Welcome to the new age.

Hello from 2014! It's been a very chilly start to this year here in Missouri. We've only been officially in Winter for barely a month, but we've had snow, ice, and bitterly cold temperatures so far. Winter is definitely making itself known around here. I saw my heating bill for this month and nearly had a conniption when I saw the amount. Polar vortexes certainly make the furnace work overtime.

2014 isn't terrible, so far. It's begun interestingly enough with a buyer for my house. My house came off the market in early December, but there was a family who really liked it and had seen it in the Fall. They came back after Christmas with an offer and I decided to accept it and so, this month, have unexpectedly been going through the home-selling process. It is slightly less frustrating than the home-buying process, but not too much less, I think. I've definitely had some sleepless nights and frustrating days. But, the house is good and passed its inspection with flying colors, needing only some flashing and a couple of minor repairs to shingles on the roof. For a nearly 110 year old house, I was beaming with pride through its inspection when the 2 inspectors (Yes! Two!) kept showering the house with compliments. Aw, shucks. I know my house is awesome and amazing, but it's always nice to hear strangers compliment it, too. It's not at all what people expect when they hear how old the home is, or even when they walk up to it from the outside. It's a gem. I hope the new owners will take care of it. I can tell that they love the house. It has to go through its appraisal  now, and we're supposed to be closing in February if all goes as planned. It's bittersweet to let my house to go to a new family, but I am coming to terms with it. When it didn't sell in the Fall, I had gotten myself psyched up for spending more time in the house again and enjoying it as my own, with no strangers coming and going through it for a while. So, after doing that for Christmas and then finding myself in the situation of needing to detach from the house again, clean it out, and come to grips with letting it go to a new owner, I'm hoping the sale doesn't fall through. My emotions are exhausted. To try to get over the irrational fears of letting my beloved home go to new ownership, I drove over to the neighborhood outside of Jeff City that I grew up in. The house my dad sold a couple of years ago. I hadn't driven over there since he sold that house. I'm so glad I did. The house looked so happy. The family has put up a big playground in the back yard, the house had Christmas lights strung up on its roof (which my family didn't do at all in at least the last decade, if not two decades). And it still had its cheery yellow mailbox that I painted out front. It looked so good. Everything was so happy and cheery. They also fenced in the back yard. Perhaps they have a dog or something that would make the fence necessary. The fence was the only thing I was sort of sad about because our yard was the neighborhood sledding hill starting spot. You started at the top of our backyard and went down the next door neighbor's yard (dodging trees), and hopefully were able to stop your sled before hitting a tree or sliding into the street. It was great...Maybe the kids have found an alternate hill in the old neighborhood. I hope they have. Still, driving by the house was a really good thing for me to do because I realized that new owners can take care of the houses you loved and spent a good part of your lifetime in. It's not really throwing away those years when you sell a house, it's just moving forward and trusting that the house will go through a rebirth of sorts and the owners will change it to suit their needs and hopefully, the house will bring joy to them, as it did to you and your family.

In light of the developments of possibly having no connection to the town I grew up in after next month, I've started looking around my new town for new things to do/places to visit/restaurants to try. I realized that I haven't really focused much on the neighborhood around the apartment or this town in general, because I focus everything on my "actual" neighborhood of my house in a different city and costs to maintain the house and I still do my laundry at the house, etc. I'm amazed at the options I'm seeing around me that I hadn't ever really seen before. We're getting something called a Pita Pit a few blocks from my apartment, which sounds neat. I love the Greek restaurant right next door to me, although I don't go as often as I could. I've only been once this year so far. There's a well-known restaurant with jazz music in my neighborhood that I've never been to, plus a chinese buffet that people seem to enjoy (I'm usually snobby about my chinese food, though. Chinese food is one thing I have explored in town, with very poor results. There is only one place in town that I go for my Chinese fix... although, I suppose I could try this other place since it's so close to the apartment.) There is plenty of exploring to do.

Assuming that the house sale goes through, and my ties to Jefferson City are cut for good, I thought I'd put up a few pictures:

Willow Creek Drive, the street of the house I grew up in.

Watson resting while lovingly keeping watch over the neighborhood of the house I grew up in.

Pretty snow-covered intersection.

Jefferson City's annual pet parade for National Pet Week.

Fourth of July food trucks in Downtown.

Chez Monet bakery, which is no longer in business, was a staple of downtown Jefferson City for decades. So many good cookies were eaten here.

Iris spent her whole life in Jefferson City and lived in three different living situations with me, always adapting to each one better than any other cat I've had.

Goslings being taken for their first swim at Binder Lake.

Downtown Jefferson City as seen from the top of the dome of the Capitol.

Floods take over the downtown parking lots periodically.

The old St. Joseph Cemetery on West Main Street.

The little front yard of still-mine-until-next-month house and its historical renovation award signage. Woot!

I went on a lil trip.

I'm sitting on my couch watching "Nature". It's about monkeys. Super cute monkeys. There are so many different types of monkeys and they are all so adorable. It is kind of like watching a show about people, just smaller, furry, awesomely agile people. I keep watching and going 'Aw!' and 'Ah! So cute!' and 'Hah! I do THAT!'

I'm trying to upload some pictures to Flickr. It takes a bit, yo. I figure it's as good a time as any to share what I did on my fall vacation last weekend. I went to Pennsylvania and saw my buddies get married at a really nice bed and breakfast outside of Philadelphia. Very cool, very nice wedding. It was great. The rain stayed away. The road trip out was sometimes rainy, but mostly really nice. I didn't remember ever spending much time out that way so I was trying to pay extra attention to my surroundings in case jobs come up in that area. I like to be able to remember places I've been.

*tanget from tv* !!! A monkey just lied! He wanted to get an egg he had hidden and couldn't get to it because all the other monkeys were around where he'd hidden it. So he shouted 'Snake!' and they all ran up in the tree panicked. And he climbed down and secretly got his egg back to eat it in peace. He had to do it secretly because the leaders of his little group would have been ticked off to see what he'd done. PBS, I love you so. You give me things to watch on tv that don't make my mind go all lazy. *end tangent*

So, back to the trip. I have some pictures and am trying to upload them all to the Flickr account. On the way back home I saw Gettysburg and that was pretty cool, too. I didn't have time to get into the museum. I'll have to make a trip back up there sometime and spend more time. The battlefield was cool. It was really nice to get away from home for a while and to hang out with people I haven't seen in a while. Now back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Here are a few pictures from the trip:

Julia's pretty dress

 

Ceremony

Monument in Gettysburg National Cemetery

Gettysburg Battlefield

Over-due photo post!

It's been a while since I've actually shared images of what I've been doing lately, eh? In this case, I must use 'lately' pretty loosely because one of the pictures I found in the depths of my camera is from blizzard season earlier this year. But, none of the pictures are pre-2011, so that's good. I was rummaging through pictures on the computer and uploading things from my camera while listening to the stereo and eating overly-ripe grapes (boo hoo on the grapes, btw. I had a bushel of super amazingly delicious grapes a couple of weeks ago from my nearest grocery store. I hadn't made it back to that store, but did happen into a slightly further away store over the weekend and decided to get some grapes there. They're just not as good.)

ANYWAY. I decided I needed a spot to put the pictures I've plumbed from the backwater of the computer. And where does all the crap I find tend to go? Yes, you're so right! It goes here. (I uploaded the smallest versions I could in the hopes that this wouldn't go on forever and ever on the page.)

This is one of my neighbors' dog. Isn't he just the cutest thing? He didn't like to sit in the snow (understandably), so he spent all winter sitting on the cleared steps from the alley when he was let out. I couldn't help but look out now and again and go, 'Aw!'

The end of summer. This is pretty, but mostly when I see this picture, I see how super beautiful it'll be in a month or so when Fall arrives and all those trees turn colors. I know Fall is coming because the geese are heading out already. One just flew over honking right now like it knew I was thinking about it.

Let's face it: if you build a baseball field in your cornfield, I don't know if Shoeless Joe Jackson will show up and play baseball with you, but I will. (I understand your disappointment, but beggars really can't be choosers.)

Look! It's a vulture/buzzard! Not a turkey, as I initially thought. I was all, 'Oh! Look at the turkey up on the stump!!' and then was corrected.

Possibly one of the coolest houses 'round these parts? With a lot of money and time and help, I think I could turn this into my dream house.