Normal routines / Endless job

Nearly a week of living in our new house, and we’re quite enjoying it. Cats are pretty relaxed and have assumed normal routines. We are still ferrying stuff over from the old house, a seemingly endless job. The sewer work at the new house got complicated. The private company did their job on our side but they found a big hole on the City side, so for the last three days the City has been working on that with lots of big equipment. This morning, it looks like they are about finished, so we’ll be able to access our driveway 24/7 again starting later today.

Radio Free Random has a new studio (in my “office,” i.e. one of the bedrooms), and I’ve been doing transmissions from there this week. It’s got a big window for such a small room, and Betty’s been enjoying the view of the south yard from a perch a typewriter table I set up in front of the window.

We’re loving the north-facing floor-to-ceiling windows and balcony in the evenings, enjoying a view of the Coburg Hills, parades of clouds across the sky, and sunsets that we couldn’t see through all the trees and foliage at our old house. Also, we get to watch bats doing aeroBATics after sunset!

First actual night

Curious cats exploring the new digs

Two weeks later, and we’ve arrived at our first actual night living in the new house. We brought the cats over today, which was traumatic for them and us, but now, nearly 3 hours later, everybody is chill, having explored quite extensively and then found good places to settle down and relax. Mrs. Random is cooking dinner. We’re listening to a mellow jazz playlist, and the internet is working great. It’s so nice to have “arrived”!! Lots still to do at the old house, but we’re going to take a long weekend break from the back-and-forth and enjoy the new house with our kitties and most-if-not-all of our stuff in one place again.

Woohoo!!!!

Car, in Garage

        We’re in! We got the keys today and took a couple carloads over to the new house. And we drove the car into the garage—what a concept. When I was growing up, through several houses that our family lived in, the garage never had a car in it; it was full of Stuff. We are going to keep our car in our garage. No more leaves or grime or ice. The car will be kept clean and dry.

Mrs. Random imagining the Future

        We took a small table and some chairs, a bit of food and drink, and powered speakers that we can play music through from a phone. We also took a couple new rugs that Mrs. R ordered some time ago, waiting until today in their original shipping boxes, and they both look great.

After two dairy crates of vinyl

        And every trip we make, I’ll haul a small dairy crate of records over, so it won’t be an overwhelming job transferring 1500 vinyl discs across town. We put up some curtains, too. So already after only a few hours, it’s feeling like our own place. Woohoo!!!!

Big week

From our hike yesterday at Howard Buford Recreation Area

It rained overnight! The first rain after weeks of warm dry weather smells so good. We have the front door open, letting in the cool damp air as we drink our coffee here in the early morning, sitting in the living room of our old house.

Big week for the Randoms….

On Monday, Mrs. R had the chemo port in her upper chest removed after enduring it for over a year. It was a relatively minor procedure, requiring a local anesthetic to numb up the area. Two days later she’s still feeling a little sore there, but hopefully it will all be healed up soon.

During the next couple days, we’ll sign and close on the new house. On Friday we’ll get the keys. Movers and cleaners have been busy. Our real estate agent sent photos yesterday, and the place is looking quite ready to move into. Before we start living there, though, we’ll get the sewer repaired. That’s scheduled later this month and it will take a couple days. In the meantime, we’ll be moving stuff over in carloads, and we’ll get help from friends with trucks for bigger things. And THEN, with a newly fixed sewer, we can move ourselves and our cats over there and start living in our new house for real!

Sneak peek! Below are a couple of real estate photos of our new place from a few years ago.