Did our walk through of the new house this morning. Everything is lovely in this new place. Aside from some additional cleaning — of course the sellers cleaned things, but still — everything is lovely here. One of the rooms has a blackboard wall. This will be The Yankee’s home office. The sellers left us a lovely note.
We went over to an office to sign all of the forms you must sign to buy a home, and all of the forms you must sign to acknowledge that you just signed the last form. So long is the process now that two separate people race through a thumbnail sketch of what they’re putting in front of you in a lab-tested voice that sounds interested but, you know, has gone through this so many times they’re clearly just bored with it and won’t you sign it so the fees can get transferred.
So we signed them.
There are at least 762 treaties that ended armed conflicts that involve less paperwork and signatures than the modern house process. I know because I counted them, in my head, in between the taut recitation of how this form notes that you will provide your own ninja security detail on your new property, and this document notes we’ve not told you which agencies to hire them from …
When all of that was done, everyone went their separate ways. Someone must work in that office, but I’m not sure which of the four people in the room that might be. And we went back to the new house. The movers were there waiting for us.
They loaded us up with four guys. They unloaded everything with two guys. Two guys plus us. Those fellows worked so hard today, and so did we, to a slightly lesser extent.
At the same time, the ISP guy came by. Bald, long braided beard. Probably rides a motorcycle when he’s not in his service van. It made him look older than he was, and older than his humor. Overly polite, like he’d just come out of some company-mandated customer service workshop. He got his job done in a hurry, and gave us more of the gigabytes than we expected.
At the same time we met our first neighbor. She was dispatched by the sellers to pick up from us a few things that they’d accidentally left behind. We were, of course, happy to oblige them of the sentimental. And the neighbor is lovely. A retired teacher, she watched the kids that used to live here grow up, and now those children are young adults. That’s just part of it for teachers. We talked for maybe five minutes, a welcome break in the air conditioning for me, and you can already tell she’s got plenty of stories and is ready to share them. In a week or two, when the house is in order, I’m going to have to think of a good excuse to stop by and visit her.
Everything is everywhere, but everything is here. Well, except for the cats. We’ll fetch them on Sunday. Because we’ll have wrung order from chaos in just two days.
Hah.
Tonight, we set up part of the kitchen and living room. Tomorrow we learn where all the light switches are and start breaking down boxes.
