Dawn of A Year

I thought it'd be good to start the new year with a little exploration of our new environment, so I decided to look for an alternate route to the grocery store and found myself stopping by Saquatucket Harbor in Harwich for a little local color.


The new calendar page shone more brightly a few hours earlier, with a sunrise I didn't get up to photograph and we enjoyed a sunny hour or two before clouds began to slip into view.

By the time I'd reached the harbor, it was beginning to rain fairly heavily and my taste for reconnaissance waned. Just as well, there was plenty to do still at the new homestead.

I did manage to stop for a look at this little roadside pond that comes up to the edge of the road on either side as the road passes through a hollow.

This bothers me on some level, since there's an indication that this used to be one larger pond, now split in half by the roadway. It's an important roadway and all, but I'm still saddened by our human need to dominate the landscape, often with little thought for other creatures.


But at least the two halves of the pond remain, and weren't filled in for develop ment.

The other day we drove past this pond and there were several ducks floating right there beyond the guardrail, one with his butt high in the air as he foraged below the pond surface.


This amused me, since we were suddenly closer to these ducks, in our vehicle, than we'd ever gotten to the ones who made Krogman's pond in Eastham their winter home.

New Year's Day is a good time to take stock of things, and I suppose I was doing just that as I sorted through and unpacked various boxes of the Things We Moved.

And its a great time to count your blessings, and remember to include the little things that make our souls sing...like Clementine oranges!!

I only saw a few minutes of this year's Tourna ment of Roses Parade, but by late evening, I had managed to carve out some office space in the back room and got the computer station configured, for the arrival of Broadband and telephone service tomorrow.

Please indulge me while I finally show off my sweet new computer chair, one of my favorite Christmas gifts this year!

Saturday

Well, it always takes a few days, but today, our feeder visitors began to show up for real, including this cute little titmouse.

Perhaps it's a silly thing, but the new place feels a little more like home now, with birds at the window feeders. You can be sure there's a kitty in the house who's even more excited than I am.

I did get to stay home for the earlier part of today and "play" a bit at moving furniture and boxes around in the back room--it was a bit like one of those sliding tile puzzles, actually--and eventually got it (this last frontier of Complete Chaos) a little more organized. It turned out there were actually couches in there! And I got the second television hooked up.

That crowded back corner of the room will be my project over the next few days, as I work to get the computer station set up, so I'll be ready for the arrival of Broadband on Wednesday (oh, how happy I will be...). Progress is coming in bits and pieces here and there: yesterday, we brought home the washing machine and were able to get electrical outlets in the back room and laundry area working. Now we just need to figure out what sort of angry creature may be living beneath the back bedroom, whom we heard squeaking and chittering at us last night.

Meanwhile, it sounds like there's the potential for us to get just a little snowed in for the New Year; there's a storm we're keeping an eye on for Monday-into-Tuesday, and we'll just have to wait and see how that plays out.

Here's the sky this evening, as I finally headed for work. This is most interesting because, not five minutes later, it was SO foggy that I was looking for a red-nosed reindeer to get me the rest of the way to the restaurant!

Bits of Progress

Whew...it's still a marathon, but at least yesterday we were able to put paid to the old house and get the last of our stuff out of there. It's kind of exciting and more than a little bit of a relief to have both feet in a single household again.

But now with just two days until Christmas, it's time to turn the attention to that a little more thoroughly, like finally getting our lovely Christmas wreath up on the front of the house--thanks, Mom and Dad!!

So this morning I worked on assorted projects around the house, as the unpacking continues.

I also managed to clean out some space in the attic last night to make room to store some of our stuff, so I put up a few decorations here and there before stashing the rest of the Christmas boxes up there.

Nice to have the stockings hung, which also helps to reassure "The Kids" that Santa's received our Change of Address notice.

Being able to get some boxes out of the way has opened up floor space in the back room--oh, that's right, there's a carpet in here! This room will be the best place for a Christmas tree in future years, with its higher ceilings and all, but I'm not quite sure we'll be ready to do that in there this year (ie, Tomorrow...), so I'll be looking for something scrawny and narrow that'll fit in the living room without crowding us too much.

I even got some holiday fiddly-bits up in the kitchen, which is still pretty much a war zone. Theoretically, it'll be a little tidier by Christmas Day, at which point it'll be nice to have something festive happening there.

Of course, I feel a little duplicitous sharing these nice pictures of the house with you, when to the side of where I'm photographing, Chaos Reigns.

Soooo...I'll include these two shots just for the sake of Honesty in Blogging.

I even managed a little bit of Christmas shopping on the way into work this evening.

Here's one of the remaining snow piles from last week's storm with the nearly full moon rising behind it, as seen from the parking lot at the Hallmark store.

Settling In

Today, Emily Grace got a run installed in the back yard, so she is happy to explore her new world a little more fully, without having to drag one of us along for her explorations.

I was standing on the deck while she was out there tonight. Yes, it's warmed up considerably, with temps in the forties, and ever-shrinking piles of dirty snow everywhere. As I waited for her, I could hear a couple of owls hooting back and forth to one another in the December dark.

There was a cardinal flitting around in the trees this morning, and I look forward to getting a feeder hung in the yard very soon, so I can start getting to know our new local wildlife a little better and to get the word out to them that we are an animal-friendly household (like the scent of dog doesn't suggest that).

It's a good feeling to see the final bits of moving appearing on the horizon and will be totally be a relief to settle into our new digs and get to know our new environment, just like Em's doing.

Sunday Nor'easter

Snow, sleet, rain. Repeat.

Sometime overnight, a new storm arrived for us. One of those classic nor'easters, bringing a few inches of snow before settling into the above pattern for the rest of the day. It was simply gross outside and I knew there'd be no success in visiting the old driveway, already muddy from our earlier moving efforts.

I might've enjoyed making an early morning phone call or two to a few people to say "hey, we're in" and pass out the new number...but we have also discovered pre-Revolutionary War era phone jacks at the new place, so we'll have to have those replaced before there's a home phone...or sadly internet access (since I opted away from the expense of broadband...).

And I'd also not really had the chance to spend much time inside at the new house, so I was glad to stay home and begin sorting through the masses of cartons, boxes and milk crates we'd piled in the big back room.

It might seem impractical to begin with unpacking the books, but at least I was able to get them up on the shelves and their boxes out of the way. By the end of the afternoon, I'd managed to clear out some space...at least enough to allow for aisles passing through the remaining boxes, which I also sorted thematically by contents.

There was no sign so far of the silverware, but fortunately we'd thought to grab a few packets of plastic cutlery from the restaurant to facilitate dinner that night.

We did, however, discover a rabbit fur dog coat, which had been purchased for Emily a few years ago, but never really served her as anything more than a shawl. Anyway, she doesn't care for clothes much. So we tried it out on Badum, who was nestled in the bean bag chair. He seemed cool with it for a little while, walking slowly around the house humming "If I Were King Of the Forest"...but eventually he managed to squeeze out of it.

After all, he's been the busiest of us, being the only one in our household who can visit all of the rooms' furthest corners. Even he can't find the box with the silverware.