Easing Back at the Big Easy

We're finally here!

Image by Ketut Subiyanto, via Pexels, license.

Actually, between my in-laws taking care of the kids for over a week and holiday travel, all of us have been here only about a week, now, but the house already feels like home.

Chalk that up to a combination of Home is where your stuff is and our current house being roomier -- in more than one sense of the word -- than the one we left in Florida. And that's even though we left a relatively inexpensive part of that state.

This was my first move to involve both buying a house on one end and selling one on the other: Even if government meddling every step of the way didn't make that more annoying/difficult than it would be anyway, I think it's fair to say that those transactions made the move an order of magnitude more stressful than the ones before.

Logistically, the worst is over, but it will probably be another month or so before we're operating on what I would call a normal routine. In the meantime, the kids love having an upstairs and an area more their own, and, fogies that my wife and I are, we're enjoying the fact that this house, being older than our last, has an interior feature called "walls" that divide our living space into distinct areas -- called "rooms," I believe. Among other things, we can hang more of our art and photos!

Despite the fact that we'll still have to drive everywhere, the place our particular suburb reminds me most of so far is Boston. We'd lived in a new development in Florida, and in a sparsely-populated area. I did expect to be able to drive less, and for there to be more amenities in our immediate vicinity, simply because it is better-established. But all kinds of things I used to have to drive 20-30 minutes to reach are within five minutes or so of us, now.

These kinds of things might sound banal, but I am amazed at how they've summed up to greatly improve our daily quality of life already.

-- CAV