Finally, pictures

(take 2, because I just lost 10 minutes of writing due to learning how blogspot works. Doh.)

Anyway, we're here. I finally found my USB cable for my camera after unpacking every box left in the house. But now we can call the movers and ask for a debris pickup and get all the empty boxes out of the garage. Our house is starting to feel more like a home now and things are starting to find their way into various cabinets and bookcases.

On the wildlife front, our pond is getting more algae, but the fish are still alive. I count that as a major accomplishment for the first week. We poisoned the fire ant nest in our backyard, so I hope they die soon. And I will be so glad when our new neighbors finally move. They seem nice enough but they have a beagle and a hound dog that bark all morning long. Ugh.

Plus, I feel so decadent. We just hired a company to take care of the yard for us. They'll do all the mowing, edging, weeding and upkeep, plus 4 times a year, they'll take care of the bushes. We have such a nice yard, I'd hate to kill it my first summer here. I'll gladly take a reduction in my weekly allowance for eating out to pay for the lawn care. Especially when it's 95 outside.

We went exploring a little bit this afternoon, looking for an Army-Navy store. Didn't find what we were looking for, but now at least we've explored another road.

I thought I had gotten rid of most of my 'junk' before we moved, but as I'm unpacking everything, I'm deciding I really don't need a lot of this stuff. Part of it's beacuse of the poor people suffering from Hurricane Katrina. They've lost everything, and I'm looking at my stuff going 'what do I really need?' And it's not as much as I have. So I've put together a box of shoes, clothes, towels, kid's games and some kid-friendly books to take to a drop off tomorrow. Maybe I'll finally achieve the zen look I admire so much.

Okay, on to the pictures.


This is Daniel taking the hard drives out of our computers before we moved. Maybe we're paranoid, but we didn't trust the packers and movers to be as careful as we would have. So the hard drives traveled in air conditioned comfort in the back seat of our car, and now the computers work like a charm.


Here's our kitchen after the packers have left. All that stuff on the counter is the stuff they forgot to pack. They also missed 3 cabinets with glassware and a drawer of kitchen tools. Grr. Fortunately, the mover guy was happy enough to pack up the remnants.


Here's our bedroom. It looks so empty and sad with no sheets and the boxes piled up. I was glad to go to the hotel that night.


Here's Daniel taking a well-deserved break after the movers have gone. It was wierd having someone else in our house packing up all our worldly belongings and us just sitting there because we're not allowed to touch anything.


There's the moving truck in front of our house. One of the poor moving guys found a yellowjacket nest in our yard by getting stung. Ouch. Fortunately, he only got stung once. I mowed the yard the night before, and I don't know how I managed not to get stung then.


This is our picnic lunch after the movers have gone. That's it. Everything we own except for a couple of suitcases is on a truck and on its way to Texas. That's a very wierd feeling. Daniel's car was also loaded onto a car carrier and taken away.

Saturday morning, we had a lot of work done on the house. We found a great handyman, Jay Doyle, to come in and fix some minor stuff before we took off. Look him up if you live in Williamsburg and need some help.

Sunday morning, we had breakfast with our friends.
Carolyn and Bob.
David.
Hey, that's us!

Monday morning, we got up nice and early and loaded the cats into the car. This one, Nomia, hated being confined and told us that for a couple of hours. The other one settled right in and went to sleep.

Our first night, we stayed in Salisbury, NC. Turns out my parents were vacationing in weastern NC and rode over to see us. Hi Mom and Dad.

Did I mention they rode in on a Honda Goldwing? We passed them the next morning and we headed south. They were off to a NASCAR museum in NC.

We passed a water tower made up to look like a giant peach in Georgia. We also sampled peach cider at the welcome center, and it was so good, it tempted us to stop at a roadside stand and get a few bottles to take with us. They even had boiled peanuts. Yum.

Wednesday night we stayed in Mobile, Alabama, and we drove down to Dauphin island that evening. I couldn't believe some of these houses on the west end of the island. They were so far on the beach that there wasn't a blade of dune grass to be seen. All I could see was a bit of road and sand with big houses on pilings.

Even the fire hydrants risk being buried in sand.

We went wading in the ocean on Dauphin Island and ogled the numerous oil platforms off in the distance. The water was bathtub warm. It's a very disturbing feeling to think that all those houses may be gone less than a week after we were there. At the time, Katrina was menacing south Florida and we didn't think anything of it. I don't think I even turned on the Weather Channel that evening to check on it.

Hello, Louisiana. Thursday night we stayed in Lake Charles, LA, in another Motel 6. They're the only chain that takes pets, but I've become accustomed to a slightly higher level of hotel. Oh well, it's just for a night, right? To make up for it, we went to one of the casinos in Lake Charles for dinner and a little fun, and we both agreed it'd be a nice place to come back to sometime.

We drove I-12 around New Orleans. If we hadn't had the cats, we probably would have gone to New Orleans to tour around. Now we're wondering what will be left to go back to.

We passed through the Frog Capital in LA. Here's proof:
They did like frogs. They painted them all over the place.

It's Friday and we're in Texas at last!

Yep, lots and lots of Texas. I still haven't grasped how big this state is.

Here's a bridge outside Houston, over the Houston shipping channel. I'm getting excited now. We call our real estate agent and she's going to meet us at our house to give us the keys. "Um, Leslie, can you give us directions to our house?"

Our house!
The family room.
The bedroom. It looks out over a beautifully landscaped backyard with a fish pond.
Here's Nomia checking out the front porch.


On Monday, our furniture and boxes showed up. Well, the house isn't nearly so empty and echoey now. But the piles of boxes are very daunting. So we started in the kitchen.

It's a very nice house. We have granite countertops in the kitchen, cherry hardwood floors in the public part of the house, glass fronted cabinets and a beautiful back yard. I even can deal with the previous owner's wallpaper and paint choices for a while until I get the money and gumption to change them.

Okay, enough pictures of boxes. I'll post some more when I get pictures up on the walls and I don't have piles of junk lying on the floors.