October 22, 2008: We Have A New House

30 Days to Baby Day! (35 Weeks and Five Days Pregnant)

7 Work Days Left for Dominica.

Today the entire day is dedicated to the process of procurring our new house in Peekskill.  I have the day off from work so that I have the time necessarily to complete all of the work that needs to be done for the house.  Dominica is taking a half day.

I had to get up early with Dominica so that Oreo and I could drive her to work.  We only have the Mazda and if I don’t drive Dominica to work then she will have the car all day and we will be stuck.  So we got to play chauffer this morning.

Traffic was pretty bad taking MIn to work this morning.  Rush hour in Northern Jersey is not fun.

Once we were home, Oreo and I had a pretty short window in which to get ready ourselves and prepare for today’s walkthrough and closing.  It is a very busy day.

I managed to pack the car pretty well for today’s trip to Peekskill.  We moved the Marantz receiver and the Totem speakers both of which were on our “delicate items” list that we wanted to move manually by car instead of having them bounce around in the moving truck.  Because they are delicate items they were also making it that much harder to pack the apartment with them in the way.

I managed to load all of our packed clothing into the car along with some doggy supplies for Oreo.  We want to make sure that he feels like this is his home and that he can relax in it.  So we took his spare pillow, water and food dishes, his dinner, treats, some budda bones, his blanket and several binkies with which he can play.  He will enjoy that.

While I was packing the car, Dominica’s clinic called and rescheduled her appointment from this afternoon until Tuesday.  That is good as it will give us a bit more flexibility in our schedules today.

I managed to leave Eleven80 with Oreo and the loaded car (the trunk could barely close, the back seat was in use and Dominica is going to have to carry the speakers wrapped in a blanket) to go get Dominica from work at ten thirty.  Traffic was better now and I arrived right on time at eleven.

The sun was shining and it was a gorgeous day for a drive up the Pallisades Parkway with the leaves changing and barely any mid-day traffic.  We got up to Peekskill at noon.  Dominica had to run a quick errand to the clinic.  Then we went to Subway at the Beach Shopping Center for lunch as we had arrived with a full hour to kill in Peekskill.  (This particular Subway has the VeggiMax subs that we really like as well as a seafood delight sub that we did not try.)

At one o’clock we had the final walkthrough up at the house.  That went pretty well. I tried to get more pictures of the house and immediately realized that my camera, while having plenty of battery, did not have a memory card in it and was unable to take pictures 🙁  So much for that.

The walkthrough went well and pretty quickly.  We left Peekskill at one thirty to drive over to Katonah to actually do the closing.  (Had Dominica had to go to the clinic for her original appointment we would have dropped her off now and she would have had to have waited for forty-five minutes before getting in to her appointment!)

We got to the law offices at two and started the closing early since there was plenty of stuff for me to sign long before the sellers would need to do anything.  The closing process ended up taking over two hours and we didn’t wrap up until four thirty.  So we left Katonah, which is a gorgeous little town about ten miles off of the Connecticut border, and got back to Peekskill around five.

I am not sure if Dominica ever though about this process but had she had her appointment today at the clinic she would have been stuck there from one thirty until five – three and a half hours.  She would not have been happy!

So at five we used our own key to enter our own house in Westchester County!  It’s official, we are 100% New Yorkers again.  Only now we are downstaters rather than upstaters.  Weird.  (And yes, for those of you who live in NYC and have no concept of the rest of the state, Westchester County is the southern most tip of downstate, not “way up there”.  Upstate is still a ways away.)

We unloaded the car, which only took a few minutes, and introduced Oreo to his new home.  He was so excited.  He ran all over the house rubbing his belly on every bit of carpeting that he could find.  I set him up with his pillow and blanket and tossed his binkies all over the living room which he thought was great fun.  He went out on the back deck and had a great time sticking his head over the side and watching everything.  He is going to love it here.

We spent about an hour in the house.  There is nothing to do as the house is completely empty.  We walked Oreo around the yard which he thought was awesome as there are so many other dogs in the area.  We checked out our local dumpsters (yes, we have dumpsters!  Yay!) and picked up the community newsletter to see what was going on.  There are 439 homes in our Chapel Hill complex and there are a lot of activities up at the Life Center or whatever it is called including a knitting club on Thursday evenings.

We decided to get dinner in Peekskill.  Originally we had wanted to have run back to Newark, loaded the car again and returned to Peekskill but it ended up being far later than we had anticipated so we decided to just get a nice dinner and have a relaxing evening.  We couldn’t get parking downtown (the parking garage is being demolished or something) and we didn’t know much of where to go so we decided to play it safe and ate at “At the Reef” located on the roundabout north of town.  It is a very well known landmark in the area.

Dinner was really good.  Dominica had the blackened tilapia and I had the pistacchio crusted rainbow trout.  It was good but took a while.

It was nine when we got back to Eleven80.  We really did not want to have to go back as we now own a home and really want to be able to stay there.  We don’t get to completely move for more than a week.  It is going to be a long week.

It was time to feed the dog then straight off to bed once we were home.  I am working the early shift tomorrow so I need some sleep.  Dominica has to go in a little early tomorrow too as she is dropping off the Mazda at the shop for some minor work.  We have a belt squeaking and a headlamp out.  Just stuff that we want to be dealt with now rather than while we are going back and forth to Peekskill constantly.

Gas in NJ is down to $2.59 by this evening.  That is one of the gas stations on the main drag in downtown Newark.