Again, Mom is waiting for me to post to my blob
I have a terrible sense of time, as you can probably tell from my intermittent postings.
I planted a garden in Aledo, a goodly portion of it even came up (!!) and then we moved to Katy, a suburb of Houston. Work has been talking about transferring us here for months and it finally happened. So, still in Texas but hotter and more humid, and about an hour from the ocean. Our house in Aledo hasn't sold yet but is under contract for the end of this month. We've had a few buyers back out for various reasons so at this point we just want to be done. Plus we have a bunch of plans for some of the money, various small things on the new house we want to change, furniture that needs replacing, etc.
We bought a lovely house that's half again as big as our last one, and we were already knocking about a lot in the last house. The new house has a lovely and welcoming back yard with space for a garden, which was my goal, and 3-car garage for Jay as he does a lot of 3-D printing and project stuff in there. We wanted to make a decent investment, and this house is in a golf course community so should be good for resale (crossing our fingers that doesn't happen again any time soon). We're fancy upscale golf people now! (none of that last sentence is true, except maybe the people part) We did have to replace the roof, which we knew about going into the purchase, so shiny new shingles! Which took out almost all of our savings, hence the hoping for our other house to sell. I'm not terribly comfortable without my safety net.
I inherited a fish pond with the back yard and am now the proud owner of 3 koi - they're about a good trout eating size, which the previous owner told me would be expensive to replace. I haven't killed them yet, they seem pretty easy to take care of so far (feed every day, clean filter about once per week), and since it's Houston I don't have to worry about wintering them. I'm a fan of easy pets. Probably the biggest issue is going to be evaporation of the water this summer. Because Houston.
Work is stupidly busy, because oilfield work is starting to make a comeback and only a dozen or so people moved from Fort Worth from our product line. Since we're still feeling the effects of the oilfield downturn, the company wouldn't agree to hire more people until those ones were gone, so there was no cross-training of jobs. This has meant that, besides doing my own job, I have also had to figure out and cover for the jobs of people who left, with poor documentation and few resources. So far it's been extremely frustrating and will probably get worse before it gets better, as we have a lot of new people starting, meaning a lot of training will be on my plate as well. I keep hoping this will all be worth it...
I planted a garden in Aledo, a goodly portion of it even came up (!!) and then we moved to Katy, a suburb of Houston. Work has been talking about transferring us here for months and it finally happened. So, still in Texas but hotter and more humid, and about an hour from the ocean. Our house in Aledo hasn't sold yet but is under contract for the end of this month. We've had a few buyers back out for various reasons so at this point we just want to be done. Plus we have a bunch of plans for some of the money, various small things on the new house we want to change, furniture that needs replacing, etc.
We bought a lovely house that's half again as big as our last one, and we were already knocking about a lot in the last house. The new house has a lovely and welcoming back yard with space for a garden, which was my goal, and 3-car garage for Jay as he does a lot of 3-D printing and project stuff in there. We wanted to make a decent investment, and this house is in a golf course community so should be good for resale (crossing our fingers that doesn't happen again any time soon). We're fancy upscale golf people now! (none of that last sentence is true, except maybe the people part) We did have to replace the roof, which we knew about going into the purchase, so shiny new shingles! Which took out almost all of our savings, hence the hoping for our other house to sell. I'm not terribly comfortable without my safety net.
I inherited a fish pond with the back yard and am now the proud owner of 3 koi - they're about a good trout eating size, which the previous owner told me would be expensive to replace. I haven't killed them yet, they seem pretty easy to take care of so far (feed every day, clean filter about once per week), and since it's Houston I don't have to worry about wintering them. I'm a fan of easy pets. Probably the biggest issue is going to be evaporation of the water this summer. Because Houston.
Work is stupidly busy, because oilfield work is starting to make a comeback and only a dozen or so people moved from Fort Worth from our product line. Since we're still feeling the effects of the oilfield downturn, the company wouldn't agree to hire more people until those ones were gone, so there was no cross-training of jobs. This has meant that, besides doing my own job, I have also had to figure out and cover for the jobs of people who left, with poor documentation and few resources. So far it's been extremely frustrating and will probably get worse before it gets better, as we have a lot of new people starting, meaning a lot of training will be on my plate as well. I keep hoping this will all be worth it...
