Miscellaneous and Churches

Hola!

My brain bounces around with many different topics, but that just comes with moving, I guess! I feel like we've been here 6 months already, with all the pieces I try to take care of each day. But it's only been a couple of weeks.

We did find a house, so that is a big deal. Various details slow the process, however, so we will be in this apartment for another 6 weeks or so. With a legally binding "purchase and sale agreement," the school district did allow me to enroll the kids in school, so they can start next week (the day after Labor Day) as if we were living in the house.

We would like to have a few things done to the house, so those are other projects we are considering, with the thousands of details that come with that! Remodeling the kitchen and two bathrooms, plus a list about 3 pages long of "little" details that will make the house updated a bit (it was built in 1950) and "ours."

Meanwhile, we can't really work on those many projects until the owners move out in 3 weeks! So I'll blog about the area.

One fun thing I don't think I will ever tire of here, is driving from town to town and driving by all the old, beautiful churches on the corners. There are a lot of churches here! They don't tear down old buildings. They fix them up and keep the "old" flavor. It's awesome. Here are three I took photos of--I purposely put the camera in the car so I could stop and take a photo on the way to one of the kids' schools or the grocery store. (My kids think I'm completely crazy: "Why are we stopping?" "I'm taking a picture of this church...")







Oh, and one last thing: I took the camera with us on the way to church, just to get a shot of this great "tree-archway-driving-through-the-woods" feeling each time we go to church! It's so pretty.



Again--my family thinks I'm losing it (why does she randomly stop the car to take pictures??!), but in actuality, this is my therapeutic way to NOT lose it, during this move. Have a great week! Love, Kari

This Week at the Whitesells

Hello!

We are still plugging along, all 5 of us in our one-bedroom+den/one bathroom apartment. In a week we'll move 2 buildings down, into a two-bedroom/two bathroom apartment!

I was all ready to apologize to the kids that we still aren't in a house. I told David (12) that next week, we'd move into the 2 Bedroom/2 Bath place. As soon as the words "2 Baths" was out of my mouth, he pulled his fist down in the air and hissed, "YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!"

Funny what you find yourself appreciating when you go without for a few weeks!

We are taking in some Olympic events this week...the kids are enthralled with the synchronized diving, men's gymnastics, and of course Michael Phelps with his many many swimming golds. These photos, by Jeff Gross& Adam Pretty/Getty Images, make me wish I had been there for the opening ceremonies.





Maybe they'll show a "highlights reel" sometime. Sorry, but 4 hours is too long for almost any show!

We've had a lot of rain since we've been here. Like, enough to say, "Have we moved to Seattle instead of Massachusetts?" I love rain. People say this much rain is unusual for August here.

We had one very sunny day, beautiful, last Saturday. We went to Plymouth, where I took a bunch of photos. This laptop, however, is not recognizing my camera so I can't retrieve any pics until next week! ugh. But next week, SOME of our stuff comes, including the computer -- yippee! I'll blog Plymouth later.

More later, love, Kari

Northeast Corner of the Country

Friday, August 01, 2008

Hola, from Massachusetts! We arrived late Monday night. We’ve just been on a big slumber party of a vacation -- we packed all our belongings and watched them drive away in a big semi truck a week ago Thursday. We stayed in a local CA motel for a few nights, cleaned up the empty rented house, and “passed” our walk-through to get back our security deposit.

Currently we are in Frank’s apartment in Waltham. It’s one bedroom, and it has a den, so there is space to set up air mattresses for the kids. Thankfully, it has a pool, so we have gone swimming every day.

Massachusetts is very different from southern California. Here are a few things I have noticed right away.

1 – I feel like I have moved to the mountains! Green, green, green, and more trees than I have seen in a long time. And these are HUGE trees, not little scrawny ones. Just beautiful.

2 –Roads. California has 8-lane freeways and the “Rush Hour” actually lasts for 3 hours. Here, they have curvy, narrow, two-lane roads that wind around through the woods, at 25 and 30 miles an hour. And I hear that “Rush Hour” is just that: one hour.

3 – Moisture in the air. In California, our wetsuits will dry outside overnight. Here, towels hang out 2 days and they STILL are not dry!

4 – Hair. My hair does not quite know how to act in this humidity. ( OK, it was not exactly magazine-worthy in CA, either…but here, it does some funny things.)

5 – Insects. I didn’t really notice a lot of bugs in CA. There are plenty of critters to watch and/or avoid, here. Ants everywhere. Wasps, mosquitoes, dragonflies, katydids, butterflies, ladybugs. (You name it, and Teresa will try to catch it!)

6 -- Gas prices. The lowest I have seen so far is $3.84 per gallon. Wow! Awesome--by simply taking a flight east, we dropped 60 cents a gallon!

More to come, love, Kari

The Saga Continues

Hola!

A couple of weeks have slipped by…wonder where they might have gone? Could it be that I’ve lost track, along the roller coaster I ride almost daily? Ha. The days all seem to run together, it is true.

One aspect of life right now that adds to the chaos, is housing in general. Frank pointed out, if we were “just” selling a house and buying a house, it would be crazy enough. But we have actually been dealing with the thousands of details of:

1) Selling a house
2) (trying to) buy or rent in Massachusetts
3) Getting our renters OUT of our house here
4) Getting ourselves of the house WE are renting
5) Figuring out temporary housing in MA, since we are in limbo & don’t have a permanent house there, yet.

So. Not one or two, but FIVE major events going on.

We are closer to the magical “Closing Day” on the house…could be this Thursday or Friday, so I am very happy about that.

We have been trying to get a place to live on the other end. Complicated by the fact that the Boston area has not been effected by the otherwise national housing downturn, we are groaning that housing is outrageously expensive out there. Pickins are slim, one might say.


We had one bright possibility about 10 days ago, certainly not a “perfect” house, but it showed up Thursday on the MLS listing. It caught my attention because it met lots of our criteria (distance from work/church/school, number of bedrooms, etc.) , and it was only a little higher priced than the house we just sold! “Hey, Frank, go look at this one,” I email to him. He goes to see it that afternoon, calls me and says, “You know, it has some things we’d have to change and/or learn to live with, but you’d like this one.” He goes to one more appointment that afternoon, and calls me that night. We decide this would be a good one to put an offer on…he says, “in the morning I’ll call our Realtor and let’s make an offer.”

**Just to interject here, the market in MA is not frantic. Homes sell in 1 to 2 months, it’s not like you usually have to make snap decisions.**

So, he calls me at 7 a.m. the next morning (10 a.m. Boston time). “Well, this house went on the market YESTERDAY,” he reminds me, “and on that first day, TEN people went to see it, one made an offer, and they ACCEPTED it.” I couldn’t believe it.

Our options are not plentiful. But there are a few that could work, that would just take a bit of remodeling…or a LOT of remodeling, in 1 case…anyway if we go that route, we would like to rent for a time, so we don’t have to LIVE in it while all that mess is going on.

The kids have been instructed to pack first for the next 2 weeks, then for the next 6 months, and the rest of our stuff will be stored…?!?!? Ha. There are still so many “what ifs” in the equation, we can’t pin down much just yet! (I am sort of a planner—read: “control freak to the nth degree”, so this part is very nearly killing me.)

It will all be fine. We are prepping the kids for air mattresses! Maybe if we rent while we are remodeling something, we will want to save money by NOT renting a full set of furniture in the house. Maybe the kids will use air mattresses, and boxes to store clothes? They’re young. We’ll call it a 6-month-long sleepover.

The moving company packers come tomorrow, to destroy the house. We’ll always have the laptop with us while we are in transit, and Internet connections at different spots will let me check email. Our cell phones stay the same, of course!

Here is a photo of the kids on one of our hikes. TERESA has already decided on the house we should buy in Massachusetts. It should be quite obvious, because (and I quote) “it has a good climbing tree in the front yard.”



Have a glorious week! Love, Kari

Signing Parties & Swimming Pools

Hola!

Another brain-bouncing week! We had Frank home for the weekend again, so that was wonderful. Friday – Happy 4th of July!! – was a day of swimming, concert in the park, and BBQing with the Clears, a very fun family across the street from our “old” house. The fireworks display was later that evening.

The “Signing Party” refers to the reams of tedious paperwork Frank and I went through yesterday…most likely, we will not be here for the closing on our house, so the Realtor sent over the majority of the paperwork. (I HOPE it’s the majority…must have taken 2 hours to go through it all…)

I’m looking around and wondering to myself: are the movers REALLY coming in 2 weeks? The answer, of course, is yes they are! I am extremely happy it is “the movers,” and not me driving around to different grocery stores, asking daily for boxes, and packing everything, and moving it ourselves. For the first 3 moves of our marriage, we moved ourselves. Wow. I can’t begin to tell you how much better it is with a crew of movers!!! (This will be our 9th move in 16 years, we counted. Life is never boring, is it?)

I think I will post a couple of photos from swimming Friday. We went to the high school because they have diving boards—that is extra fun for the kids, and actually for Frank, too! He had some good dives off the high dive. Teresa and David have tried front flips off the HIGH dive, if you can believe THAT! (I didn’t, until I saw it…the fearlessness of youth?!?)

First, Frank "flying" off the high dive..."


Then, Teresa flips off the low board:


David dives:


And Kara is not to be outdone:


And since the Olympic trials are going on right now, I do have to show the sequence of Frank's competition diving material: jump, touch toes in air, then dive in:




(I'll let you know which day you can watch him in Beijing next month.) Have a glorious week! Love, Kari

As My Brain Unwinds...

Hola!

I have been in a calm type of daze for a day or two…my brain is just trying to absorb a few big things, I think, and I will just let it do that!

After four months of trying to show and sell our house, we finally have an offer and the house is “in escrow.” In a very basic nutshell because that’s really all I know, that means the buyer now has 45 days (sometimes it’s 30) for the financing to go through for his loan, and to have a house inspection, and then you can have the closing and he can move in.

Like I said, it has been 4 rather painful and nerve-wracking months of hand-wringing and walking around on eggshells, trying to appease some often temperamental renters as we tried to show the house.

The Whitesells (Frank’s parents) will get a kick out of this one: during one conversation with Frank, they said “When we were selling our house in a bad market, the Realtor said it takes 50 showings to sell your house.” Well guess what! A weekend ago, we had showings numbers 51 and 52, and BOTH of those people put offers on the house! Kinda funny.

(BTW, I am not typing this news in celebration, just yet. It is a very important milestone and a great step, but I also know it is not a Done Deal. We very much appreciate people’s prayers during this transition for our family, and ask for those to please continue?)

Another thing for my brain to absorb is that THIS week, we do NOT have to ask-for-help-and-donations-and-call-to-remind-people-that-they-signed-up-and-can-you-come-after-all-to-the-middle-school, to help us PAINT! We took four days to do it, 3-hours each day, and the physical labor part of the project itself is now finished. David and I plodded through those 2 weeks, and yesterday Frank and David returned everything to people who loaned equipment, took back supplies to Home Depot we didn’t use, etc., etc.

Sometime I may blog on details of the project. For now I will just say Whew, and appreciate the fact that I’m not crouched in a corner rocking, counting specks of dust or something.

Kari

David's Turn

Hola! A couple of blog entries ago, I bragged about Teresa and Kara and their awards recognition at school. This time I can focus on David. Last month, he helped with a youth yard sale, to raise funds for summer camps. Those kids got up pretty early in the morning to get started selling! Here is a page about that.


Then there was the 7th grade awards night, at his Middle School a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to attend the assembly in the auditorium, and hear teacher comments about each student. They were coached to “dress nicely,” and there were some very different interpretations of that phrase! David’s interpretation was to wear his Sunday best, with dress pants and jacket. I think just one other student had on a jacket like that.

Some quotes from his teachers were that he puts forth 100% effort in all he does, and that he is kind and courteous. He has been in ASB (an elective class, kind of like Student Council or Student Government) this term. They had to apply and be “accepted” into the class. These kids help plan, organize and execute school events, and are required to put in 20 or so service hours a term. David has helped set up and clean up teacher luncheons and school dances, and has worked after school at the Student Store. He has also helped individual teachers after school in their classrooms. I think it’s a great elective, and shows the kids there is more to these events than just showing up!

Here is his scrapbook page for the 7th grade Awards Night.


Paper/embellishments: Correen Silk’s Chore Day e-paper kit, http://store.scrapbook.com/digital-scrapbooking.html, also Jen Reed, Moments in Time;
Saab jelly beans; Tags by Verena Karolyi

David also completed his Life in Boy Scouts back in April, which means he can now be working towards his Eagle. We are in the middle of his project right now, helping out his Middle School. He and other scouts, over the course of 2 weeks (4 sessions, spaced a few days apart), are prepping, putting primer on, and painting the area
underneath the stage, and the 16 doors of closets lining the back wall of Sequoia’s auditorium. (If I type more details about that, I will hyperventilate. Suffice it to say I’m juggling a little too much right now. Another day, I will share more.)

I am a little biased, I know, but we sure like having David around. He’s a neat part of our family.

Love, Kari