Meta(
    title: "Settling in to the new house",
    summary: Some("After the move and resting up a bit, we\'re starting to settle in nicely"),
    published: Some(Time(
        year: 2022,
        month: 11,
        day: 1,
        hour: 21,
        minute: 35,
        second: 57,
    )),
    tags: [
        "homelife",
        "cooking",
        "diy",
    ],
)
---
It's pretty early in the morning for me as I write this, having grown accustomed to afternoon shift over the past five years. I've been up since about 7:30 local time sipping coffee, slicing vegetables and listening to a nice Jazz session featuring Danny Gatton and a young Joshua Redman. I've just finished filling the crocpot with Roma tomatoes, sweet yellow onion, green bell pepper and three varieties of beans. Browning some ground beef to add and in about 8 hours we'll be eating bowls of chili on a fall day.

We finished the mad rush to clean out the old house a week ago today and have been resting up and working on some small domestic projects. While I love our old home, we were overextended and it's truly liberating to not have that financial burden over our heads anymore. It's also nice to have trees. The big draw of the old house was a huge, almost two acre back yard which was wide open and facing directly south, along with our neighbor in that direction being a farm. So we caught every sunset in spectacular glory. The drawback was that the wind beat down with gale force at times. Now we're technically "in town", but right on the outskirts and close to the river. And the back yard is lined with trees including a giant Oak towards the back side. I missed that.

Today's agenda is a bit relaxed. Our basement is partially finished, ad we're turning the finished half into a bedroom for when my daughter comes to visit from Rhode Island or my son from college in Maine. There is a gap in one of the walls and part of the ceiling where some plumbing comes through. Looks like there was a bulkhead there at one time but it got torn out for whatever reason. I'll be headed to the lumberyard in a bit to get some dimesional lumber and framing it back in today. Other than that, it's just going to be a catch up day for domestic chores like laundry and dishes.