Per the Aftervictory Code of Secrecy, all I can say is that I’m still a web designer, but now working in the public sector. It’s quite a thing to change a job when you’re the sole source of income, but they made me a pretty outstanding offer. So far so good there.

Two years
Hard to believe but it’s been two years for us here in the northern of the two Carolinas. It’s gone by so fast! Still a little weird to write ‘NC’ on our return address labels.  It’s still good though, and still tough to be away from our family and friends.

Cars
We now have three cars, which for those keeping score us one more car than licensed operators. Kate and Ted cruise around in the Versa while I take either of the remaining vehicles to work.

Keeping versus trading in came down to value. While we would have received some money for a trade in, we get much more value out of having an extra car. By equally spreading the mileage over the older vehicles, hopefully we can delay having to purchase a commuter car for me for a while.

Television
As new parents, our TV time is pretty limited. After Ted goes down for the night, there’s only maybe an hour before we’re both asleep. We have to choose our viewing wisely.

We watch almost all our TV from the internet. Sites like Hulu.com and the various network websites allow us to watch what we please whenever we like, without having to pay for cable tv.

Right now we watch The Daily Show, How I Met Your Mother, and the very dark comedy Its Always Sunny in Philidelphia.

If you haven’t checked out Hulu.com yet, you need to. It’s way easy to use, free, extremely well thought out in it’s design, and has a ton of shows, many from long ago.

What a thing to do…. pack up and head off into the country with nothing more than a Craigslist handshake and a couple of disgruntled cats.

It’s been great, though. And sad sometimes. And awesome other times. However hard or silly or non-Yankee its been (and sometimes it was all three at once), it’s all been worth it.

Hopping on a jet plane again tomorrow and heading up north to meet up with them, and then on Sunday we’ll all pile into the Celica and drive home.  The Celica has been busy up north, getting itself a new clutch, a long overdue bit of maintenance  I can’t wait to shift gears again without fear!

It’s been a fairly productive time for me down here.  I did lots of yard work, installed a rain collection barrel, cleaned out the garage so we can fit an actual car inside of it, filled up two bags full of old clothes and brought them to goodwill, and got to visit some locals.  I also installed our new HD converter box thing, which will allow our tv to work after the great old school tv signal cutoff happening next year.

I also caught up on sleep.  Delicious multiple-hours-in-a-row sleep.  It was good to relax, but will be better to see the rest of the After Victory crew this weekend.

It was good times, I was totally surprised! Getting to eat at Chelo’s is one of those things I’d like to do on every New England trip, but since we moved our time up north is usually too limited. I had the roast beef sandwich, which is super tasty and I think their specialty (besides cake). I thought I was stuffed, but found more eating room when some birthday cake was brought to the table.

It was good food and good prizes including a certain robot movie on dvd, a new tv remote so we can see all channels our tv provides over the airwaves, and lots of gift cards including one to Home Depot which we used to….

TedPrep
…. get paint and brushes to paint Ted’s room. His room is pretty close to being baby-ready now thanks to all the sweet gifts people keep sending him, but the walls were plain white, so we got a couple of gallons of a light blue paint and went to town. I think it’s the nicest looking room in the house now. We’ll post some photos soon.

Pancakes!
Back in the day my mom would make us pancakes for supper from Corn Muffin mix. I’m not sure I ever saw a box of corn muffin mix be transformed into muffins, but they always made good pancakes. I hadn’t ever run into them in the outside world though.

Tonight we ventured to the International House of Pancakes which just opened in the town next to us for some fine dining. To my surprise (and pancake-related joy) I found that they now serve corn muffin pancakes! I ordered some and they were almost exactly like I remember… except mom never served them with the carafe of coffee like IHOP does (probably for good reason).