You never get what you expect - or hope for

I figured, once tax season was done, and I moved, etc, etc, I would be able to work less. 

In my dreams.  I'm working more, actually.  I'm tired.  I want to go home.

Which leads to the other not what I expected.  I'm still feeling like the new house is a temporary place, like a vacation rental, and I'm going to have to give it back soon.  How weird is that?

However, Pablo has declared it to be home, so home it is.  Since he's the real boss around here.

So.  I just came back in from drilling more drainage holes in my front porch flower pots, since they have been getting flooded and not draining with all the torrential downpours we've been having.  The red geraniums are looking soggy.  They needed help.  So glad I bought a drill, I can do these things myself, instead of looking for some guy with a drill to give me a hand.  So far, I've mostly used it to drill holes in the bottoms of plastic flower pots.  At least there my aim (or lack thereof) is not critical. 

We also had a nice long walk, to a neighborhood with more shade, where I almost bought a house but didn't, I bought this one instead.  Something to do with the bloody infernal racket from the railroad crossing gate that's only a block away from that place.  It's a nice house, too, and it looks like it's still vacant, tho there's no realtor sign on the lawn.  The shade is provided in large part by sycamore trees of great height.  I love sycamore trees (as long as it's not me sweeping up after them), they have that bark that peels off and is crunchy to walk on....takes me back to being a kid. 

Now, in my own yard, I've finally got the blank spot where there used to be a rather large maple tree turned into a cute little garden spot, aka an obstacle course for Pablo.  I'm not the lucky one who had to have the tree removed, but they left a lot of stump, and of course you can't do much of anything about the roots, so planting things can be a challenge.  Like when you attack the earth with a shovel, and it just bounces off. 

I posted before and after pics on FB, and people reacted more to the before than the after, which is a tad annoying.  So here I'll just put up a couple of afters, and actually it looks better today (a week later) because the Stella D'oros have bloomed some more, which I didn't expect at all.  Of course, with all the rain, the weeds are coming back.  Can't win anyhow.

Same thing, different angles of view.  The outside pots there are tomatoes, and the middle one is volunteer marigolds.  I have tomatoes happening, none of them are ripe yet.  The circle is actually sort of a small scale hill, too, so Pablo likes hopping over the stones and running up and down the hill.  It's also now got a couple of solar lights, took me a while to find them in the garage.  Conveniently, they were right next to my drill.

So that's what we've been up to, in the little spare time I've had lately.  And Pablo has new favorite sleepy spots, as you can see here:

Afghans 'r us.

The other side

While the front of my house overlooks a typical suburban street, the back has a different aspect.  There's a gravel road in back (right, no fence to fence neighbor back there), which goes up the hill into an area with sparse, likely very expensive houses that are a part of an older development called Fox Hill.  I've heard there are actual fox back there, as well as the deer we've already met, and an assortment of smaller mammals, like chipmunks, squirrels, probably skunks and what all else. 

This morning Pablo and I took a short walk up the road, to the point where I suspect he was having sensory overload from all the scents, and decided to turn around and go home.  It was a slow walk, because there is just so much information there for a dog to read.  Pretty, and I hope we can make it a regular part of our routine.

Visitors last evening

So from now on I will take a camera with me wherever I go, even if it's just out in the back yard to de-pee Pablo.  We had seven deer last evening, fortunately on the other side of the fence, munching the much more expensive landscaping of the neighbor back there.  Naturally, I did not have camera or phone with me.  Pablo of course took up his best defensive posture and barked his tuchas off, and I noted that the deer did not seem to feel threatened by him (don't tell him that), they just took their time and sauntered off, gracefully trotting around the BMW and Mercedes (some kind of convertible) parked in the driveway back there.  I guess those people can afford to have the deer fleet munch their landscape.

Guy across the street told me there are also foxes.  That must be why the neighborhood behind me is called Fox Hill.

You learn something new everyday.

I owe you all something here....

It's been a couple of weeks now since the move.  I got totally over exhausted in the process, then had a wait to get my internet set up, and it's sort of here but not really what I wanted due to the Verizon strike.  So it's still transitional.

But here I am, sort of basically settled into the new place.  Pablo has staked his territories - he has a lot of them - and I still have zillions of boxes to unpack, but the basics are unpacked.  This past week I've been sick with a stomach thing, likely from all the exhaustion and stress and what-all.  So I've worked a little, unpacked a little, and spent an awful lot of time in the bathroom.

Anyway, here are a few pics of the new place.

 
It's small, and cozy, and not quite set up to where it will eventually be, but you get the gist of it. I think it will suit us just fine.  Pablo is considering it home, now.  I guess I am, too.

This is a last day posting

We're almost done packing, the movers come tomorrow morning.  Two closings on houses tomorrow, one selling the beach house, the second buying a new place over the river and up the hill.

I think it's good, but will need some real sleep before I can tell for sure.  Last nite was full of dreams of torrential downpours, roof leaks, and ceilings collapsing.  Presumably those dreams will stay here, while I go.

I will not have internet service for a week or more, beginning tomorrow.  Verizon has to come do an install on the new place, but they are on strike (rightly so, IMO), so no idea when the install will actually happen.

Change always comes with turmoil.  I hope this will all settle in due course, and life will go on.  And I'll still be close enough to the beach to drive over for those dog walks.

Yet another day after

Quiet day yesterday, a bit on the cold and blowy side for my tastes - looked pretty outside, but no thanks.  I think spending as much time as I did outside yesterday was one of the triggers for the headache I have today. 

And of course today is ultra bright and sunny, to the point where I can't even look out the window, the intensity of the light hurts.  And 62 degrees, too.  Crazy. 

So I mostly have spent the weekend hiding and trying to not answer the phone, which has been ringing incessantly.  I really don't want to talk to anyone.

Yesterday's discovery is interesting, tho.  Someone has been on the north end of the sea wall, building stone piles....towers?  Cairns, maybe.  Not sure what to call them.  Someone I know told me that Vancouver has a couple of people who do this all over the place up there.  Maybe they visited us.  Or maybe someone who has been to Vancouver is here now.  Who knows.  But it's another interesting thing being built here, maybe a more lasting alternative to the wooden beachhenge conglomerations of driftwood that tend to pop up in various places.

The wooden star in the second picture (on the post near the road) is one of the ones that were mounted all over town by some group after Sandy, to encourage us to persevere or something.  I think they called the project determination, and each one is hand painted and unique.  Mostly they are nailed to the telephone poles along Ocean Ave.  I don't think there are any close to my house; I suppose I didn't deserve encouragement, or something.  Whatever.

Which begs the question, should I still call those things telephone poles?  We don't have copper wire based phones here anymore, it is all VOIP running thru Comcast or Verizon.  So they could be electric poles, or maybe cable poles.  Or something.  The biggest difference being, when the power goes out now, like it does pretty frequently, there is no phone service at all, and the cell phone service here sucks, so it's really kind of difficult to call in the power outage.  Whoever decided this was a good thing ought to be taken out and shot.

Progress my ass.

Basta.  Enough of being negative, it's mostly from the headache.  This too shall pass.  Any minute now would be good.

The day after

Nothing earth shattering or horrible happened here from the "blizzard."  Apparently we don't have winter and snow anymore, we have only disasters and panic mongering.  Regardless, we have once again survived, relatively unscathed.  Photographic evidence thereof:

My self-cleaning back yard.  Thank you, wind!

House from the front.  Only one biggish drift, which needed to be cut thru so I can get mail delivery.

The beach this morning.  It's still there!  There are puddles on the wrong side of the dunes, in spots, but all in all it looks pretty much intact.

The gulls are still with us.  And sand mixed with snow looks like a frothy cappuccino or something.

One of my neighbors has her nephews over, and they shoveled out what I needed shoveled out, so I had minimal work to do outside.  Took them ten minutes to do what would have taken me a couple of hours.  Good work, guys!

Happy start of 2016

Not much to say.  Jan 1, 2016 on the beach.  Cold out there, nobody much around except me and Pablo.  The way I like it best.

Merry Christmas!

Since it is again likely that I might get around to sending out Christmas cards by maybe the end of April (at which time I figure it's too late and don't bother after all), I thought I'd put a message up here.  Anyone I know is, of course, hereby wished a lovely holiday season and the best of everything in the new year.  If I don't know you, that goes for you, too.

All I really want for Christmas is that people would find a way to get along.  We're all in this life together, we ought to help each other whenever we can, and put down the hate for good and all.

If anyone really desperately feels the need to give me a gift (aside from doing what I suggest in the paragraph above), please don't.  Instead, you can make a contribution to one or all of my favorite projects (links to their websites are in the parentheses):

On Site Opera Inc  (osopera.org), where we have a matching grant that runs to the end of December, and we could  love having your help in meeting the challenge!

Monmouth County SPCA (monmouthcountyspca.org), a great place to find a furry friend.

Westside German Shepherd Rescue (sheprescue.org), because DOGS!

And now a short picture show, because you have a lot to do in the next few days, and don't need to spend time on pictures.  But....

On a quasi-religious note, I give you "Madonna and Child:"

If you don't get the joke, shoot me an email and I'll explain.

And something more civic-minded:

And no, I didn't mess with the sky, it really did look like someone with a paintbrush had colored it in.

And now, I leave you with best wishes for the holiday and every day. 

It's that time of year, I guess....

But still too early to be this cold.  And I'm hearing of snow in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as Boston and northeastern PA.  Feh.

But we dug out the doggie hoodie this morning.  Even with, Pablo wasn't interested in being outside for very long.  Fine with me, I'm having the "we just closed the windows and I'm allergic to closed windows" syndrome with my sinuses, and being out in the biting wind is not fun when you already can't breathe too good.

Be that as it may, a couple of pictures from this morning's venture into nature.

And we've got a lot of beach, all of a sudden.  The rearranging that was done by the nor'easter a couple of weeks ago resulted in this.

I was standing at the water line, almost (had to keep my sneakers dry) when I took this one.  My house is almost dead center in the picture.  It was a long way away.  The dropoff we had all summer is gone now, and a lot of sand got added to the dunes by the storm.  And at low tide, we have all this beach.  You can see a couple of high tide lines, pretty much where the color of the sand changes.  But the tide pools are actually gone now, at low tide.  And the piece of our jetty that was exposed all summer is now a lot closer to being covered up again.

That's all you can see of the jetty now.  Enough to not notice the outliers, and trip over some rather solid granite if you're not watching where you're stepping.  Not so long ago, the jetty looked like this.

Mother Nature's been redecorating.  Always interesting, sometimes scary as hell, and different every day.