bunny ears have not progressed well since I was a kid. Or we live in a tv signal vacuum because we tried and failed miserably.
18. Our house is pretty much perfect, kitchen faucet excepted. Side note: I will never not have central air again.

So, them's it. Back to work, and then back to organizing the house and putting away our stuff. Woo-Hoo!

Back to School

Spotted taped up on campus. It feels good to be back in an academic
environment.

Move story, Part 2

We got up pretty early to eat breakfast, clean up the room from the pets, and tried to hit the road before 8 to get through the nightmare traffic that is Atlanta, GA. And it all went reasonably according to plan. Before we hit it, I took Domino out for a walk where I ran into a very spry 83 y/o man walking his bichon frise. We had a nice chat, and he told me great things about the place we were going. Considering I hadn't visited Auburn yet, I was nervous. The man's easy going nature and good words made we feel a lot better about our future home.

We hit the road and enjoyed a nearly traffic free drive all the way to the outskirts of Atlanta where the road widened and traffic volume got heavy. We were never stopped dead in our tracks, nor were we slowed down all that much, but I stuck to 1 lane for the most part. Like most metro areas, Atlanta has highway signs giving up to date traffic info and travel times which was helpful because our original plan was straight down I-85 through the heart of Atlanta. The signs said heavy delays, so the beltway became our route.

On the southern side of Atlanta, we stopped for lunch and got ready for the final push. At lunch, we ended up speaking to another nice stranger who asked if I was a cyclist (I was wearing my Fat Cyclist t-shirt). He then went on to start telling us about the bike trail that goes from Atlanta all the way to Birmingham. In the back of my mind, I started planning a fall weekend cycling/camping getaway.

Back on the road, we cruised over the state line and arrived in our new home state. 30 miles more down the road and we hit Opelika (pronounced Opa-like-uh), Auburn's sister-town. Then we got off at our exit and Tina led the way through the center of town. It was something, let me tell you, driving a 26' truck through the center of town along the edge of the university until we hit Toomer's Corner, the exact center of town where a big orange paw print is painted on the intersection. A couple more turns onto the beltway of Auburn where I sub-division is located, down the access road, and into out new little neighborhood where we pulled up to our new house (pics soon).

The LL was (to my surprise) waiting for us, and in we walked to the place we (our family) would spending the next year of our lives.

Move Story, part 1

We're here, and despite some hiccups (all minor), we're in the house, all of our stuff accounted for. More on that later.

We took off from CT around 7:45 on Thursday morning, and as expected, sat in traffic almost immediately, which was fine given that I hadn't really gotten used to the truck yet. After we got passed Stamford it was pretty much smooth sailing all the way into Pennsylvania.

We stopped to get gas about 50 miles outside of Harrisburg. Filling up the truck for the first time was a humbling experience. It was a truck stop, and I didn't understand the concept of satellite pumps. Are you confused as well? So, when you pull into a truck stop fueling lane, there are 2 pumps, one on either side. One has the controls for paying, etc., and the other is just a pump. You have to engage the paying pump by pulling out the pump and laying it on the ground. You then have to go to the other side to use the satellite pump and fill up. Additionally, the gas tank on the truck was not like a car's, where you just pop in the pump and away you go, waiting until the pump stops automatically. With this, you had to pump until the pump stopped, and then re-angle the pump and continue until you could actually see the gas at the top of the tank, almost coming out. A little freaky to be sure.

We move on down the road and the check engine light comes on in the truck. Great. I get on the phone with the emergency service folks at Penske while I am trucking down the road. They tell me to get off in Carlisle, and we spend 45 minutes while the techs fumble with their computer diagnostic systems and swap out a bum sensor. An hour later, the light comes back on. I ignore it, and continue to plow down the road, never getting more than 70 miles hr. No pull overs for me!

Virginia is a big state. I never realized how big it was. As you're traveling down 81, you just keep on going and going and going. 300 miles, or so. And its extremely pastoral. Talk about idyllic farm settings. Happy cows on those hills.

We made it to Statesville, NC the first day, traveling 660 miles in 12.5 hours. We would have gotten farther if not for the check engine light, but I'm happy to have stopped and gotten it checked then rather than to have gotten stopped on the road in the middle of nowhere.

The animals did ok, for the most part. Domino (the dog) was great. My one cat, pearl, well, she was great too except for the meowing. My other cat, jasper, however, had a real rough first day. Before we even left, he decided to take a d*^p on the office floor of the house, which was fine because then he wouldn't do it in the truck. But I put him in there and the meowing (read yowling) began big time. he then pissed himself. Awesome! Before we got onto the highway, we stopped for coffee, which gave me the opportunity to swap out the paper towels I had put down on the bottom of his crate. Poor guy. He was a mess to clean when we got to the hotel in Statesville.

End of part 1

Last sunset in Black Rock

We leave in the morning