Exploring

All of my moves previous to the one that took to Georgia have been within Livingston County in Michigan. So this has been a big move for me. And part of what makes it interesting is the exploring new places.

We covered a fair share of Forsyth County while we were shopping for our new home. With the help of our real estate agent Julie Tressler and her trusty GPS we can away with some sense of the layout of the county and the neighborhoods. Well, at least the neighborhoods in our price range. Our kids said they chose this area because of the low property taxes a couple of years ago. Now the average housing price is the highest in the metro Atlanta area. We were lucky that the market for housing was so poor when we were in a position to buy.

We ended up in a subdivision which is in between Georgia 400 shopping district and lake Lanier. The lake was created to generate hydroelectric power and supply drinking water for north Georgia. It is a huge lake run by the Army Core of Engineers and is encircled by a large number of parks which provide lake access. We took my sisters Mary and Carol one of the parks when the visited after driving down one of our cars from Michigan. The park is only minutes from our home and provides a stark contrast to the urban feel of the GA400 shopping district.

The shopping district is very much that same as that you would find at home, only more in one place. There is the Kroger supermarket, and Home Depot, Wal-Mart and the other nation wide chains that provide a sense of familiarity to the new location. There are new restaurants to sample and the old stand by furniture store of Art Van’s has been replaced with a Rooms to Go which is very much the same. We are trying not to stay in our old ruts by trying new places down here.

No Time to Rock!

It has been almost four months from my last post and a world of changes have taken place. The house we lived in for more than 25 years has been sold. We have purchased a new home in Georgia. We have moved 750 miles to our new home and are now residents of Georgia. The 2010-2011 school year has started and I am not involved in teaching for the first time in 38 years. We moved into our new home on September 16^th and things are just starting to calm down.

There are some good things about moving, I guess. And moving once every 25 years seems to be about the right frequency. Our new location in Cumming Georgia was initially dictated by its closeness to our granddaughter Lalita, and of course her parents our daughter and son-in-law. We have, however, really gotten to love the area for its other advantages. In one direction we are five minutes away from a shopping district with every kind of store you generally need to use. In the other direction is Lake Lanier with an abundance of lakeside parks from which the natural beauty can be enjoyed.

The kids are only fifteen minutes away. We have set up a room for Lalita where she can spend the night. We have a laundry basket of toys for her to play with when she comes over. With the help of my sister Carolyn we are already assembling a library of books for us to read to her. I am in the process of child proofing the cabinets she should not get into.

Sense we have been down here we have seen her go from the slow crawl that a soldier would use to go under barbed wire to the four limbed crawl which makes her here one second and gone the next. Watching her grow and develop new skills has been one of the joys of relocating.

One of the other joys of the move is that my office, from which I am keying in this missive, has moved from the basement of our old home to it current location in a “bonus room” above the garage. There is now a window next to the monitor from which I can observe the comings and goings in our neighborhood. Our neighbors are a variety of ages and races. It is a great place for me to take my daily walks.

The house looks like our home now that our furniture and pictures have found their places. Our cats, Bonnie and Clyde have gotten use to their new digs, if not the visits from Lalita and horror of horrors the Molter’s dogs. A cat door placed in the door to the basement allows the cats to escape to there and hopefully the kitty litter to soon be relocated from just outside my office door to the basement also. As the days and weeks have passed we are gradually making the changes which make this place our own as we settle in.

Projects to tile the kitchen and add a screen in porch as well as Lalita’s first birthday are in the immediate future. A family gathering after Christmas and a cruise with friends in the spring also loom on the horizon. Retirement has not been boring and the rocking chair in the living room is only use to coax Lalita to sleep.