Settling In …
Sorry for the lack of updates but, as you might guess, moving into a new house in a new town takes a bit of one’s time. The last month has been a busy one on the mountain. We have been unpacking, setting up new accounts, working on small house projects, planning for our first party, etc.
The unpacking and acclimating stuff has gone pretty smoothly, other than the confusion of trying to explain to the post master that mail addressed to our street address should be delivered to our home, and mail addressed to our post office box should be left in the PO box. Apparently this is a foreign concept, and is supposed to explain why some of our mail was returned rather than being delivered to either our house or our PO box. Eventually we convinced the PM that there was a logic to our request.
The small house projects have been just that, small. Sarah made a sign for the end of the driveway to help people find the house. I took karmic hits by murdering wasps in preparation of our housewarming cookout. We thought we had avoided this unpleasantness when we removed a half dozen unoccupied nests a few weeks ago, but suddenly the front porch was filled with the buggers …errrr…. buzzers sunning themselves and chasing the dogs when they were in the yard. With a planned cookout, it was decided we needed to address the issue, and so each morning over a few days while it was still cool out (and the wasps were inactive), I found myself crawling under the porch and climbing on the roof hunting for wasp nests.
Of course, when the day of the party arrived, it was raining. While we were luckily still able to grill, neither we nor our guests spent any time outside. The wasp murdering spree was still somewhat necessary as they were threatening to Haley and Mickey, but I still wish it could have gone down differently. We are surrounded by woods; why our stinging neighbors couldn’t find a nice tree to raise their broods is beyond me.
As for the party, we had a light turnout, but had fun nonetheless. Jessamyn and Greg brought over some yummy Vermont cheeses a professional cheese-buying friend of theirs had given them. Heather brought her friend Adrienne and a jug of Rock Art Brown Bear Ale, and I drove to Montpelier to pick up our mate Mike since he doesn’t have a car.
Picking up Mike was also an excuse to drive the new car. Last month we took the Subaru to our mechanic for what we thought was going to be a tune-up, only to be informed that the car has all sorts of issues. We respect Chip’s opinion, and he suggested we consider trading the car in now before we blew a head gasket. The other option was to help him put his daughter through college and have a lot of necessary work done. We had other reasons to consider selling the Subaru, including needing four-wheel drive and not just all-wheel drive, but Chip’s diagnosis accelerated the process. So we headed on down to Shearer Honda in Rutland and a week or so later came home with a Honda CR-V that gets better mileage than the old Subaru, and has many more safety features.
Everything else is going well. I am doing some web consulting for our town’s website, and Sarah has a job interview at Vermont Law School next week. Now that it is warming up a bit, our next projects are to build a fenced area where the dogs can run, sign up for a CSA membership at Four Springs Farm, and get ready for various visitors including Sarah’s dad in May. If you’d like to visit too, let us know.
Ahhhh, House …
A little less than a year ago we ventured up to Vermont for the first time.* While we were visiting, we drove around for hours exploring the small towns and back roads. We even purposely came during “mud season” because we had heard from friends and family that if we liked Vermont in mud season, we’d love it the rest of the year.
We ended up liking Vermont—and mud season—so much we decided on the flight home that we really were going to sell our house and move.
The most difficult part of the transition hasn’t been the brutal Vermont winters—this one has been significantly more mild than usual, as we understand it—but acclimating to living in an apartment again. It may even be more difficult for the dogs. Let’s face it, when you’ve had a house, a yard, and a garden to poop in, it’s tough to go back to having to go for walks on a leash. Errr, I’m speaking about the dogs, mind you.
Back to us.
While Montpelier has been wonderful to us for these last seven months, we have been chomping at the bit to find our dream place. So, after even more driving around Vermont, we are all very happy to have someplace to call our own again. It’s a cute little 3-bedroom, cape-style house that sits on a mostly-wooded 10-acre lot with a brook running through it and a small one-room cabin.
Now, we just need to find jobs to pay for it. gulp.
* Perhaps our first opinions of Vermont had been skewed by the fact that we had such wonderful hosts who generously opened their home and gave their time to relative strangers. We’re still glad we’re here … so thanks you two!
About Towns …
Though we haven’t been writing about it much, we’ve continued to explore Vermont. Inspired by the 251 Club (some members of which we got to meet in-person at a recent VT blogger meetup), Rick made a 251 page where we can track our progress.
When The Steelers aren’t playing a 1:00pm Sunday game, these afternoons are the perfect time for us to hop in the car and check out a new town for a couple of hours. Several weeks ago we drove over to Northfield. We enjoyed the quiet setting and historic “New England” feel, and had a blast spending too much time and money in the used book store on the green. The town also had some great views. For us, the major detractor was that Northfield is the home of Norwich University: while we admire the institution we are a little too hippiefied to feel at home in a town that is mostly populated by a military academy. It was a great town to spend a couple of hours in though.
Last Sunday, we headed over to Bristol, about an hour’s drive west-south of Montpelier. Bristol lies just a bit off of the major north-south corridor of the Lake Champlain valley, Route 7, and the proximity to Burlington and Montpelier drew us to the area. We tried taking a short-cut across the mountains via the Lincoln Gap Road but had to back track a couple of miles onto the more conventional (and paved) Route 17 when we discovered Lincoln Gap was closed due to fire. (It also looked like some trees had not been cleared off the road from the wind storm a week earlier, and that had us wondering what the people who live on Lincoln Gap Road do in the winter. Stay home I guess.)
At any rate, we eventually got into Bristol, parked next to the large town green (no meters!), and immediately snapped off a few pictures. It was sunny and beautiful so we strolled around a bit before checking out an eclectic Asian imports and weird do-dads store, an art gallery featuring the works of Vermont craftsmen (painting, sculpture, hand-carved spoons, ceramics, and jewelry), and then the Bristol Bakery & Cafe which had great soup and organic green-tea soda. We loved the area and felt comfortable in the town. It seemed large enough to be a town one could go to for errands, but small enough that the surrounding countryside would have the rural feel we are looking for. The one detractor of Bristol is that we are not the only ones who are enamored with it, and the property values are skyrocketing. We’ll keep an eye on it but wonder if we’ll be able to afford land and/or a house in the area.
On the way to and from Bristol along Route 100 (before the turn to Route 17) we were also reminded how much we like the areas around Moretown and Waitsfield. The towns are smallish and the surrounding fields and farms reminded us of England. The proximity to highway 89 is an added bonus. Again, the question of affordability came up, but for now we’ll add these areas to our list of “places we could live” and continue our search.
Spring is Sprung! …
We’ve been busy. Busy with work, extra work, travels, The Plan, dog(s), friends, and all the other joys that life has to offer. And in case you hadn’t noticed, we haven’t been that great about updating. But since we had time to put in our garden on Sunday, we thought we’d share. It doesn’t look like much now, but there’s here’s a huge batch of garlic, some broccoli, two types of lettuce, chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a variety of herbs. The only thing missing is the peppers section, which will be put in place in a few weeks, after it warms up. We’re hoping the garden won’t take too much supervision this year….as long as we can keep Haley out of it.
Look what we made! …
We’ve confessed our addiction to DIY television shows in the past. One of the projects that inspired us was a bit on Gardening by the Yard about making your own trellis out of copper pipe. We thought copper would be a great garden accent for our craftsman-style bungalow. So, we whipped out the graph paper, got all the supplies for cutting and soldering pipe, and after carefully cutting out the pieces, we spent the better part of Sunday welding everything together.
Now our peas will have something to cling to!