-ety jig

1000 pieces, 7 lighthouses. Saw 2 of them in person (Bodie Island & Cape Hatteras).
Over mom's 3 week stay we put together 2750 pieces of 3 puzzles in their entirety : Disney World, candy hearts, Coastal Lights of NC, plus we got the castle part of Neuschwanstein put together but not all the forest or sky of that 550, then deconstructed it because of EOPS and needing the table space.

It was a beast to do, though, because of the same edging on the real edge pieces and the internal blue/white edge. Also, I thought doing the b&w lighthouses would make picking out the pieces easy... nope!

But the pieces TOUCH wonderfully and are the most beautiful irregular shapes. Which makes for a different challenge.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

We always say we're going home whether bound for NC, MD, or PA. Sometimes even MI or on rare occasion CA. But in this case, it's all based at Credo, where unlike at an airbnb, we can break out a jigsaw puzzle. MIL always has one going at her apartment, so why should her visits here be any different?

12h from start to finish on the 750 piece Disney World puzzle.

The candy hearts took longer, about 4 days, but it's 1000 pieces and all candy hearts look the same.

Next up, Neuschwanstein Castle. Big Frog was there when he was in Germany, and it's always been towards the top of our world tour list.

Credo tour

Lots of changes since we made up the first house tour.  And there's more paint and such in the plans for future too.  Maybe I'll even get the rest of the art onto the walls.

House tour 2016. 
And this is trust, but I've always averred that if someone steals it they must need it more than I do.  Alternatively, this is evidence that we're not worth robbing.  

If good fences make good neighbors, so too do new basketball hoops

When we moved into Credo, we acquired an in-ground basketball hoop.  Just the hoop, really; the acrylic backboard was gone, leaving just a hoop and its steel frame, and a pole embedded in concrete.  And being the avid basketball players we are  given our great height and athletic ability it literally has only impacted our lives when we told our RV-dwelling friend that she could park in our driveway and then we discovered that RVs are taller than hoops.

But it's been on the list since we moved in as a reasonably easy fix to just throw up some plexiglass, or even just tack some plywood up there so it was useable instead of useless.  And we've actually had it in mind to host youth events since reading the previous owners' letter to prospective buyers; that was something they did, and something that resonated with us.  We have hosted movie nights, and "no school now what?" days, and most recently, a youth group game night that devolved wonderfully into roasting marshmallows and tossing a football in the backyard.  And tossing a basketball thru the backboard rather than thru the hoop.

We also looked at just taking it out; we certainly wouldn't miss it.  And our RV friend wouldn't either.  And every time we back out of the garage, we wouldn't have to think about how to miss it.  But the internet was humorously unhelpful, particularly this forum which variously suggested 1) dynamite, 2) a "please don't steal me" sign, and 3) saltwater and a case of beer while you watch it rust.  Bonus, ours had a head start on rust.

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Before:

 

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Disassembly of just the parts needing replaced¹:

1 That is proper Penn Dutch grammar. There is no "to be" in Penn Dutch.

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Then, although the entire rig is meant to be assembled on the ground and then hoisted aloft and installed on the pole, we had a good bit already installed from the previous backboard that we did not bring down.  We also are fortunate to have good neighbors.

Today's QOTD:

Next door neighbor C: So the springs go on there...
me (interrupting): What are the springs for?
C: It's for when you dunk.
Big Frog (directly to me): Yes, for when YOU dunk...!

<later>
C (tightening bolts): How tight should these go?
me (consulting instruction sheet): It says to desired tension.  So basically, season to taste.
C (directly to me): So when you DUNK...

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Taaaaah daaaaaaaah!

I will have you know that I pulled out the basketball right away, stood at the foul line, and made a basket on my very first attempt.  Big Frog will vouch for me, and not just because he's obliged to in the marriage vows².  But of course it's not on video because it is basically unprecedented, and there was absolutely no reason to believe this shot would be a success.

2 We did make oddly specific promises at our wedding, but somehow basketball never did enter into it. Until now?

Got a lot of practice to put in.  Free shots, of course, and also dunking.

Old School

I've been out of school since 2001, when I graduated from Messiah College. (Home of the Falcons! Our football team is undefeated since 1909.)

And I always promised myself I'd go to grad school, that I wouldn't be one of those people who "took a year off" and never went back to school.  And I do occasionally flirt with the idea of getting my terp's license or my MLIS (Master's of Library and Information Science. But so far it hasn't happened.

But every year at back-to-school time (mid August for September start dates, not retail back-to-school time, which means May) I see all the pens and markers and super-cheap single-subject spiral notebooks and it's rare that I don't buy at least SOMEthing.  Usually the impulse limits itself to new markers or notebooks.  But this year it went old-school.

On Main Street Kernersville, there's a lovely little antiques shop, Remember When, where Barbara keeps a pair of hymns CDs by Alan Jackson on infinite repeat.  They don't sell those CDs due to some arcane music-selling law, but she tells not a few people what they are and sends buyers to other retailers to acquire them.  We have a set and sent a set to my mom, too.  I poke around in there and sing make-your-own-alto. And I usually ask a few questions, try on a few hats (Derby hats like you wouldn't believe!), and go on my way.

Today there were some really neat pieces in the store, like a table made of shields.  I thought it'd be neat as a lamp table in our guest bedroom, but it really deserves to stand alone so the detail of the shields can show.  Then we found this beauty.


We'll need to research the maker, Peabody-Stiggleman Co, of North Manchester, Indiana. A quick search revealed that in 1926, they made 30,000 desks for California schools.


It's perfect for a side table or some extra (kid-sized) seating. But I may need a classier lamp than my sleekly-modern florescent-tube desk lamp.

A lot can change in a year

On this day in 2014, one year ago, we had just landed in Minnesota for a family reunion and a golden anniversary party.  While I played in the splash pad with my niece & nephew, introverted, early-rising Big Frog took a nap poolside.  (He had driven us from Harrisburg PA to Trenton NJ¹ that morning for a beyond-super-cheap flight... even so, never fly out of Trenton.)

1 "What Trenton makes, the world takes." The first time we were in Trenton, we were trying to visit a college friend in Philly. We knew there was a problem when we found ourselves entering Jersey. Also, and I consider this a systemic problem, you have to pay to leave Jersey. What's up with that?


Turns out, Big Frog wasn't napping.

He took a call and it was an unexpected phone interview. And unlike all the other phone interviews he'd taken of late, he could freely say, "Sure this is a good time," with an unspoken undercurrent of, "I may have to ask you to repeat things, and you may hear some random pool noises coming from my end." Far better than the oft-repeated, "Hang on a sec, I need to leave my cube and go out to the car to take this; I haven't told anyone here that I'm leaving."

Who he had told was one of our friends from church, someone from his early-morning men's prayer group. At different points in Big Frog's life he's been in several early-morning prayer groups that have given him great relationships with God and with his Christian brothers. Because of that, it's one of the things he looked for in our new church. But this friend, although not an engineer, worked at an engineering firm where there was an opening for someone with Big Frog's background and interests. Although they worked for different companies, their buildings were next door to each other and they sometimes got together for lunch.

So when the phone call neared conclusion and the interviewer asked Big Frog for an in-person interview, Big Frog said once he was back in town he could walk next door just about any time.

But wait...

"Where do you think I'm calling from?"

Turns out, the international company headquartered in Central PA has a sensors division in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

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It's now July 17, 2015. A year has passed. We moved from PA to NC² in October and put Selah, our Harrisburg house on the market³, pulled it, had some work done on it⁴, and relisted it at Eastertime.

2 Precision in abbreviations: NC in this case is not New Cumberland, 20min from our old house, but North Carolina, which is substantially farther.
3 Our first realtor was terrible. We never should have signed with her, but we didn't know we had real choices given that we were working with a relo company put in place by Big Frog's work. How terrible was she? She never even told our relo company that the house was on the market. She sent the house to the internet without a single photo to advertise it. Resultingly, in three months there were perhaps 7 showings. Admittedly, fall is a tough time to list a house, but she was dreadful.
4 Our second realtor was amazing. She had people-resources to get things done even though we were at a distance. She did a great job marketing. Worlds better an experience.

It took some time to find just exactly the right person for Selah, which always was a quirky property. But in the fullness of time, and in yet another case of "God has a sense of humor" we got two simultaneous cash offers for almost exactly the same amount. We were able to parse through the pros & cons of each offer, which boiled down to pros & cons of each person making an offer. And today, a year to the exact day, practically to the very hour from when God put North Carolina squarely in our path, Selah closed in about 20 minutes (the joys of a cash offer!), firmly closing the door on our time living in PA.

Selah

Bobcat snow

Ahh, majestic creatures, bobcats.


source: Ohio DNR

< auditory screech >

But wait.
Don't you live in the suburbs?

Actually, yes.
And it snowed enough that our screen porch is snowy.

And our Bobcats, as it turns out, actually are in the neighborhood to do sewer work.

Which they can't do when there's 5" of white stuff (more manna!) on the ground.
(Could be worse. We were in the 5-12" stripe of the forecast.)

So the gents, who actually hail from south Georgia, have made themselves available for private snow removal.

Coming from a driveway that is exactly one car length long and two car widths wide to a heck of a driveway, we took them up on it.


Sure beats using a dustpan.

So cute and little!

At HIA's open house (these pics are from 2013), we got some closeups with the plows.


Granted, these are the heavy-duty runway plows, but even the plows that do the side streets use one swipe for a lane of traffic. On highways, sometimes you see them drive in diagonal formation so snow plowed by one truck is systematically pushed to the next truck doing the next lane.

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But now we live in NC.
And things are different here.

Hours later, closer to sundown than sunup (Spoiled because Selah and Gaude were both on main roads. Even my parents' house is on a through street.), we heard scraping, and sure enough, here comes the calvary.

Maybe?

It's a Bobcat.

And its slightly more sizable friend.

Does that even have a plow? Oh wait, the plow is directly underneath the driver. What!?

They went back and forth, forth and back, possibly a dozen times for our side street.
There is an inch of accumulation out there.

Welcome to the south, my friend.

Shrubbery

The Knights who say Ni came to visit us today.
They were guised as workmen looking for tree trimming/removal jobs, knocking doors in our neighborhood, going for no.
We, by contrast, had ~75 linear feet of overgrown juniper that we've been wanting to get rid of since we moved in.

Here's the house as it went to the market last April:
(By the way, yarbhill, those white things are crepe myrtles, which had been trimmed way back too. But they've since sent shoots up again and are looking more treelike.)

And as it was when we moved in, in October:


By January, when there was not a flake of snow in the forecast and the lawns were still the green of "we might grow just as well as hibernate", came knocking The Knights who say Ni. (This is not their professional name... although our grass is cut by a guy who, the first time I met him, was wearing a herringbone Batman shirt, so it's not totally beyond the realm of possibility.)

Within 90 minutes they turned this

into this

Hey, we have a mailbox and everything down there -- it actually makes the mailbox feel closer, because before it was a little labyrinthine.

OK, maybe not quite, but hey, never a bad time for Labyrinth.
Also,

Sorry, got sidetracked. Anyways...

They also cut down a holly tree that I'm sure at one time was a lovely little bush at the corner but had become a behemoth that overhung the second-story window and was a little alarming in the winds this past week, although it hadn't bothered us previous to that.

In an interesting confluence, we also took the Christmas tree down today, so the living room seems significantly bigger as well. And the house smells pleasantly of juniper.

I hope our friends recognize Credo the next time they visit.

Well, we said it would be a hospitality house.

So all week UPS has been delivering packages, multiple packages, to Credo from QVC. Thing is, neither Big Frog nor I have ordered things from QVC, possibly ever.

But Credo's former owners have. Often, evidently.

And we've been getting packages addressed to their current address, with stickers pasted over and around the ostensibly correct "ship to" addresses which redirect the packages our way.

But unlike the United States Postal Service, United Parcel Service won't let you just marker "please forward" onto the item and throw it back into the mailbox. Instead, I went online to figure out what to do, and the "chat now" person had me take photos of the packages, which she passed along to the local office, which sent a brown truck back our way to retrieve and redeliver. The drivers have been very gracious about it, but they seem as mystified as I about who would keep correcting a "ship to" midway through the process.

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I am a night owl. This is not news to anyone who has ever met me.

And although we have our outdoor and tree lights set to "dusk + #h", they're on sometimes dusk to dawn, sometimes longer. It depends on how light hits the sensors. Or maybe we have a bad optic. We're not sure, and this is the first year we've relied on them instead of just using them as switches.

So I was awake and reading, and the lights were still illuminated and blinking merrily away in the darkness at 1am when a knock sounded at the door.

Even though I always say, "It's never too late to call, although it may be too early," few people call after 10p. And really no one calls after 11p, even if you tell them to. So a 1am knock was really unexpected. Haven't had one of those since college days, when everyone was on a semi-nocturnal schedule.

I open the door and I'm greeted by a complete stranger, an African-American woman whose face immediately falls and she says, "Oh, [former owner] moved." She starts backpedaling into an apologetic, "I knew they had their house on the market, I just forgot, I'm so sorry," and I learn that the previous owner's mother has passed on unexpectedly. This night visitor just an hour ago learned about the passing and hopped in her car to support her friend. Who no longer lives at my house.

But wait!

Longtime readers may recall how God providentially let us meet the previous owner and her mother the very day I moved to NC. In a show of completion, when I arrived in NC, I met Big Frog at the house rather than at the hotel where he was then living. Not 15 minutes later did the previous owner show up to do some last minute tidying before turning the keys over. So instead of prowling around the perimeter with cat-like tread and bobbing flashlights, we went into the house and took photos of us in our new kitchen. We exchanged cell numbers and invited the former owners to EOPS.

So, 1am notwithstanding, I was able to give the friend all the reasonably-current contact information I had for their friend.

Ain't God good?

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Hebrews 13:2 Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

Outdoor lights, addendum

Our outside Christmas lights are on a timer, dusk + 6h.  Our porch lights are manual.  Late last night, when we turned the porch lights off, the Christmas lights, which had already gone off, thought it was dusk and started merrily blinking again.  Sorry, neighbors.

Outdoor lights!

Outdoor lights!  Not many, and just on the front porch, but significant because this is the first time in my entire life I've been part of a household that put up outdoor lights.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas?

Cultural differences:
At tonight's Christmas tree lighting, here in NC, there were burn barrels and hot cocoa to keep people warm.
It's 50F. 
I only wore my coat because it gave me pockets, which my choir dress lacks.

Also, in addition to The Kerner Chorale and a local HS madrigal group singing carols, another high school sent their drum corps and cheerleaders.  Never heard a drumline play Silent Night before.  But I guess you can only reorchestrate pah-rum-pum-pum-pum so many times before it gets old.

Merry Christmas!


photo credit: Rheanell Baker

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Also, a few snaps from our Messiah rehearsals and performances.
Note to self: don't rent harpsichords. And certainly don't transport rented harpsichords in a pickup truck in the rain.

photo credit: joyverflow






Remember, sing British, not southern!

Bird

<having seen a hawk of some kind swoop across our lawn>

Bird!
Big bird.
But not the Big Bird.
Probably eating <simultaneously> voles/squirrels.
If he's eating squirrels,  he's my friend.

Credo House Tour

www.tinyurl.com/CredoHouseTour

Did a brief phone-video house tour before heading north for Thanksgiving... unfortunately, due to the limitations of battery and memory, in my redo of the main floor, the living room got cut off... maybe after Christmas has come and gone we'll loop thru the living room again.

How NC DOT keeps people from getting mad at them for bad pictures

Within a month of our moving to NC (not New Cumberland... it took me years to recognize that abbreviation as New Cumberland, and now I have to retrain myself), three of my friends also moved out of Central PA. One headed south to her grands in Texas, the second and third each headed to the Pacific Northwest. It's been good for me to see how the process (and it is a process!) is going for them.  It also reminds me of things I need to do. 

The new Texan recently blogged about her mug-shot-like new driver's license, and I realized I hadn't changed mine yet.  I'd actually been delaying it because according to the official website, regardless of if you were moving to the state or if you were a new driver, you had to take the written test and possibly even take a driving test pending the examiner deeming it necessary.  And THAT was not high-priority for me.  (The website overstated.  Real people let an out-of-state license suffice.)

But although they took a photo, they didn't send me home with it on an immediately-ready shiny plastic card.  Instead I got a North Carolina 20-day Temporary Driving Certificate.  If I got stopped, I would have to show my PA license as well as this half-sheet of printer paper with all my stats.

The real card will come by mail next week.

Which is one thing for a library card (they do that to verify your address), but on a driver's license it means that the infamous driver's license photo goes unseen until there's a week between you and the clerk at the DMV.  There's no doublecheck on the photo.  There's no retakes.  And the clerk gets no repercussion.  The mail carrier might, though.