new house

Cellpic Sunday — Ring-a-Ding

Fandango6 Comments

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday, in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. He encourages us to participate in this cellphone photo prompt by creating our own CellPic Sunday post and linking it back to his post.

As most of you know, I moved into my new home on Friday and my wife and I still have a long way to go to unpack all of the boxes and put things where they belong and then to retrain our brains to remember where everything is.

Anyway, after spending a close to sleepless night on Friday, at some point maybe an hour or so after sunrise yesterday, I opened up my Ring doorbell app on my iPhone and saw something that made me say “Wow” because of the geometric interest, at least to me, of what I saw. So I took a screen shot of the Ring doorbell image on my phone.

Our new house faces east, so the early morning rising sun created some fascinating shadows of the wooden fence we have on our front porch. And I thought it interesting enough to share it with all of you, my WordPress friends, today on John’s Cellpic Sunday.

And speaking about my WordPress friends and my move, I haven’t had much time since Wednesday, actually, to be on WordPress. I have hardly posted anything other than my previously scheduled daily FOWC word prompts. Nor have I had a chance to read or comment on any of your posts.

So I am sorry I have been MIA and will continue to be for maybe a week more. But hopefully I will be back to full throttle by next week.

Sunday Poser — Buyer’s Remorse

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For today’s Sunday Poser, Sadje wants to know:

Have you suffered from buyer’s remorse?

Sure, there have been times along the long path of my life when I suffered buyer’s remorse. In some cases it was because whatever I bought didn’t live up to my expectations (i.e., it wasn’t as advertised).

The only major purchase I made that gave me buyer’s remorse was when I bought a used 1959 Jaguar XK-150.

My most beloved car ever was a 1967 silver-blue Austin-Healey 3000 Mk III. I absolutely loved that car, but it was essentially a two-seater British Roadster. I had recently been promoted to a position at work that occasionally required me to shuttle people from place to place, so my boss told me I needed to buy a car that could comfortably accommodate four people.

If I had been more business savvy at the time, I would have told him to lease me a company car and would have kept my Healey. But I was naive, needed the job, and, with a broken heart, I sold my ‘67 Austin-Healey 3000 Mk III for $2,200.

(Just as an aside, I Googled “1967 Austin-Hraley 3000 Mk III” to see what they’re worth today. Try around 80 grand. What?)

Anyway, a few years went by and I felt I was in a position to maintain my practical car and to try to recapture the feeling of having a classic British Roadster, so I bought a used 1959 Jaguar XK150 for $2,300. 

This wasn’t my car, but it looked just like it.

It was drivable, but just barely. In the 3 years I owned it, it spent about 2 3/4 years in the shop of a self-proclaimed Jaguar mechanic who called himself “Jaguar Joe.” I probably paid Jaguar Joe more than I paid for the car in the first place, and he was never able to get it to run for more than a week or two at a time. I finally ended up just letting him keep the damn thing.

(Just as an aside, I Googled “1959 Jaguar XK 150 S Roadster” to see what they’re worth today. Try around 100+ grand. What?)

So, bottom line, between the cost to buy the Jaguar and what I paid Jaguar Joe in his unsuccessful attempts to make the vehicle road-worthy — all in my ill-fated effort to try to recapture a past feeling — buying that Jaguar gave me a serious case of buyer’s remorse.

Home-Worthy

As I mentioned here yesterday, my wife and I are moving into a new house this coming Friday that we purchased late last month. Our reasons for moving from our current house, a house we love with an oasis for a backyard and with lots of privacy and gorgeous views, are very logical and rational and on paper make perfect sense. But I do have concerns that down the road a bit we may scratch our heads and ask ourselves why the fuck we did this.

Maybe it’s because we are in the phase of the process where we are going through all of our belongings, deciding what to move with us, what to leave behind, and what to toss. And we have to look forward to the actual physical moves of our stuff to the new place, figuring out where everything goes, unboxing everything and putting it all where it belongs. And then getting used to living our day to day life in a very nice house with a very nice yard, but not one with a beautiful oasis of a backyard with million dollar views.

I am hoping that if I am ever asked if I have buyer’s remorse about buying that house and selling this one, my answer will be an unequivocal “no.”

I am going to leave myself a task for the end of August of this year to write a post with my answer to that question.

SoCS — A Clean Slate

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For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us the word “trees.” She asks us to use the word “tree” or write about a tree. Any kind of tree.

I thought I’d write about not just one tree, but about the dozen trees that we planted in our backyard as part of a major landscaping project we undertook this past year. Here’s the story.

When my wife and I moved into our current home in early 2020, our backyard was a field of hard, dry clay. Our house was a flip, and the flipper decided to leave it up to the new owners to landscape the yard anyway they wanted to, so he covered the clay with a black tarp. He called it “a clean slate.”

About a year ago, we decided to turn our tarp-covered backyard into a green paradise. We removed the tarp, tilled the clay, added topsoil and nutrients, planted ground cover, grasses, plants, shrubbery, and around a dozen decent-sized trees where there was nothing but clay before. We even constructed a waterfall with a pond to attract birds who drink from and bathe there.

Here is a recent photo of just a small portion of our lush, landscaped yard as it looks today.

I can’t describe how much pleasure my wife and I derive when we sit on our backyard deck and look out upon the natural, park-like tranquility we have created.

Pack ‘em Up, Move ‘em Out

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The packers and movers showed up at 8:00 this morning. By tomorrow night, everything we own will have been moved into our new house, including our dog and our cat, both of whom are somewhat freaked out by all this commotion, since they have no idea what the hell is going on.

My wife and I will be spending Thursday, Friday, and probably most of the weekend unpacking and getting things organized. And that means I won’t be around much on WordPress. I do have my daily FOWC with Fandango prompts and my daily February Expressions prompts scheduled out for the next two weeks, so they will be posted. I’ll also probably repeat one of my early Fandango’s Provocative Question posts on Wednesday and I will try to post a Fandango’s Friday Flashback on Friday.

I’m hoping that by early next week I’ll be settled in enough at the new place to get back in the game.
D77AFF46-74C3-4589-8F3C-CCF960C12385But that, of course depends to a great extent on the size of the “honey do” list that my wife has already begun compiling even though we haven’t yet moved in.

JusJoJan — Pressing Matters

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E0A5F2C7-FC2F-40F4-99C6-483AE5232AF6I didn’t publish many posts today.

Why not? Because I had other pressing matters to attend to.

Like what? Like the final walkthrough of the new house we’re buying, which is pictured above (in my wildest fantasies).

How long did it take? About five hours altogether. One hour driving each way and three hours turning over every stone (figuratively speaking, not literally speaking, of course). And then another hour creating a Word document using my handwritten notes.

I’m tired and hungry — it’s dinner time in my neck of the woods, so no more posts for today. Hopefully, I’ll be back to my more regular schedule tomorrow.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s JusJoJan prompt, “publish,” and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (Press).

#writephoto — Couples Counselling

Fandango17 Comments

5C625EE8-4482-4650-844E-8CB2C5147C14“It doesn’t look like it’s been well maintained,” Chuck said to his wife. “Look at these vines and branches. They practically block this window.”

“First of all,” Anita said, “that’s a rose bush. It just needs to be cut back a bit and given some TLC.”

“The whole house needs TLC,” Chuck noted.

“But it has so much character,” Anita countered.

“That is just another word for money pit,” said Chuck. “I want a brand new house that no one else has ever lived in.”

“But all those new houses are so cookie cutter, so bland. They have no character at all,” said Anita.

“You can find plenty of characters if you watch TV or read a good book,” Chuck said sarcastically. “And the windows. They’re probably the originals. Single pane and no doubt drafty. Can you imagine what it would cost to heat the place?”

“What I can imagine is how owning this home would be like living in a fairytale,” said Anita, somewhat dreamily.

“More like a nightmare,” Chuck said.

After listening to Chuck and Anita bickering, the real estate agent who was showing them the property had had enough. “You two aren’t ready to buy a house together,” she said. “You need to get on the same page and I suggest couples counseling as a good first step.”

Written for this week’s Thursday Photo Prompt from Sue Vincent. (I think I’ve been watching too many episodes of “House Hunters” on HGTV.)