Settled and unsettled

We may not be settled in, but we are at least settled down, with many of our boxes unpacked, a sense of where to go to find things we need, and even some time to relax.

We eventually did close on our house. It turned out we needed flood insurance, because the FEMA map the bank had said we were in the 500-year flood plain. Um, yeah. We all know how much anything FEMA says should be trusted! Regardless, it was necessary if we wanted to buy our condo, so we're happily insured against twice-in-a-century disasters!

It's been a long few days, and as usual when I don't blog for a while, I don't know what to say or where to start! Do I tell you about the cats, and how they survived 12 hours in a car, an overnight stay in a hotel room, moving to their new home, a week of guests, and eventual sibling rivalry? Do I mention that in our first week we had Coffeeboy's family who helped us move down here, college friends of his who happened to be driving through town just after we arrived, or a grad school colleague of mine whose family gathered this past weekend a few towns away?

Or do I write about my new neighborhood, this little town? How this small-town, mountainous location is definitely not New Jersey, given that neighbors here have parties by the creekside and actually talk to each other? Should I blog about the culture shock of moving to a place that's like nowhere else I've lived before, given it's in the rural south but is culturally far more liberal than the "rural south?"

Take Asheville, the closest city, about forty-five minutes away. Coffeeboy and I have already found two Asian-fusion noodle places there that we love. After we visited one this past weekend, we stopped to listen to a guy and a girl on the guitar and violin, doing a rendition of "Closer to Fine." A few feet away, a magician performed for kids and adults alike, and a block or two away, on the way to the car, we saw some more musicians, using the entrance to a very modern furnishings gallery to improve their acoustics.

Or what about my dissertation, the books now somewhat organized on a newly set-up shelf? I need to get back into that, but it all feels so far away, and my dreams are of distance and disconnect. I don't know yet how it will be to try to do this crazy amount of work while not "in residence."

Or do I write about the hike that Coffeeboy and I took this afternoon, visiting a few of the waterfalls of our new county. We watched bathers swim and frolic on the rocks, wondered about the pine trees and the deciduous trees and how it would all look in autumn, and marveled that we were most certainly not in suburban New Jersey anymore, Toto! And after watching local trout swim in the streams, we stopped at a natural foods store and bought some local trout, just caught today, and brought them to our new home for a fresh and tasty dinner!

Yes, I could write about all of this, but I'm too busy trying to live it, processing it by mind rather than "pen." Trying to write about even some of it shows me just how "unsettled" we really still are! When I get even more organized, I might even manage to eke out a picture or two to share or a chance to visit the "sit and stitch" at my very local yarn store!

All my bags are packed

Well, maybe not all of them. Maybe not all my clothes, the kitchen things, last-minute books, or my WIPs! But we're really doing quite well on packing and a Sunday pull-out.

We're having a couple of those "crises" which precede a move. The main one was our sudden realization that, though we're driving our own truck, we still need folks to help us load and unload! While we had a few helpers for the loading, we don't know anyone in our new town to ask to help unload. So, we hired some professional schleppers. This will be wonderful, as Coffeeboy, his parents, brother, and myself probably reasonably couldn't have moved all our stuff. Following the same logic, we realized that the same five people, plus a few odd grad students (all over-libraried and not so hot on the weight-lifting department like yours truly), wouldn't do much better at the starting end. So we've hired professional schleppers for here, too.

The biggest confusion, though, is whether or not our new place is on a floodplain. For the last, oh, few weeks or so, we'd been told that it isn't. Now, the bank says that FEMA says it is, and we need flood insurance. Because our new town is small, the paralegal there has helped close all the condos in our new little development, and flooding hasn't ever been an issue. Until now. Suffice to say, we're hastily working on lining up flood insurance or getting the whole flood plain question sorted out. But really... couldn't this have happened sooner than 5 days before closing?

At least packing is going well, and the cats are only a little spooked:

See all the empty hangers?

We go off-line on Friday, so if you dont hear from me until well into next week, that's why! I can already feel the strangeness of being disconnected from the Great Big Interwebby Thing!

Finished socks!

I even have a finished object to show you! What's even crazier is that Coffeeboy was excited enough that he tried them on in hot weather! Not outside, mind you, but still! Given his aversion to the heat, it was a true sign of appreciation.

Pattern: Gentleman's Fancy Socks, from Knitting Vintage Socks
Yarn: Brown Sheep Wildfoote, color "Mums", 2 skeins plus a bit of black yarn for the toes
Needles: Size 0 DPNs
Thoughts: These were a fun pattern to knit for the future professor. they had enough patterning not to be boring, but not so much that I didn't memorize it. Designed to be long, they'll sure keep him warm this winter! I added the little black toes because in both cases, I ran out of the skein at the very end, and decided he'd probably think the contrasting toes were neat. (I did have a third skein, but didn't want to use only a small bit of it, preferring instead to have a contrasting toe color).

I've also finished my first Monkey sock; I need to cast on for the second! (Do I smell some second-sock syndrome here? Hopefully not, but moving is mighty distracting.

The weather is hot and heavy. We've been packing and packing. I shredded years worth of old bills and so on yesterday; the more I shred, the less we need to move. You won't believe what I was still carrying around! I found health insurance plan details from jobs I left years and years ago, credit card statements for cards I don't have any more, and possibly the most telling one of all: pamphlets of information on deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot in the leg, one of which I had in college.

I know I still "carry" that episode around with me in a lot of worrying, so I wasn't too surprised to see just how much I still had from that experience. I kept the important stuff but ditched lists of symptoms, instructions on how to inject anti-coagulating shots, and the like. Maybe if I can ditch the paperwork, the same will happen to my mind? I doubt it, but it's worth a shot nevertheless!

Not so lazy days

I had such high hopes of showing you in-progress pictures of the bathroom remodel. But when you're brushing your teeth at the kitchen sink, and thinking of how many extra trips you took to Home Depot and Lowe's, and that weekend-long project stretches into a week because it takes time for paint to dry, the excitement of "in-progress" kind of fades away. But there you go: our upstairs bathroom, before and after!

Before: notice how nothing matches?


After: notice now things actually match now? Wow!

We put the finishing touches on about a week ago, hanging the barely-dry mirror and cabinet doors, just in time for a visitor (my parent who actually owns the place) to see the finished bathroom. That's why we're redoing it right before we move out: because we have a small stake in it selling well. Unfortunately, though, we're going to have to rent it for a while until the market picks back up. We now have the oddities of a "for sale/rent" sign out front, as well as a lockbox. Weird - and a sign that this is real, we really are moving!

There's been progress on the knitting front as well. It's now the Summer of Socks knitalong - and since the rules say socks have to start after June 21st, and I have two pairs in progress, it'll be a while. But, I'm making progress on the two other socks I had going. See?

Embossed Leaves

What, you think that little discrepancy of 3 grams is going to be a problem? Especially since the done sock weighs more than the remaining amount of yarn - and I don't have any more than that? Yeah, so do I. I'm about 1/3 into the second anklet and am really hoping to get most of the way into the toe. Then I'll either troll the net looking for some similar yarn, or I'll just knit it with some plain blue or green sock yarn. I do know it's Koigu... I don't have the ballband, so I haven't a clue what I'd be looking for specifically. Shoot. At least the Embossed Leaves sock pattern is tons of fun!

Home sweet home

Thanks for all the compliments on the house, and the get-well wishes! I'm feeling better, but now Coffeeboy (who certainly does know how to keep a knitter happy) is sick instead of me, which was pretty much a foreordained conclusion, but I'm still sorry it happened.

Now that it's the weekend, I can sit down to describe the place for all of you! It's a small 2-story condo, three bedrooms, 2.5 baths, laundry room, fireplace, garage - pretty much all the types of spaces we wanted. We'll actually have a master bath in our bedroom, a more spacious office, and a guestroom. It's right behind a grocery store (a Food Lion, whose truck entrance we share as a driveway for the complex). Thankfully, the units are surrounded by trees, not other grocery stores.

The grocery store complex itself has a small coffeeshop, a pizza place, and a Chinese food place (not sure if it's good yet). The next closest building is the Methodist church, across the street from Coffeeboy's college, which has a Methodist connection. Next to the Methodist church is another small shopping center, this one with the yarn store, a bookstore, a cool little breakfast/lunch cafe, a burrito place, a natural foods (the kind with lots of supplements, bulk items, and books, rather than the kind with those things plus groceries and produce). All in all, a very convenient place to live, especially given that the small downtown area is another 5-10 minutes away up a hill. Exercise and the relative end of suburban living, here we come!

The area itself is really nice, too - a five minute drive from a national forest with hiking trails, a ten minute drive from a summer music festival center, not to mention probably various crafty and fibery places I have yet to discover in western NC!

Brief update!

We've returned from North Carolina, and well, there's good news, bad news, and really good news:

First the good: we found a place during this second trip, made an offer, and it was accepted!

The bad news: I was ill most of the trip down, and am still sick, so I'll have to post more later. Plus, I'm missing the Lost season finale. Thank goodness for old-fashioned VCRs.

The really good news (since this is a knitting blog): The place we bought is walking distance to the town's yarn store. And by walking distance, I mean 5 minutes max! Coffeeboy and I agree that while this could be a good thing, it also might be very bad. :-)

No knitting while house-hunting

Have you ever gone house-hunting in a part of the country you don't know at all (or that your spouse only sort of knows)? It's intense! I had no idea! I don't think I can even write about it except to tell you that I'm still here and that... my brain hurts. Three people told me today that I looked tired, or not OK, or like the walking dead, which is true.

Last Friday, we left town for Coffeeboy's PhD graduation ceremonies and a weekend of eating, catching up, and good cheer, speckled by sudden downpours and moments of sunshine. We ate many wonderful meals and saw several of Coffeeboy's colleagues who also had their hoods ceremoniously placed over their heads by their advisors.

The real insanity started Sunday, when we drove to the mountains of western North Carolina, Coffee's future place of work, in order to find a place to live. I had no idea at all what I was getting myself into: houses falling off hills, bathrooms without walls, bathtubs with cracked tiles and yards full of overgrown shrubbery, on the one hand, followed by a reassessment of our needs, which led us to condos with nice layouts located far away from Coffeeboy's school. We had endless discussions in the car, over lunch, over dinner, in the hotel at night, about pros, cons, priorities, advantages, disadvantages - and not to mention this mortgage or that, whether we wanted a homeowner's association fee or would rather put that money into renovating a house of our own. Our parents by now, I'm sure, know the ring of the phone as we called for advice, commiseration, celebration, or just to express confusion.

I've never moved to a place I didn't know at all, it seems, so I had little idea that it could be so totally exhausting to try to figure out neighborhoods, price ranges, expectations, and even where to eat for dinner... all in the space of about 52 hours, the total time we spent in the area. Sunday afternoon to Wednesday morning, there and back again.

No wonder I look like the walking dead. And on Sunday, after I finish grading papers, we're headed back. We thought we had found a place we liked, and we almost put an offer in, but no sooner did we arrive home on Wednesday than we found out that there was actually an affordable condo in our most desired location, the college town where Coffeeboy will be teaching. What confusion! What a tizzy! We need to see the smaller, but more convenient place to know which one we should go with... so we're off, again! No wonder I'm exhausted.

This time, though, I might try knitting in the car, since I know there won't be time to get the needles out in the non-existent evening hours!