E.T.'s L.J. U.R.L.

The forecast for Sunday is gorgeous... perfect day for a barbecue!

For those of you who are local (and frum): Our shul is having an Open House on Sunday (11 am), followed by a free barbecue (1 pm). sdavido is speaking at the Open House, and we might be able to arrange a tangent off the neighborhood tour (house visit?) for our friends. Should be fun! And the weather's supposed to be gorgeous, too. Hope to see some of you there!

sdavido was home today, and he noticed that the house was getting rather cold. Turning up the heat and adjusting the radiators didn't seem to have any effect. Fortunately we have a totally awesome plumber, who was able to wedge us into his already-hectic day. After a bit of experimentation he found the problem: The thermostat had blown. SD- says that when the plumber took the old one off the wall there was a scorch mark. Wow. I didn't even know that was possible. Apparently it wasn't installed right. (Not a surprise, unfortunately.) So now we have a shiny new thermostat, with a little patch of old wallpaper next to it (which we'll patch eventually)... and heat! Yay for things that work!

We already knew the Jewish community in Malden was very warm and welcoming. In the past couple days we've received 3 invitations for meals our first Shabbos in town after we move (I asked if we can take a rain check on the 3rd). But I just got this note from one of the shul members, and thought it was really above and beyond:

The Sisterhood has pooled together on different occasions to make meals for people at different times. We'd like to make some meals for you as you take some time to settle into your new home. People have already offered to make sure that you have food Monday night of your move, and again on Thursday. Please let me know if this is something that you are comfortable with so that I can confirm these meals with people, and I can let you know as anyone else offers to bring something. Also, do you have any dietary restrictions/preferences?
Your new neighbor,
[name]

Wow. At least we won't have to dig through the boxes for cereal our first night in the new house...

We closed on the house* today, it's officially ours. Yay! (And, eeeek!)

Now we have to start making repairs and such, not to mention getting our condo on the market and praying that somebody falls in love with it soon... and working on packing, moving, etc. It's going to be an intense few months but G-d willing once the dust settles it should be really nice...


* For those of you who don't already know, it's in Malden. :-)

For those of you who are eagerly awaiting an update... moving all the stuff into storage, thankfully, went really well. Almost scarily so. (e.g., I was fretting about the unit not being big enough, and a bigger one became available a few days ago; I was worried about not having enough people, and unexpectedly gained an extra person this morning; the truck place didn't have the size truck I reserved, but gave me a larger one at the same price...) It did take a little longer than I'd hoped but we had no major disasters. (The biggest snag was part of the crew getting caught in traffic en route to the final destination.) I'm tremendously grateful to several members of the Amazing Arisia Logistics Team for helping everything go so smoothly. It's a tremendous weight off our shoulders to have that done. And now that all that stuff is in one place I think we'll feel less pressured to find a house right away, and can wait for the right moment.

Of course the whirlwind of packing stuff up to go into storage left some ripples here, so our place is suddenly un-neat again... but at least we have more places to put things now, so that should be corrected soon.

On a related front, my cough has been better today, at least while on medication... as soon as the dosage runs out it starts up again. So it's controlled but not really gone. I have an appointment to see someone tomorrow to make sure it's nothing serious. Hopefully it'll be a waste of time!

So, it looks like we have a house...

Won't go into details here (just got home from long cycle of broker negotiations - not much time 'til Shabbos), but wanted to put up a quick update. We saw a house we really liked a couple weeks ago and, after much thought, finally made the decision to bid on it. We put together all our numbers, etc., and found out they had an offer pending. Gulp. So we had to figure out how much to offer to entice them to take it without totally wiping ourselves out... and it worked. (Of course now we wonder if we could have offered less, but there's no way to know.)

If all goes according to plan, it'll be ours around the end of June (when the current owners move to their new house). This means we have until then to clean up our place, put it on the market and (hopefully) sell it, pack everything up (aiiiiiigh!) and move. And we'll still have to rent a storage unit for the stuff from my parents' house b/c there is a gap of a couple weeks between when the new owners take over their house and when we take over ours - which is good b/c it means less time paying storage, but bad b/c it means we'll be moving it all again right away.

I repeat: Aaaaack!

Hopefully this will be a good thing in the long term, but right now I think I'll go panic quietly for a bit. More details later, for those who want them... (Oh, yeah, it's in Malden.)