December 31, 2006: New Year’s Eve

Well, 2006 is coming to a close. Another year of SGL completed. Another year older. It has been a big year for us. Dominica got her second real IT job this year. I took the job in New Jersey. We moved (at separate times) down to North Brunswick. Then we moved to Newark. We decided to sell our house in Geneseo. Then to keep it when we didn’t buy in New Jersey but rented instead. Then to sell it anyway. The Ralstons decided to move to New Guinea. It has been a crazy year. We have seen our friends less this year than we ever have before. This has been probably our busiest year ever with more “moving” packed into a shorter period, new places that we have never been before, more work than we are used to and everything else. It is hard to believe that we made it through the year and that we are about to start a new one!

Dominica and I slept in until ten this morning which was about eight hours of sleep really. Before going to bed last night she played a bit of Cooking Mama on the Nintendo DS and I set up my HP D325 workstation in the upstairs office so that I would have a stable, solid machine to work from when I am here in Geneseo. Which we need whether or not we are selling the house but if we do sell it then I will be here quite a lot over the next few months (the target is to close in four months) as we attempt to pack and ship the entire contents of the house over to dad’s house. That is going to be a very large project. And I only have a total of sixteen weekends in which to do it. I will probably take a week off of work at some point to really get it done when we get down to the very end but we will have to wait and see.

Our big job for this morning is to clean out the armoir in the living room as the plan is to get it moved to Frankfort sometime in the next two weeks. It was my mother’s armoir that she used as her computer desk in the basement of my parents’ house and then when she died it came here to Geneseo and we used it in the living room as our computer desk there. That is where I had the Mac desktop that we used for our living room DVD player. A lot of times people would use it when they were here visiting and needed to set up a computer real quickly. The armoir has a “filing cabinet” in it and it is full of Dominica’s paperwork and so she has a ton of that to go through before the armoir gets moved and we have a number of small items in there that need to be moved as well. All stuff that can be packed and sent to dad’s or to Newark. It is really cool that Dominica’s father decided that he wanted an armoir just like the one that mom used to have (he wasn’t aware that we were not going to keep this one when he told Dominica that he wanted one just like that) so that we are able to keep mom’s armoir in the family instead of just giving it away or something. But neither dad nor us have any practical use for it and we would just be keeping it for the sake of keeping a piece of mom’s furniture around and that is not really very smart. So this is the best possible solution and we are all really happy about it. It is a really nice piece of furniture too but we just don’t have space for spare furniture. As it is everything we own is just going into storage until we figure out what we can do with it all.

Our appointment with the real estate agent for the sale of the house is at one this afternoon in Geneseo. Nothing is final or official yet but everyone thinks that this is the final counter-offer and that everyone has met the needs of the other party and that everyone is going to be happy with the situation. I am very sad to be leaving the house that we love but we are both incredibly relieved to be moving out of a situation where we cannot rent the house and the next door neighbour is just so mean that we are always uncomfortable being in our own home (she also spies in the windows sometimes!) It is really just too much. We want a place that we will be happy with and that will be comfortable and practical. Geneseo was very practical once upon a time but now really is not at all. We chose this location because of the special services that we were able to get here from ChoiceOne and almost immediately after moving in they went bankrupt and broke their service agreement with us and left us high and dry. Not something that you expect from your phone company. So we lost the advantage, almost immediately, that we had purchased the house to get. It ended up raising the cost of the house by almost $200 per month after that and kept it from being the value that it was supposed to be. Time to move on I guess. Sad but we will be much happier with something else in the long run and really, we will almost never want to come back to Geneseo except to eat at the Omega.

The appointment went really well this afternoon and the bottom line is, the house is sold! It is not official yet, obviously, but everyone has agreed and everything is moving along quickly at this point. The paperwork is going to the lawyers on Tuesday and everything should be ready by the end of the week. It will be several months before we close and there is plenty of time for things to go wrong but basically we are as sold as it gets until we actually close. We are very much excited and relieved although we are very sad to be selling our first house. There are a lot of memories here in this house and the house itself has been so good to us but we just can’t justify keeping it anymore.

After the meeting it was back to the Omega for a late lunch with dad. It was around one thirty when we got there. We hung out for a little while and then we had to run up to Henrietta to get dog food for Oreo as he is completely out of food. So we went straight from lunch up to the city. We hit Petco and the wine store and then decided to run up to the north part of the city to see Kate and Phil Ayers’ new house (by new we mean that they got it in February but we still have not had a chance to see it.)

We got to the Ayers’ house around four and got the whirlwind tour. They have a very nice and practical house just inside of the city of Rochester far to the north off of Culver. They are hosting the New Year’s Eve party tonight and were just about ready for it when we got there. We were able to stay and visit for about an hour but we have lots of work to do in Geneseo and have to get back to Oreo who we were not intending to leave at home on his own for very long.  The Relyeas and Jess arrived a little before we had to leave which was nice so we got a little bit of time to visit with everyone before taking off to come back to Geneseo.

We got back to Geneseo and did some quick work around the house, checked on Oreo and then ran downtown for some pizza from Pizza Paul’s for dinner (yes, that is four evening meals in a row of pizza for me!)  Oreo was happy to go for the ride and we were back at the house by have past six to work on getting stuff packed and ready to go to dad’s.

For New Year’s Eve we are going to go over to dad’s house after he gets home from dinner with the Richardsons in Geneseo.  We will hang out there and visit in front of the fire (Dominica is totally addicted to real wood fires now especially when you have pine cones that cause the fire to be pretty colours) until we get tired and then it will be back to Geneseo and time for bed.  Tomorrow we will be driving back to Newark as I have to work early on Tuesday morning even though the US markets are closed in honour of Gerald Ford’s death but because I am early morning support and the UK markets are still open I have to be there.  But the upside is that I will get a long weekend sometime soon since I am stuck going in on Tuesday which I will need to get the house ready in time.

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