, Subject= "Coast-to-Coast"
| Coast-To-Coast-To-Coast-To-Coast TravelBlog,
starting May, 2005. ... rev 08.27.2006 |
Back to Trip Coast-to-Coast home page | Back to plusaf's Home Page |
Monday, September 19: 363 miles, 7:34 hours: Knoxville, TN to our new home !
Actually, back to the apartment on Falls of Neuse where we stayed the month of ... what was it? .... July. Yep, August was getting the house in CA ready, then driving back here in early September... that's right.... whew!
Unpack a little Monday night, and spend the next few days replenishing the fridge which hasn't changed much since we last used it, visit some of the closer relatives [5-10 miles away], and see how soon the movers can deliver our house's contents to the new address. Turns out that Thursday is feasible, so we get ready to drive over in the early a.m. to be ready for them.
Ok, so we made it here. So did the boxes from our house. The shippers took most of the day to unload the smaller boxes, and returned the next day with the larger stuff, like furniture. My 3-car garage had become a Zero-Car-Garage, as all three bays filled up with boxes and more boxes. A little rearrangement, and emptying a few boxes, allowed enough room to fit Claudia's into the two-bay section. Yea! Claudia's car finally gets a garage of its own. That only took about three years to do...
A few days later, we had the cable company hook us up. The house was prewired with lots of cable runs, which, of course, allowed Time/Warner to charge us an extra $18 or so dollars a month for having more than five wires running through the house. I may cut one of them and cut our bill at the same time.... I chose the disk-storage flavor of the cable controller box, and it's really neat. It's like TiVo. You can select a program to record and tell the machine to record "just this episode" or "the entire series" whenever it's on or even "just the new shows," omitting repeats. "I'm going to like this, I thought." I was right.
Within a few days of moving in, three of our closer neighbors had brought over home-baked cookies, muffins and brownies. When we asked for the recipe for the brownies, the mom said that she'd be glad to share it, but she has an agreement with her son to not share it, because he really didn't want to go anywhere else and have someone else's mom offer him one like it! After we tasted a few more of the brownies, we agreed with her son.
The days that followed saw us emptying more and more boxes and learning more and more about the house. The longer we have been here, the more we have come to love the house, the location and the forest in the back yard. And the more neighbors we've met, the happier we've been with the neighborhood we chose. Plus the "doll house" in the back yard: the ten-foot-square playhouse built for the previous owner's daughter.
Now we've been here for nearly three weeks, and we just like the whole area more and more.
After watching our "uphill neighbor's" lawn being mowed by a local lawn service, I waved one of the workers over to get introduced, and ended up meeting the owner of the service. "How soon can you start work on my lawn," I asked him, and the next Monday his crew was harvesting our 8" tall crop of grass.
While we are waiting for delivery of the kitchen refrigerator, we bought a small, 4.7 cubic foot model to "tide us over" until the "real one" arrives. When the big guy finally gets here, hopefully on 10.9, the little one will go upstairs into the "bonus room" near the TV set, where it belongs.... The wine-cooler is plugged in and down to 55 degrees F, waiting for me to arrange delivery of our wine
By October 5, we'd ordered a new refrigerator for the kitchen, a freezer for the garage, and have the preliminary part of a wireless fence installed to keep our dogs from straying off our property. collection. I also got to explore some of the wiring in the house, too. As most home owners discover, the way wiring and switches are set up by the previous owner is often "a puzzlement" to the new owners, and this one is no exception.
To power up the "invisible fence" for the dogs, a dedicated outlet was required. The salesman and I concluded that the best plug in place was in the walk-in crawl space in the back of the house. Inside the door was a closed junction box which fed power to an overhead lamp which was switched by a pull-chain switch. A transformer was bolted to the lamp's junction box, and it trailed off a small black two-wire pair towards the front of the house. It finally dawned on me that they were the power supply for the doorbell! So the light had to have power applied continuously, and my plan to put a combination wall outlet and light switch into that first junction box on the wall was going to run into some "minor" problems. My plan was to switch the light on and off from near the crawl space door. If the power to the lamp were cut off, the doorbell would be turned off, too!
The Force was with me. I found another junction box that looked like it was always powered up. I also had another doorbell transformer which I managed to mount to that box pretty easily. Finally, I could rewire the first box to include the switch and socket. Done! Ready for the Electric Fence guy to plug into.
Now, if only I could find my wireless modem and make it work with Claudia's PC. That work started this evening, the 5th, and although I've run into some stumbling blocks, the prognosis looks good.
10.30......
Sorry for the delay. We've been busy....
Let's see... There were days of faxing things back and forth to our Realtor, but the details were minor, and things have gone pretty smoothly, overall. We had hoped for closing on the 28th, but some bank weenies couldn't get out of their own ways for the buyer, so it looks like tomorrow, the 31st, will be our Treat Day, and hopefully no Tricks.
The dogs hate the electric fence. We didn't follow the instructions religiously, and may have to pay to have them retrained. Right now, Biscuit looks like she'd rather have her bladder explode than risk getting a shock in the back yard. It may be worth the price to get to to have the whole back yard to enjoy. Oh, well....
We ordered new furniture a few weeks ago. Some of our new appliances have arrived. We now have our new refrigerator, a small freezer in the garage, and the little fridge in the "entertainment room" upstairs. We ordered a new mattress and box spring for the guest bedroom [which we'll use when guests want to sleep in the first floor master bedroom... :) ]. We ordered a new headboard, dresser and night tables for the master bedroom. We're hoping they'll arrive this week, but it could be a few more weeks, too. :(
One item on a faster track is a special gift for me. I've always wanted a grandfather's clock. There's a furniture store having a bankruptcy sale, and I noticed several very beautiful clocks on display in their store. We went back last year and bought one. It's a beauty: three different chime songs, hand wound with three heavy brass weights, and a nice little lever that turns off the chimes, either from 10 pm to 8 am, or completely off. That will make our pets, our guests and ourselves very happy! The clock is targeted for delivery tomorrow, the 31st. The good news is: if it had been delivered Friday or Saturday, I'd have had to immediately reset it for Eastern Standard Time. Fortunately, "Spring Ahead" one hour is six months away.
We've emptied about half of the moving boxes we came with, and have unearthed a few treasures that we haven't seen in months. I put them up for "sale" for free on CraigsList, but only got two real "takers." A few other nibbles for the old bed we're tossing, plus the PC desk I was going to use, but which is too big to fit through the door into the room I wanted it in! So it's waiting in the garage, too, for a taker. We're calling the moving company tomorrow to see when they can remove the empties [and if they're willing to make a second trip when the remaining boxes are empty, too...] and also to take a look at some of the few items that were damaged in transit. Most of the big stuff survived well, but a few picture frames arrived with broken glass, as did some wooden items. [and one solid state night light that I can't imagine how they broke...].
Tonight on the TV news, the announcement was made that we're in a noticeable drought, and lawn watering, for example, will be mandated to be a maximum of twice a week. Not a major problem here, as I'd turned the system off for the duration of the rains of the past weeks, and over the past few days, I've installed a rain sensor to interrupt the sprinkler system after a rain. That took two tries, as my first wire routing used up the wire about four feet short of its goal. Rip out all of the outside wiring, back to about two feet from the sensor, then move the hole through the wall into the garage about 7.5 feet up, and now the wire will reach. Amazing what a little geometry can do... Now, when I get some of the tables and boxes and other stuff out of the way, I'll be able to get to the sprinkler control box and splice the sensor into the circuit!
Tomorrow night is Hallowe'en, and with the huge number of kids of all ages around this neighborhood, we're looking forward to an onslaught unlike anything we'd seen in Cupertino in years. There have got to be a few dozen kids of trick-or-treating ages within a few hundred feed of our home, alone! It should be a blast.
Saturday, the community held a fall party in one of the greenspace areas under a power line corridor that runs through the development. They had pony rides (!) for the kids, and Claudia and I volunteered to burn some hot dogs and buns on a gas grill for one shift. It was a neat way to meet neighbors and see what they were like. They're really nice, still....
One little dog got loose from its leash, and thought that it was a game of "catch me if you can" that a dozen or so kids were playing with it, and he ran around like crazy, not letting any kid get within a few feet of him. This went on for something like ten or twenty minutes, it seemed, and it was obvious by the time the dog was finally collared and re-connected to his leash, that he'd sleep VERY well that night, as would a dozen or two kids! All but the little girl who owned the pup. She was heartbroken with fear that she'd lost her doggie, and it took some serious consoling before her tears dried.
ok, enough for now... More to come....
| , Subject= "Coast-to-Coast" |