Thanks for all those "internet birthday" wishes. Date of birth is frequently used as a security question, so I make a point not to use the real one online. The year is correct, because it is useful for people to know my age, but that's all.
Seeing Sarah (
@Stottie Girl ) talking about her upcoming move reminded me that I haven't talked about mine. This will be our fifth move. It had better be the last, because we are both getting too old for this cr@p.
The place we are in just isn't right for us. For our last move, we wanted to get down off the mountain (just a hill really, but the mountain road was right some nasty in winter), and we had already sold our place, so we were under time pressure to buy whatever was available: this place. The house is nice enough, modern and lacking character, but structurally sound, and the grounds (1.8 acres) are nice. But it is on a steep hillside. We replaced the nasty-in-winter mountain road with a nasty-in-winter driveway. The major highway that runs the length of Nova Scotia is only half a kilometre away, and there is a major interchange at the bottom of four hills. No matter which direction you go, you are first going downhill towards the interchange then uphill away from it. We hear jake brakes and roaring diesels all the time. We are on the outskirts of one of the Valley's major towns, and the people are townies: nice enough, but not very interesting.
So we have had our sights set on a little-known, quiet stretch of road down at the quiet end of the Valley. It is the old-old highway. It was at one time the main access route, until it was bypassed in the 1920s, and it became the old highway. Then they built the "big highway" in the 1990s, bypassing everything, so now it is a forgotten byway. But there are four quite active community halls in that stretch of road. We have been lurking at events there and discovered that the people there are our kind of people. Old hippies!!
Four moves ago, we lived on an island off the coast of British Columbia. The people there were mostly old hippies: back-to-the-land-ers and ex-American draft-dodgers from the Vietnam era. Because of the limited access (an expensive ferry), people there were quite self-sufficient. The original founders of Greenpeace had a commune there, which later became a Buddhist retreat centre. After moving around too much and learning who we are not, we realize that those are our people.
And the people down on Highway 201 are the same. There was even a book published a couple of years ago, called "Far Out" about the back-to-the-land-ers in the area. We have already joined a Save Our Old Forests group, and attended a pie auction. We watch the schedules for all the community halls in the area, and there is a lot going on: yoga classes, meditation sessions, environmental groups, pot-luck dinners. There are quite a few organic farms and orchards all around.
The house we have bought (conditional on selling our current house in a reasonable time) is 153 years old. It has been in one family all this time, passed down from one generation to the next. We will be the first non-family owners. The current owner's father did a lot of major structural renovations in the 1980s, so it is internally in better shape than most of the houses in that area. Unfortunately, the exterior needs some TLC, but we are hoping that the repairs won't cost too much.
So now, we are waiting for an offer on our current house. We have had six showings so far, and had only one offer, which was garbage. We might have to lower our asking price. And we are dreading all the packing and unpacking. We still haven't worked out how to move our three cats. We can pick up one and stuff him into a carrier, but the other two are not pick-up-able. And we don't know how to keep them from freaking out while the movers come and go.
