Home search - Done!

Sorry about the gap in posting, I know you've all just been dying to see the progress. I wish I had a good excuse, but the unfortunate reality is that I'm just really, really lazy.

So we found a house (the one in Wimbledon as previously described), and Caroline has a spot in the school that we liked very much, so it looks like we're all set. Now, it's just a matter of parting with most of our worldly possessions so that we'll actually fit into a space that's roughly half the size of our current house. If you're interested, photos are at http://picasaweb.google.com/paulconroy/newhouse.

If spatial ability is the best measure of intelligence, I must be the village idiot. I took lots of measurements of the new place (though not as many as I should have, since I largely ignored the presence of such architectural details as doors and windows), and measurements of our furniture. Any fool could have seen that our furniture just wouldn't fit into the new place, but not me. I have to see it in black and white (or, the computer has to tell me), so I used Google's new SketchUp (www.sketchup.com) (boy, haven't I fallen for Google in a big way...) to draw out one of the rooms and the furniture I had thought would fit it qite nicely. Guess what? I was wrong. For the record, Michele knew right away that the furniture wouldn't fit, so I'm deferring anything that has to do with space to her from now on.

So now we're selling our furniture. While you might think that this would be cathartic (and, indeed, that's what I tell myself), it really isn't so much. I mean, this isn't the furniture left over from college, like the vinyl couch with the can of beans to holding up one side. This is actually nice stuff, bought new, with our own money. Selling it is like cutting out a part of our history. A Buddhist might point out that attachment is the source of unhappiness; and if he did, I'd probably just sock him in the nose. He'd be right, of course, but one doesn't really need some bald guy in a saffron robe telling one how to live one's life, does one?

One of my friends who went through this same thing not long ago suggested that I might actually like the new stuff better. I didn't poke her in the nose, and not just because she doesn't wear a saffron robe (at least not to my knowledge), but because as she rightly points out, I can just get reattached to the new stuff. Oh, goody! I won't achieve Nirvana, but at least I'll have a new entertainment center as consolation. Now, anyone want to buy the old one?