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).

So today marks 365 days since we signed (and initialed, and initial here, and one more here) on to become homeowners. That was a crazy day, which involved us meeting some people we’ve never met before to sign hundreds of legal documents that hopefully did not require us to read all of them completely, followed by some hand shaking and ultimately the symbolic passing of the key (one key? what?) from one homeowner to another.

To celebrate, we got Thai food tonight. The house wasn’t that hungry, so just Kate and I ate it.

And as an unrelated bonus, here are some photos Kate took of Zoe reveling in some packing paper from a package sent by my folks. Cats, who also enjoy homeownership, respect good packaging a great deal.

So tonight was our first Halloween as homeowners (last year, you’ll recall, we were in our in-between apartment). Five, five bags of candy we had, all gone in just over an hour of non-stop doorbell ringing! At one point we had overflow off the front porch, and a posse of kids and parents out on the lawn.

We had to do the unthinkable and go dark on Halloween.

All lights out and the shades drawn. Very sad, but it’s hard to estimate just how many kids will come to your door, dressed as super-heroes and princesses, demanding sugar. Previous years at the old Rockland-Ave found us on the third floor of an apartment, so we really didn’t have any experience with trick-r-treater estimation.

Next year we’ll have to stock up, and possibly with generic candy.

For a limited time only, you can buy the house directly across the street from us, which is still under construction and should be finished before the holiday season. I think it’s a three bedroom, with definitely two and possibly 2.5 bathrooms. It’s got a two car garage, a runaroundable backyard, and I’m thinking it will come in under $150k. Interested parties can drop an email, and I’ll send you some pics. We can’t offer any financial assistance, but we promise to hang out with and/or bbq with you.

But wait, there’s more! Our neighbor on the right side of us has accepted an out of state job and I suspect (but have no proof) that he’ll be selling his place soon. The house is almost brand new, as he only moved in during April. If you’re more of a side-neighbor, this may be the place for you. I’ll post an update if there’s any for-sale signs there.

p.s. – this is post #499. Insanity!

Tonight consisted of four activities, two moderately nerdy in nature.

Watering the lawn:
Both a pain and a chore. I like our house, and I like our yard, but watering the lawn is a drag. It’s not some crazy effort, but it takes time moving the houses around the house and I always seem to get wet…. and yet if we don’t water the lawn (and, more importantly, the trees), our little slice of suburbia turns brown. I anxiously await for the day when robots will perform yard related tasks for us.

Talking to Kate on the Phone:
I was happy to hear that she safely arrived in New England, without any travel shenanigans. She no doubt has some action-packed days ahead of her this week.

Watched Battlestar Galactica:
This show is sci-fi-rific. I’ve watched three episodes of season 2 tonight, and it’s good television. Sometimes I wish we had cable, so I could catch fresh episodes as they come out, but I kind of like watching a bunch at once, commercial free.

(By the way, for fans of the show: I suspect that Lewis Scooter Libby is actually a Cylon. You heard it here first.)

Installed Xubuntu Linux on the old Power Mac G4:
By far the nerdiest thing I’ve done all day. I thought the machine was toast, but it turns out it was just a bad hard drive. I found an old, unused hard drive and (instead of reinstalling the Mac OS) installed a variation of the Linux operating system on it called Xubuntu.

Xubuntu is a version of Linux written for slightly older machines, and so far it has been a great OS to use. I’m typing this blog post on it right now.

Installation was, for the most part, pretty darn easy. It’s never flawless, but it also didn’t take four hours, and only required two reboots (unlike a certain other company’s OS intall.)

As an added bonus, it’s all free Open Source software, so you can be moderately sure that no one in Redmond, WA is data-mining your shopping habbits, or trying hard to get you to upgrade to a “premium” version.

I can say that if you’re doing graphic design in the real world, play super-fancy computer games, or if everyone else in the office uses Windows, Linux might not be a good choice for you. But for a spare computer here at Rockland-Ave, with zero dollars in software cost, it’s pretty sweet.

And now it’s time for bed. Happy Independence Day!

The past couple weeks our yard has been overcome with Japanese beetles. I am constantly out there catching them off of my hibiscus and rose bushes. If only I could sell beetles. I would be so rich. We sprinkled the yard with toxins to combat them. So unfortunately the cats can’t go out anymore. They are not happy about this turn of events. I really don’t like using pesticides but the bugs were hovering over the grass and swarming all over the plants. Now they are just swarming the plants. I guess I need to spray the plants, but I was hoping the bug bags we got would take care of them. We empty the full bug bag everyday and still my roses are covered. When talking to some locals they confirmed that the beetles were especially bad this year. So at least its not just us.

Next week I will be in RI. Wahoo! I am going up on the 3rd to be around for the 4th celebrations and then Pat will be joining me on the weekend to celebrate my sister’s wedding. Kim and Anne are getting married on 07.07.07. In MA, so that they will get all sorts of rights and tax benefits and such. They really wanted to wait until it was legal in RI, but with a little one on the way, they figured they better get some legal status sooner rather than later. I am very glad that we get to celebrate with them. Kim changed her last name to Anne’s while they were still out in Michigan, so I missed that event. I am really happy for them. Anne has been a member of our family for a long time now, this just makes it a little more official.

So all kinds of excitement around here. Tomorrow will be Pat and my three-year anniversary. We have been together for nine years. We are some lucky people.