Today is the busy day for the week. Dominica’s alarm went off at 5:10 this morning and surprisingly she managed to get herself right up and out of bed. I slept, sort of, for another fourty minutes before having to get up to load her car. We use every opportunity of going in and out of New Jersey to keep anything valuable from accruing in our apartment so the server that I had been working on this week is returning to New York. She is not meeting her parents in Scranton until 10:00 but because of pending rush hour traffic she has to leave exceptionally early to make sure that she makes it on time. So she was out the door by around 6:15.
Since I was up I decided to just get ready and go into work. I don’t have to be in early this morning but why waste being awake? I got to work nice and early and ended up having plenty of stuff to work on.
Dominica ended up getting to Scranton so early that she drove on up to Great Bend, Pennsylvania to meet her parents there. She could have met them much farther north but they didn’t have their cell phone on and she was unable to coordinate with them.
We decided that we want to get the Hillcrest Home at the Heights of Lebanon so the plan is that I am going to drive out there today during lunch to put down the initial deposit on the house. We had hoped that a smaller Crestmont II would have been available but there isn’t going to be one of those for a year and they are not even sure that that will happen since one has to fall through before any will be available so we decided to just go with the Hillcrest. The Hillcrest is more expensive but it is available a year sooner (that is a lot of rent to be lost during that time), has 400 square feet of additional living space, has an awesome theatre room that we expect will roughly rival that of our theatre in Geneseo and has an awesome view of the Raritan Valley.
The Washington Post talks about a survey of bloggers and determines that the average blogger is a fourteen year old girl writing about her cat. I think that they may have missed something in their survey though. I would be interested to find out their definition of “blogger” as they might be surveying a huge number of one time or short term bloggers and not the real, regular bloggers who right more than three posts and do so for an extended period of time. It is like saying that you interviewed a “writer” just to find out that it was a sixth grader who wrote an essay for English class or interviewing a “automobile mechanic” and discover that it is a teenager who works only on his own car and just changes the oil himself.
During my lunch break I drove west to Lebanon and bought the house – or at least I made the first deposit on the house. Thus the process starts. We are hoping to be into the house around November 15th of this year. Just about perfect timing, I would say, for us. That will give us time to relax some before actually moving plus time to sell our house in Geneseo and get that all squared away. We are hoping to have the money from that sale to put into the down payment on the house in Lebanon. We don’t need it so we are okay but it would really be nice.
After dealing with the house I took a quick drive to the south to see Round Valley State Park that we will be living directly against. I didn’t realize how close we are and we will be living within walking distance of the park. The park has the state’s deepest lake so we could even go boating there, in theory. It looks like there will be nice walking trails there.
I drove downtown and had a quick lunch at the luncheonette there. The food was really good and boy was it cheap. We are going to enjoy living out in the country. I am all ready starting to feel like one of the locals. We have been there two days in a row.
The rains from the tropical depression in the Atlantic hit us today as we had expected. Who would have guessed that on a day when I am going to be driving back to Geneseo that there would be torrential rains? Certainly not I.
Everyone at the office covered my late evening duties for me so that I could get onto the road as soon as possible. I left right about at 5:00 to head for Geneseo. The rain was heavy and it caused traffic to become really bad out on the expressway so I decided to take the opportunity to get some food without wasting any valuable drive time so I pulled off the expressway in Lebanon. The little General Store where I had hoped to eat again was closed for the evening so I went out on to NJ22 and stopped and the Bagelsmith and got a sandwich for right away and one for the road. It is nice being able to stop at all these local little restaurants and check them out knowing that in not too long we will be living here and these will be our local haunts, most likely.
The drive home was pretty good. I stopped at exit 299 on US80 (this is the same stop where I pulled over on my way back to Geneseo when they called to tell me that my job really was starting and that I needed to return to New Jersey) and fueled the car (mid-grade – ouch!) and felt that it was safe enough to put the top down to enjoy some fresh air while I drove the rest of the way. The rest of the trip went quickly and uneventfully. I pulled into the house in Geneseo just after 10:30. Boy is it ever nice to not have to arrive after midnight for a change. That makes a huge difference for how I feel when I arrive. Even so it was pretty much time for bed when I pulled in.