Sunday, December 16 - Packing to move

As I told our realtor yesterday, this "dream house" has turned into a total nightmare. Everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Right up until the beginning of last week it looked like there was some hope. Not so, so now we live in a house we no longer want to buy, and probably would not take as a gift -- details available to close friends and relatives only.

So after all these months of trying to make it work (we signed the original contract on 30 April - Bless You Melissa for sticking with us), we're moving on. We found three properties which would suit us just fine, and maybe we're rationalizing but all of them are better than here, in many ways. Of course, we'd lose most of our pasture for a lawn, the fish pond for flat garden land, and a log cabin for a conventional looking vinyl-clad house or double-wide. But overall, it's not worth trying to work things out here any more, so we're packing.

On top of all that, the several pipes froze in the Waterville house when the furnace kicked out, and I have a "Merry Christmas" repair bill of $2100.00, with no guarantee that the furnace won't kick out again and do more damage. At least the oil tanks are full. If I put in an insurance claim, the company almost certainly will cancel my insurance. Isn't that fair -- you pay and pay but when you need to get some of it back they drop you like a hot potato! At least the repairs are deductible on my income tax, but in the meantime I still have to pay for them. I've dropped the price from $83,500 to $69,900 and still nothing.

On the bright side -- yes there IS a bright side -- we got a dusting of snow last night (not 8-12 inches), the winds are up (but not 60 mph) and the temps are down to 26 at night (not 0). It's what we in Maine would call a heavy frost. Another good thing though is that the plants we put in the ground can be dug up -- the ground doesn't freeze here -- and be replanted in the new place even in January, with care. The front lawn is still growing when temps get up into the 40s -- and they will be 50+ by Thursday. And the birds are still feeding voraciously! The hawk ON the bird feeder in the picture is probably looking for appetizers!

Just keep reading my blog -- the only thing (I hope) that has changed is that it has become the "View From The Porch" instead, because the places about which we're serious are out of the knobs with its treacherous roads, and actually in the "Bluegrass" farming region and have porches or decks with lawn. If we get our first choice, our mailing address will actually be "Danville, KY" even though we'd live less than a mile from Parksville. And we'd be about 8 miles closer to town (on less curvy, much wider state roads), Burke's Bakery, Centre College, our doctors and dentists, and Wal-Mart (note the ORDER in which I list these notable sites)...

OK, back to uploading cemetery photos, packing, and thinking about friends and family in Maine as an old-fashioned "Nor'easter" blows in.