Fascination Place

Today I mowed a lawn for the first time in, oh, 20 years or so. I’m pretty sure I stopped mowing my Mom’s lawn when I went off to graduate school, since I had less and less time to go back and visit from that point forward.

I borrowed an electric corded mower from my friend Chad, who has a gardener who does his and Camille’s yard. Since it had been sitting around for a while unused, I cleaned it up this afternoon, bought a 100-foot cord, and tonight took it out for a spin (it having been maybe 2-1/2 weeks since the lawn was last mowed, around the time we closed escrow).

The two big drawbacks:

1. The cord is by far the biggest pain in the ass in the process, having to swoop it around to make sure I didn’t mow over it. Fortunately, I didn’t, and I didn’t get tangled up in it either.
2. The bag is small, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the bags on the mowers my Dad owned growing up. So I had to stop to empty it often.

So I bet I’ll end up buying a new mower with a larger bag. While I grew up using gas-powered mowers, I’m not too enthused about having to buy and store gas for it. So more likely I’ll get an electric battery-powered mower.

I might also need a weed whacker or other edging tool, as part of the yard is edged with large rocks. Fun fun.

All-in-all it took about an hour, but I think with no cord and a larger bag it would be faster and even pretty easy.

Still, how long do you think it’ll be before we break down and just hire a gardener?

Buying a new house and moving sucks up all your available time, which is why I haven’t been writing here lately. Plus, we don’t yet have Internet at the new place. But! On Saturday we made the big move to our nice new home.

We closed on our new house last Tuesday, and we took Thursday off to be at the house for some appointments, including Comcast coming by to set up cable TV, and our washer/dryer being delivered by Home Depot. All the appointments went off without a hitch, and we were able to move some stuff over during the day as well. Susan and Ajay also came by to see the place, and Ajay enjoyed playing in the yard as well as running in circles in all the empty rooms.

We were packing right up until the movers arrived on Saturday, though we did go to bed and got about 6-1/2 hours of sleep the night before. Debbi called around to several moving companies and we went with Trusted Van Lines, based in San Jose. The phone contact was apparently very helpful and was the only place she called to give us a written quote. They also had the best price. Originally they were supposed to show up between 1-3 pm, but they called on Thursday and asked if they could come between 8-10 am, which was fine with us! They actually arrived around 8:40 am with a 3-man crew and a plenty-big truck.

I think we packed around 90 boxes all together, and the movers filled a couple of larger boxes with bedding and pillows. Plus our furniture, which actually was not as tough to move as the fact that about 50 boxes were filled with books, comics and CDs! Heavy!

But these guys were awesome. They were friendly, courteous and careful, and impressively efficient, only taking a few breaks. We had water available for them, and I went out to buy us all lunch from Quiznos. They trucked lots of boxes up the stairs at the new place (where they didn’t use dollies to spare the new carpeting; the old place didn’t need such care as its carpet needs to be replaced before I sell it), and got almost everything routed to the right place (3 boxes ended up in an adjoining room – hardly a tragedy!). Given the heavy stuff they moved for us, we gave them a pretty hefty tip (at least, I think it was hefty, from standards I’ve read about elsewhere), and the final total was actually close to what I paid for my 2001 move. It took about 7 hours end-to-end, which was slightly above estimate, but given all the books I wasn’t too surprised.

We would definitely use them again. In fact, we might use them again to empty our storage locker next month!

As the movers were finishing, Chad and Camille and the twins came by to give us a care package of mai tais, and we invited them in to see the place.

I locked the cats in one of the bathrooms in the old place for the day. Newton spent much of the day meowing, but I hope they were able to get some sleep after we left for the other house. Debbi and I made a run back to the old house to pick up some key items we’d been unable to pack, and then we picked up the cats, put them in their carriers and brought them over.

Newton is a well-travelled kitty, having done 2 previous moves (1 cross-country), and he was out of his carrier within 5 minutes, and trotting around with his tail held high within half an hour. Blackjack and Roulette, however, refused to leave their carrier after a peek outside, so we eventually pulled them out and closed it up. Blackjack started to come around, finding a good hiding spot but venturing out periodically to explore before retreating. Roulette, however, was miserable, looking for somewhere to hide and not finding one she liked. Debbi eventually took her upstairs where she hid under the bed for the rest of the day.

As I’d predicted, she came out overnight and had pretty much conquered the upstairs by the next morning, but she’s still very wary of downstairs and mostly stays upstairs. (I hope she comes down to eat at night.) Blackjack has gotten used to most of the house, has been scratching at various posts, and took off up the stairs at high speed this morning, so I think he’s used to the place. Roulette may take a week or so to fully acclimatize.

For Debbi and myself the house feels like home already (albeit home with a bunch of boxes piled in every room). She’s unpacked much of the kitchen, I’ve set up the computer, TV and stereo, and we’ve made another run to get more stuff from the old house. (We still have another 2-4 car loads in the garage to bring over, but we’re almost there!) But we’ve been there a couple of nights now, cats snoozing on the bed with us, and we watched an episode of Doctor Who while drinking mai tais last night.

We have several projects to get the place just right over the next month or two, but so far so good. I think it’ll be a great place for us.

The big news from this past week is that we’re buying a new house! We found one not far from where we live now, and put in a successful bid. So now we’re in escrow. It’s a fairly new house, and both our agent and our house inspector (who did his inspection yesterday) were impressed with the quality of the construction.

I’m being a little coy about details because, well, partly because I don’t want to jinx it – even though I don’t really believe in jinxing things, and there’s not really much that could go wrong. But I think the stress involved in buying a house triggers my irrational paranoia. But we’re really pretty excited, and working in getting everything lined up to close next month, and then to move.

It’s gonna be a busy summer!

Meanwhile, I spent most of the last week somewhat ill. Wednesday (the day we made the offer on the house) I felt unwell enough that I stayed home from work. Mostly I just felt tired and had a scratchy throat and rough voice, but a few mornings I was parched enough that it was actually difficult to talk. I guess it was a cold of some sort, but it was a weird one. I’m feeling much better today.

It’s always something.

We’ve been talking about looking for a new house for a while. I’ve been in our current home for 9 years, and Debbi moved in 5 years ago. A bunch of Debbi’s stuff (and a little of mine) is in a storage unit. And we have 3 cats, with the expectation of going back to 4 (or even 5) someday. So we’ve basically outgrown this place, even though when I bought it it was just the place I wanted (well, within the bounds of what I could afford).

We went out and looked at a few open houses early last year, but I wasn’t really ready to move. Now I’m feeling more motivated, so the last two weekends we’ve gone to see some houses on the market. January isn’t the ideal time to look at houses since there’s not a lot on the market (most people like to move during the summer, between school sessions), and the market is down so many people are keeping their homes off the market until it improves. We were mainly going to see what’s out there in in our price range in the area we want to live, and to talk about what’s important to each of us in a house and see how close these houses come.

What we didn’t expect was to see a house we both adored the second time out.

Now, this isn’t a huge problem. As a friend of mine observed, there are always other houses. But this one is quite nice, with three bedrooms, a den, a 2-car garage, a large yard (and yet, a yard that doesn’t look like it would need too much maintenance), and it’s very bright and cheerful. Its drawbacks are mostly cosmetic: I’d say the biggest one is that the living room could be bigger, and it could have more closet space. It is perfect? No, but we were both charmed by it. And the location is good, too!

Of course, we’ve only seen a few houses, whereas when I brought my current place I’d seen upwards of two dozen townhomes and had a pretty good understanding of the market. But we don’t feel like we have the same grasp of this market this time around, which is why finding this place so quickly feels a little uncomfortable, since we don’t have a lot to compare it to (though it’s much nicer than the places we do have to compare it to). On top of that, we hadn’t talked to a realtor or a mortgage broker yet, so we weren’t ready to actually put a bid on it.

So we’re talking to a couple of agents and a broker over the next few days. And if everything goes well, we’ll decide whether we want to make an offer on this house.

But if that house doesn’t work out, well, we’ll have started the ball rolling.