New Homeowner

Last Tuesday, I signed a stack of documents that made me a homeowner. It was originally supposed to be on Wednesday, but the closing date was moved up to Tuesday because a big snowstorm was coming on Wednesday. It's a good thing we moved the date to Tuesday, because the storm ended up dumping somewhere between 16 inches and 2 feet of snow on the area (varied by exact location).

I don't need to leave my current residence quite yet, so fortunately I can move by bits and pieces. The downside of this is that there will be a lot of shuttling between my old and new residences.

I didn't even try to get to the house on Wednesday. Work was closed, and nobody went out driving if they could avoid it.

On Thursday evening, after work, I performed my first task as a new homeowner - shoveling out paths to the doors. Perhaps I should have started in the morning before work, but I underestimated the size of the task. After almost three hours, I had cleared a path from the street to the front door, and a large part of the driveway and a second path from the driveway to the front door. I learned a few lessons from this:
1.) ALWAYS check my coat pockets to make sure I have my winter gloves and hat. I forgot them, so I did all of this shoveling with bare hands and earmuffs only. Fortunately, it was cold but not windy.
2.) My new house requires a lot of snow removal. It has a relatively long, curved driveway, and a relatively long, curved path from the driveway to the front door. A second, shorter pathway from the front doorway to the street is recommended for access. One person with a shovel needs to do quite a bit of work to clear these paths.
3.) I must invest in a snowblower.

On Friday, I took delivery of my first pieces of furniture, a kitchen table and four chairs. I also learned from the mailman, who showed up shortly after the furniture movers left, that he puts the mail in a mail slit in the side door. This cleared up a bit of a mystery that I had forgotten to ask the previous owners about, but it also meant that I needed to shovel a third path, since the previous paths did not cover the side door.

On Saturday, my father and I got a small UHaul truck and moved a bunch of boxes and a couple of pieces of furniture, the only furniture that I am keeping.

Yesterday, I finally finished clearing the driveway, chipped ice that had formed on the paths to the doors, bought a bunch of cleaning and kitchen supplies, set up my desktop computer, and tried with limited success to figure out where various items in the boxes should go. (Being obsessive-compulsive, I sometimes get hung up over things like that.)

Today, I need to get some more supplies, bring a few more things, and re-assemble a couple of pieces of furniture. I'm pretty confident that there will be no shoveling today. Tomorrow, though, we're supposed to get a few more inches of snow.

Wednesday, I get a bed, table, and easy chair delivered - weather permitting, I assume.

Even with this going on, the most stressful aspect of my life for the past week, as it has been for the last 2 or 3 months, has not been anything going on outside, but rather my almost constant struggling with a very bad attack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I don't want to go into detail here, but it has been pretty severe and it has come at a very bad time. So far, though, I have been weathering the move, the OCD, and the weather itself.

Other news

My sister in law in Germany is doing fine after the surgery she had 10 days ago. It wasn’t that serious, and while she stayed home from work last week, she is returning this week.

There has been a mix of about 20% wet snow and 80% rain here since last Wednesday, with the net result that much of the older snow has been washed away along with the new snow. We are now in what I consider the ugliest time of year – everything still dormant from winter but not much snow to cover the brown muddy ground. I shouldn’t complain, though – further north and west and at higher elevations some places got all snow, which came out to about 3.5 feet over the last several days.

I have started waking up really early and not being able to get back to sleep, which is something that as far as I can remember has NEVER been a problem for me before in my life. Part of it is that I have been making a conscious effort to go to bed earlier, but the early waking up is often taking twice as much time from my sleep at one end as I am gaining at the other, leaving me frequently very tired.

As long as I can find the time, this spring and summer will be “garden simplification time”. For three years I have taken care of the sprawling and productive flower beds that Mom set up over the years, but now I will be moving at least a little further away, and Dad is not a gardener. In practice, this means that I need to transform beds packed with various perennials into beds with a few perennials or shrubs and everything else covered with thick mulch to keep out the weeds. It also means that I will have a whole bunch of perennials to try and give away to anyone who will take them.

A slight change in the forecast

We were supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow today, and there were already a few inches on the ground was snowing when I woke up. I finished off my previous blog post, then ate breakfast and prepared to shower. I checked to see if there would be a delayed opening for my place of employment, and was surprised to find out that they would be closed for the day.

Then the snow changed to pure rain. Now we're forecast to get nothing but rain until late tonight. So, from my point of view, that whole calling work off for the day was probably not necessary. On the other hand, the majority of people who I work with come from points further west or north, and some of those areas are still getting snow, so it's very good for those people that they don't have to make their way into work.

That's one of the fun things about the weather where I live - when we have late winter storms like this one, we're often really close to the border between snow and rain, with rain to the south and east and snow to the north and west. The problem is that even with the best experts using the best technology, it seems to be basically impossible to predict where the rain/snow border will be to anything closer than 20 or 30 miles. You just have to wait for whatever happens - and pray that you get either rain or snow, and not the dreaded "wintry mix" of snow, sleet, and freezing rain together, otherwise known affectionately as "winter crap".

In any case, I'm not complainin'. This unexpected day off will give me the chance to procrastinate some mo ... I mean, finish all sorts of important tasks that I've been putting off!

Public transportation - 19th century - 1; 21st century - 0

A couple of days ago it was raining and over 40 degrees (Fahrenheit), and tonight it's about 8 degrees, with windchills of about -8. Such is winter in New England.

I met with an old friend and co-worker a couple of days ago - he's come back to the historical archive where I work (and he used to work) to do some research on 19th century railroads in Massachusetts, specifically the railroad that runs east-west across the state between Boston and Albany, N.Y. One interesting bit of information he provided was that according to the oldest schedules that he found, the trains in the 1850s could travel between Boston and Worcester in slightly less time than the commuter rail trains that follow the same route today. This is especially interesting (and depressing) to me because I used to travel on those commuter trains when I worked in the Boston area. It's interesting (and slightly depressing) to learn that a traveller in the pre-Civil War period could get a faster trip than present-day commuters! Granted, the seating on those early trains probably made even the most cramped old commuter rail cars today seem like luxury hotels on wheels - I think that the early seats were usually plain and rickety wood, on cars that had very limited shock absorbing capabilities.

This kind of ties in with the fact that the USA once had one of the world's best passenger rail networks, and then we basically dismantled most of it in the mid-to-late 20th century because interstate highways and automobiles seemed like a superior method of travel at the time. You could once travel to almost any small city and many decent-sized towns in the USA by rail. Even the electric streetcar networks were pretty comprehensive - I heard somewhere that in the early 20th century one could travel all the way from Boston to Chicago using only electric streetcars, although nobody would actually travel that way because you would probably have to change streetcar lines 30 times or something. I'm not sure if that is actually true or not!

Holiday season, etc.

This may sound bizarre to some people, but being with my immediate family has generally been my favorite part of the Christmas holidays. I could easily leave all of the hype and stress and marketing associated with the holiday. When I was a kid, receiving lots of presents was important, but in more recent years I could totally skip that too and not miss it much at all. Going through Christmas without seeing anyone in my immediate family, though, really would take all of the personal meaning out of Christmas for me.

Why am a sounding like a sickly-sweet Hallmark card? The weird thing is, those cliches about Christmas being a time that brings families together and full of warmth and love and all of that stuff that makes many people feel sick - they have been pretty much true for me. Of course things aren't perfect, and there is sometimes stress and sadness, and there have been some Christmases that are much less happy than others, but overall the Christmas season is still strongly associated in my mind with fairly happy times together with family.

A couple of things help. For one thing, my brothers, parents, and I have generally gotten along fairly well for most of our lives. There have been times of anger and tension, but these have actually been very few and far between. Once me and my brothers were all adults, the sibling rivalry and adolescent-parent strife mostly faded into history. We really enjoy each others' company most of the time, so once we were all adults family gatherings took on some of the same atmosphere as gatherings of very good, old friends, with an extra dimension. The second thing that helps, I think, is that we all have a pretty casual attitude about the holidays. Nobody expects elaborate or expensive gifts. We don't worry about putting out lots of decorations. The main elements of our family Christmas are time spent together, lots of unhealthy but tasty food, a little simple decorating, and a mix of serious conversation with plenty of joking and good-natured insults.

The holidays inevitably remind all of us how much we miss Mom, though. This will be the fourth Christmas since she died, and there is a huge empty space in the family that will never be filled. My father and brothers and I still enjoy the holidays, though. The last thing that Mom would have wanted was for us to stop enjoying being together as a family, and we have not stopped.

Last Christmas was very distinctive because I went over to Germany with my father and youngest brother, and we celebrated Christmas with my middle brother, niece, sister-in-law and her family, who are from Magdeburg, a city to the west of Berlin. The year before we were in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where my brother and sister-in-law were living at the time. In fact, this is the first Christmas that I will have spent in Massachusetts in 5 years. Staying near home for Christmas actually feels a little "exotic" this year.

I have taken this week off from work and am spending it with my father and one brother at the "old family home" where I lived the majority of my childhood and part of my adulthood as well. My middle brother is staying in Germany with his family, but my other brother (unmarried like myself) flew in today from Colorado. We are also joined by a friend's dog who I am taking care of over the holidays.

Rio, our temporary family member for
the holidays - friendly, intelligent,
and generally furry and adorable.

The weather here has been seasonally appropriate. We got about 10 inches of snow from late Saturday night through Sunday afternoon, in a storm that was unusual in that it pounded places further south and along the coast with much heavier snow than the inland towns here got. There is enough to cause some problems, but not very serious, and it looks right for Christmas.

Canadian Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in Dad's front yard.
At about 15 feet tall, it has outgrown any possibility of being
used as an indoor Christmas tree in the house.

On a less scenic note, it is really cold - partly because of the actual temperature, which has been between about 12 and 30 degrees Fahrenheit (about -11 to -1 Celsius) over the last few days - but also because of the wind. The "old family home" is near the top of a hill, and it has an open field behind it to the west. This means maximum exposure to cold winds.

View behind the house, with an area cleared out for Rio's use.

I was saying to my brother that with the cold, dry, windy air and blowing snow, coming to central Massachusetts now from Colorado Springs might not seem like much of a change. One key difference is that instead of seeing the Rockies just to the west, the best we can do is some Massachusetts hills. Well, what can ya do?

Not quite the Colorado Rockies, I'm afraid.

After spending most of the summer with unusually cool and wet weather, we're back to "seasonal" weather - highs around 90 degrees (Fahrenheit; that's 32 or 33 Celsius) and hazy and humid. This makes me sorely miss the cool, rainy non-summer that we used to have. It was great - kind of like I imagine the summers in the Pacific northwest or England might be like (not that I have ever been to either of those places - and I heard that the Pacific northwest had an unusual heat wave recently).

Weird weather and a garden that grows too well

Whoever is in control of the weather this summer apparently decided that late April or early May has the ideal weather, and so they would just replay it over and over again instead of giving the normal warm and humid summer weather. This has irritated a lot of people, but it was just fine with me, because I really hate warm and humid weather. Then again, I really hate cold weather, too. My ideal climate would never go above 70 degrees or below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (that's between 10 and 21 degrees Celsius for all you non-Americans who insist on using slightly more rational systems of measurement). Then, this week, the weather went back to being seasonal, i.e., warm and humid. Well, the window air conditioners are finally getting a workout after sitting around and doing little but collect dust for over 2 months.

The cool, rainy weather has been great for my lawn and garden. Actually, that's a lie, since I don't have any lawn and garden, since I don't own any land. What I do have is my father's lawn and garden, which I help take care of, and often lapse into thinking of as sort of mine. The gardens are what really stand out. As I grew up, I watched Mom expand the gardens over a larger and larger portion of the yard, and at times I took a casual interest in gardening myself. Mom passed away from cancer in late 2006, and my father and I have tried to keep up the gardens since then. Unfortunately for the gardens, neither of us has the dedication that mom did, and so the nicely arranged cultivated plants are often mixed in with quite a few wildflowers and outright unattractive weeds. I will periodically attack the weeds in part or all of the garden, then see a whole fresh crop of weeds come up, sometimes in just a few days. The rainy summer seems to have encouraged an especially lush growth of weeds.

Still, some of the unasked-for plants have turned out to be very attractive wildflowers, and I've kept most of those, which leads to a somewhat chaotic and unkempt but colorful garden:

There was once a grove of pine trees here. Then, there was an above-ground swimming pool.
Then, there was a formal garden, which a certain amount of benign neglect
is in the process of turning into a wildflower patch. At least it's colorful.