We moved into our new house in Newton on Saturday. It was one of the hotter days of the summer but luckily we hired movers to handle the heavy lifting and had the air conditioning working in the nick of time on Friday to keep things a little cool at the destination house. The movers were drenched in sweat to the point where they changed t-shirts between the loading of the truck and when they arrived to unload. My parents and Nancy came by to lend a hand and were instrumental in the unloading of the kitchen contents. Sarah’s parents took Madeline and the cats from Friday night until Saturday afternoon that also was a big help to allow us to focus on moving rather than herding the family about the house.

We seem to have unpacked about half of our boxes and I haven’t found much in the other half of the boxes that I actually need so those items remain in their boxes. Most things that I own don’t need to see the light of day more than once every three years. Those things probably should be tossed. It’s that fear of loss that keeps them around allowing them to survive moving. Many items didn’t make the cut including socks that I have deemed to be un-wearable and clothing that bothers me when I wear it like a pair of comfortable but odd looking green corduroy pants.

I have discovered some of my new responsibilities in the house. Today while taking Madeline out to play on the swing set I noticed that we now have a yard that is in disrepair. It is littered with sticks that fell from trees, leaves that are getting a head start on fall, shrubs that were starving for water, and a lot of long yellow grass. The neighbor’s yard across the way is a verdant paradise that they were watering as I looked at my lawn so I grabbed the hose and started spraying things that looked like they were dying or dead.

The house also comes with a new concept for me. We now have specialized rooms for different functions. While before we had a living/dining/tv room, a bedroom/office, and a child/play room these functions are now distributed throughout the house. Our large 42” television is now in the basement out of sight and for now out of mind since it has been separated from it’s couch set so there is nowhere to sit and watch it even if I had set-up the wires. The living room is just a pair of couches but there isn’t a stereo or radio in it because that is in the basement with the TV. The dining room is a welcome change. It allows the kitchen to stay a food preparation area and gives us a real place to sit with the table extended and eat. We even have an empty room for the expected new baby planned for arrival in January.

The office was set-up through a half day’s toil by the Verizon FiOS installation guy and it now is a very nice set-up with the fastest net connection I have ever had at home. I tested using NetFlix download service on my laptop through the wireless and it was amply fast to take advantage of my ridiculously large laptop screen. Furthermore while I type in the office I don’t need to worry about the keystrokes pounding out noise that would keep Sarah up all night. Unfortunately we are still stuck with out of date computers like the Windows 2000 box currently running this machine that won’t show movies because it is incompatible and the old media box I created in 2003 has a hard drive that is whining out of control if I plug it in. That drive happens to contain the full set of all of my photos for the past few years so everything needs to get migrated to some new PC set-up.