The end of despair

We've been in talks for the past week with a potential buyer for our old house. Today we finally signed the contract to sell the house to the buyer. FINALLY!! This home switching idea has been over a year in the making and today we can see the end in site!

I have to say it's been way harder than I ever expected. You watch the home improvement shows on TV: A nice couple buys a run down place, puts some paint on the walls and some new curtains and wallah! The couple sells the house the next week and makes loads of money doing it.

Our story reads a little more like: A nice couple buys a dump from some hillbillies and then works their butts off cleaning, fixing, upgrading and pretty much go broke doing it. After the work is finished the house is put up for sale and then sits on the market for 5 months because it is in the not-so-elite part of town.

Alas this chonicle is finally ending. And I'm glad to say that we are never going to sell or move ever again.

Some good news: I recieved my yearly review today and I was promoted to the next level of engineer servitude. I am now a Technical Specialist I, rather than an Engineer II (never thought of it before, but Engineer #II sounds like a technical purveyor of feces). I got the raise and a big pat on the back from my boss. Now we just need to celebrate. Steph is finishing up the exit exam for her Master's this evening so maybe we will wait until this weekend to party it up.

Did I mention that the little old lady moved out of our new house? Tomorrow we are going to stop by the house just to enjoy having the place to ourselves. We probably should start cleaning, but I will likely spend most of the time playing with sprinkler system. New toys!!

New Blog In Town

Occasionally in this space I like to endorse things that I whole heartidly stand behind. This week I'd like to feature a new blog that I just happened to come across that is most read-worthy:

http://thesouthernyankee.blogspot.com/

Actually, this is Stephanie's new blog and it's actually pretty good.

The benefit of me featuring this blog is that Stephanie has been updating her blog with all the neat things that we've been up to lately. If you refer to her blog, I don't have to update everyone on how we got the new house, or the cool bike ride that we embarked upon today out near the beach. Being the lazy butt that I am, it's kinda nice when she's already done all the work for me.

Yesterday I went for a great bike ride in downtown Savannah. The weather couldn't have been better and there were loads of people walking around. It was neat observing some of the tourists' perspectives: At a cross walk I stopped to let some people cross and one lady said "See! Even the bicyclists here stop to let people cross". It made me a smile. Partly because it made me feel like a nice guy and partly because I had already almost hit another dozen or so pedestrians in other cross walks.

Savannah is great city to bike in because the traffic is so slow around squares. It's easy to keep up with traffic without getting run down. Many of the local motorists are also used to driving around cyclists because there are so many people who cycle in downtown just to get around.

Sights from Downtown: Savannah is coming up on St. Patrick's day so all the fountains were dyed green and many of the streets were decorated. In a park off Bay street there was an irish step dancing competion for middle school girls. I had no idea that this riverdance stuff was so popular. In Forsyth park there were loads of students playing ultimate and also an organized game of rugby. I stood there for a good 5 minutes watching the rugby...which is good for me considering I'm not much of a sports fan... because it's really a cool sport. I like how unpredictable and chaotic rugby is. Far more grass roots than american football. It even crossed my mind to look into playing just for something fun to do. Not sure I want to commit to it, but it could be a lot of fun. ZULU!!!!!!!!!

Hardly Bearable

Bear Update: It's been about 24 hours since the great bear sighting of 2006 and I've now had time to let all the facts sit with me for a while. Looking at the pictures today with my colleages we decided that the 'bear' silhouette was rather unbearish. As a sanity check, we did a check of bear habitats in Georgia and we learned that bears are not common on the coast at all. This pretty much confirms that my sighting couldn't have been black bears.

We have a new theory my sighting was actually wild boar. Wild boar are very common in the coastal area, have a black silhouette like the bear and the sows can grow to nearly bear size. Looking at the pictures, the baby following the momma has a pretty distinct floppy ear. This leads me to think these were boars, not bears. I'll let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

Wild boars aren't quite as cool as sighting ferocious, man-eating bears but it was a neat find, nonetheless.

Bears!!

The weather was sort of nice today so I got out of the house while Stephanie was working on some of her grad homework. I went for a hike to investigate the historic Ogeechee canal in Tom Triplett park, which is not far from the Savannah airport. The hiking was sort of crappy because many sections of the trail were totally covered with flood waters (got nice and muddy) and the trail was pretty poorly marked.

Since the trail wasn't marked very well, I never found the canal. But I did find BEARS!!!! Now this is an interesting situation. I've been hiking so many times over years straight through bear sanctuaries and never caught a glimpse of a real black bear. But today, on a 20 minute hike I saw a momma and two baby bears foraging through the undergrowth.

I first heard the rustling of their footsteps way off in the distance and I expected it to be another hiker. Then I caught glimpse of the mother bear shortly followed by two babies at her heals.

Until now, I had never seen anything in the wild that was bigger than me. When I saw these guys I must honestly say that a rush a fear swept through me. All at once I began to think, "Should I run? Is the momma going to charge me? Can I climb any of these trees before she closes the distance on me?".

I'm not sure if the bears noticed me or not. They actually might be used to people hiking through so they weren't phased by hearing my footsteps. I just stood there and took a few pictures of them as they passed through. They didn't really get that close to me, but I must say it was a neat sighting.

BEARS!!!