After the paint, floor and carpet contractors came and went, we moved into our house in the space of just a few weeks, in between performances of "How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying" with The Aerospace Players. Mark spent his first night there on Saturday, 14 July 2001 (Bastille Day!).
Mark's apartment was not very thoroughly furnished; he just had a twin bed, two Target desks, some folding chairs and a card table, plus assorted computers, an engine hoist, and an electronic organ. We moved the heavy stuff in his van in one trip; you can see Cheryl leaning over the organ and the bed components, with the desks in the foreground. We are awfully thankful for removable rear seats!
Mark moved the remainder of his stuff (mostly books) to the house with his van on evenings and weekends, and took the day off from work on the last day of July to finish the evacuation before his lease expired. Cheryl's condo, however, was well enough furnished that we needed to rent a truck and call on some friends; here are our helpers relaxing after the move on 4 August 2001, a couple of days before the sale of her condo closed (whew!). On or near the couches, left to right, are Melisa, Woody, Meghan, Ida, Bud, Cheryl, and Susan. These are our friends from The Aerospace Players, who did the heavy lifting; in the foreground are our new neighbors Mark and Grace with their daughter Iris, who came by to visit. Grace works four doors down from Mark (Looper, that is) at Aerospace, and now we live four doors down from them!
In the middle of moving in we were also performing a show, as noted above. We have a favorite restaurant, Coyote Cantina, located about halfway between Cheryl's condo and Mark's apartment, to which we were introduced by Woody and Susan; we have developed a tradition of going there (in addition to other times!) on the Wednesday night between the weekends of a show, and we didn't let a little disruption in our domiciles get in the way of that! You can see some of the namesake coyote statuary in the background, or in the photo from the first time we went there; they are by an artist named Markus Pierson, and the owner started the restaurant mostly to house his collection of Pierson's art.
One thing we were worried about was how Cheryl's cat, Melody, would handle the move. She had already been forced to stay in a kennel (a very nice one--more of a spa!) during the plumbing work in Cheryl's condo, and cats do not like changes in their environment. However, with her familiar litter box in the laundry room, and her familiar towel on Cheryl's familiar bed in the master bedroom, she started feeling at home in just a day or two.
One attraction was the abundance of direct sunlight, which she clearly loves, in our House of Light; she will often lie in a sunbeam for long enough that her fur gets hot to the touch! She never had direct sun in Cheryl's condo, which faced north; she also had never dealt with stairs, but she got used to those in a hurry too, and in fact makes a habit of climbing up the ledges outside the handrail posts!
Since we had a wedding to prepare for, we did not complete the huge task of unpacking all our boxes (and still have not, as of this writing in mid-December!); however, we did clean shelves and drawers to make room to unpack most of the things we'll need day to day. The kitchen, in particular, was a high priority, and just a few days after moving in Cheryl made us our first home-cooked meal: some delicious spaghetti and meat sauce.
While we filled up the inside of the house with our furniture and other things, we had some folks come by to fix the neglected yard, trees, and bushes, and to repair the water-saving automatic sprinkler system. They did a beautiful job; compare this photo with the one from when we first bought the house! Note also the cement curb at the turn from the driveway into the garage; we asked the landscapers to put that in so as to prevent us (or delivery vans, or visitors, or ...) from driving over the grass while pulling in close to the house. The lawn was completely stripped bare in this location when we got the house, but since then we have not had a problem even when pulling Mark's large van in to load or unload it close to the house. A little preventative maintenance, here or in several other places where we saw the need, should help us keep this house in good shape for as long as we plan to live there, which is a long time!
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