Goings on

So what’s new and exciting in our loony bin? Well, let us catch everybody up!

House (2780)

The house at 2780 is now officially somebody else’s headache. That’s right! The sale of it closed on the 14^th! No more mortgage, no more mowing the lawn, no more pool chemicals, no more, no more, no more. I feel like breaking into the ‘Free At Last’ speech.

Yeah, well, while all of that was very exciting it also was a little bit painful on the emotional side. I lived in that house for right around 30 years and there sure were a whole lot of memories there. It was my first and only house. It was the house that Jess was brought home to. Additions were adding the porch, the pool, several different landscapes, Jess’s playhouse/swing-set, numerous vegetable gardens, building the boat, more birthdays than I can even remember, dozens of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc. dinners, and Jess’s high school graduation party was there.

I will admit that on the very last day that I was there packing the last few things and checking cabinets one last time, that it all sort of caught up with me and it took me a few minutes. Damn glasses must have gotten some smudges on them.

Here are a few pics of what it looked like on the very last day before the closing.

House (245)

The big piece of news here is that we are officially residing at the ‘Beach House’. That’s kind of what we’re calling it as it sounds very pretentious and snobby. It would probably be more accurate to call it the Beach Bungalow, or the Beach Phone Booth. It really is pretty small. I’ve seen clothes closets that are bigger than my garage. We’re calling that the ‘Man Closet’, it’s too small to be considered a Man Cave. But that’s ok, we plan to be there only about three or four months out of the year. The rest of the time it will sit empty and closed up.

We’ll get some pictures up when it gets a little further along. We are still living out of boxes a little bit and the place is still a train wreck with renovations still going on. We’re hopeful that we can get to a point where it’s relatively cleaned up in a couple of weeks. Once the tile guy is done, boxes get unpacked, I finish the floors, get the baseboards installed, build a closet, install crown molding,…..the list goes on forever.

Edna (Every Day New Adventure)

We did hear from the sales guy about two weeks ago (right around the first of November) and he said that Edna was to start the build process in a few days. He also said that we could expect to get the phone call to head to Jacksonville (where we will pick it up from) to do the walk-through and paperwork by about the second or third week of December.

Yes, we are EXTREMELY excited to make that milestone! To be honest I am far more excited about Edna than I am about 245. I cannot wait until we can take off and go camping for a long weekend. I also can’t wait to be able to drive it back from Jacksonville. I would absolutely LOVE to make a Saturday night reservation somewhere between Jacksonville and here, and spend the first night in her.

Us

First off, we really wished that we could have made it to the Sylvester get-together lunch. We tried every possible way to come up with a way to make that happen, but there was just simply too much to do.

Everything else seems to be rolling along pretty much as usual. We’re still talking about exactly when we want to retire and jump off. It will very definitely be in 2018, that much is for sure. We just can’t seem to nail down a good date.

I think that pretty much catches most things up a little. I just haven’t had time to keep the blog up as I would have liked. Hopefully as things start to calm down a little and we get caught up I can be a bit more regular with the updates.

In the next entry I’ll explain where our nicknames June & Mango came from. Some of you already know the story but I’ll tell it for everybody else.