As stated before, Casa di Canine has been sold. We passed all the inspections with flying colors (need to do some minor touch-up stuff myself, nothing that we have to bring in help for) and the closing is on Monday, April 14. We have a 24′ truck reserved for Saturday, April 12 – Monday, April 14 and will be moving everything on Sunday the 13th – hopefully in just one trip. We’re even bringing in help for packing and moving – Datahawk will be joining us for a little over a week starting next Monday. For out-of-town folks who offered to help: it looks like we’ll have at least six friends showing up locally to help, so I think we’ll have it covered. Thanks for the offers, though!

The new place is less than ten miles away, in the teeming metropolis of Apex, NC. One nice thing is that although our postal address will change (let me know if you need that), nothing else will – our phone number will remain the same. Of course all the usual e-mail addresses won’t change.

The house in currently in a modest state of disarray – I broke down the dining room table and we’re staging boxes and easily-movable furniture in the dining room, right next to the front door. The front guest bedroom is completely empty, and the back guest bedroom is about a third full of boxes or stuff to be boxed up. We’ve taken all the art off the walls and the place seems pretty barren, even more oppressively beige than before.

I’ve moved a lot in my lifetime (and I mean a lot – this will be my twenty-third move, the twelfth since I left for college). I don’t tend to get sentimental over real estate, but at the same time I find this is a tough house to leave, even more so than the house in Joliet. This is a house that Takaza found for us, and deciding on it was a joint effort. As much as I hate the neighborhood (we’re don’t socialize with the neighbors and we don’t have kids – two strikes around here) and the shoddy construction of the house (the plumbers should have been shot), we created a lot of really good memories here. We hosted the Gang here for multiple New Year’s parties, where we ate ourselves silly and enjoyed great company. We’ve hosted our close friends Thomas and Sherry and Donald and Janelle here many times, and watched Janelle fall asleep in front of the fireplace many times 🙂 Then there’s the furry parties – we perfected the hang-out-with-the-canines-and-let-the-inertia-set-in model here. We found out just how many laptops you can add to the Wi-Fi network before you start to slow things down. We spent many mornings, coffee in hand, watching bleary-eyed guests trickle down from their rooms upstairs, and fed them well with French toast and pancakes. We grilled, and stir-fried on the patio. We had many, many discussions here with friends – frivolous, deep, technical, and everything in between. There’s a lot of really good energy in this house, for want of a better term. And we’re leaving it behind – I’ll miss it, a lot.

We’ll get a new place. I can say for sure it won’t be a new and shiny (and beige) as this place was – we learned that even though you buy other people’s problems when you buy an older house, if you buy a new house all you get are new and exciting problems no one’s dealt with yet. The new place will be nice and big, like this house is, and will have lots of room for guests. I can say this with confidence. The only thing I don’t know is…where or when. And that’s unnerving. I’ll have faith, though. Casa di Canine will rise again, and you’d better believe we’ll have a party to celebrate!