LizaWasHere

It has been BRUTAL here this weekend.

On Saturday, my car became a carcicle. It was coated in a quarter inch of ice. In the late afternoon, the power went out. Fortunately, I have a down comforter and my phone was fully charged, so I called people and dozed, confident that the power would return soon.

Around 9:30 pm, I was on the phone with Dave, and the power returned for a terrible, taunting, cruel 2 minutes. That was it.

The power was still out when I woke up Sunday morning, but at least it was light enough to read for awhile. Then I went to the bookstore for a few hours, which was a delight as always. I decided that IF I go back to school part time for an MBA, I should go to Georgia Tech or possibly Emory, but that first I need to brush up on my math. A big if, but I feel like there’s a lot more I’d like to know to be really good at my job. Like marketing, and financial stuff.

Then I drove down to Fayettesville, about half an hour south of Atlanta, to spend the afternoon with my old friend Kamina and her two-month-old daughter, Spencer. Kamina moved to Atlanta the same weekend I did, but she bought a house before arriving. And what a beautiful house!

Sadly, when I got home, there was still no power. I’d stopped at the grocery store for candles and matches, but I just couldn’t handle it. So I called the hotel next door to Earthlink, and they very kindly gave me a great emergency rate. So I had a shower and ate the soupy ice cream I’d also bought at the grocery store, and then walked the 1 min to work in the morning.

I don’t know what I’m going to do if there’s no power tonight when I get home. Cry, probably. Jill’s working the Superbowl, managing transportation issues for people getting on and off the cruise ship Miracle.

Saturday and Sunday, Jill was here and we looked at about a dozen houses.

The very last one we looked at, I had already ruled out, since it wasn’t in Decatur. But it was SO beautiful, I asked Jill to look anyway.

She fell in love too. It was a magnificantly restored, large, craftsman/mission style house on a corner double lot, across the street from a huge church. Hitting every traffic light, it took 20 minutes from work. It was a little above our budget…but we fell in love, and our real estate agent assured us that Atlanta isn’t like DC: you offer below the asking price here.

So we made an offer. And I started researching craftsman/mission/art deco interiors.

Unfortunately, with a few back and forth efforts, we weren’t able to reach a mutually satisfying price. So we aren’t buying the beautiful house.

After a day of licking our wounds (Tuesday), we are snapping out of our sadness and making an offer on our second choice house. SCH for short.

The SCH has been painted in colors that are even more awful than they look in the pictures. Most of the common living area is an agitating shade of spicy brown mustard. The greens are also more lurid than they look. And it has a nearly unusable back yard, a small patch of ground on a not quite 45 degree angle.

But the interior has a nice flow to it, the hardwood floors are fantastic, and the master bathroom is not to be believed. I think it’s the size of the smallest bedroom in our condo, with 2 sinks, a deep, huge soaking tub, a separate shower, and a built in vanity area. Oh, and a separate WC.

SCH also has a great master closet, which we can get "californiaized" so that it will hold all of Jill’s (and my) t-shirts without them toppling over in scary stacks. (At present, they occupy ~9 square feet of shelf space, in stacks from 8-15 inches high.)

And the list price is 60k lower than the beautiful house. So we can easily manage the cost of repainting, interior especially, but exterior too. AND I am envisioning an imaginative cascade of deck area transforming the unusable back yard into a cool, creative, fun, surprising space. Even better, SCH is only 5 blocks from the MARTA.  So I will be taking public transportation to work most days!!!

We do still have a 3rd choice house…but hopefully it won’t come to that. (That one has a great yard, but a dated and dark interior, and is not walking distance to the MARTA.)

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for more than a week now.

On the job front, things are going well, although quietly. They don’t have an engineer lead yet who will focus on implementing all my great parental controls product plans. So I am mostly learning our current product and doing competitive analysis.

On the housing front, we sold the condo in Reston! We listed it last week, had an open house on Sunday, and had 6 offers yesterday night.

My temp housing isn’t going quite as well. I moved into a sublet on Sunday night. It wasn’t quite ready for me, so I went and did grocery shopping and came back. My "landlady" left around 10:30 pm, but wasn’t able to move out all of her stuff until yesterday. But it looks like she will be back again – at least I hope so, since the mystery substances on the dishes in the sink doesn’t look like anything I want to deal with myself. She also has another friend who was staying with her, who she hasn’t actually reached yet to tell that he can’t stay there anymore.

As a result, I REALLY want us to make an offer on an unoccupied place in Decatur this weekend, so I can be moved into a house of our own SOOOOOOOON.

In a few minutes, I get to come home for a SHORTSHORT visit — final scene night is tonight for Character & Emotion at the Studio Theatre. So I will see my lovely wife and sleep tonight in my own bed.

And then come back to Atlanta tomorrow.

Well, I’m all set up. Everything is packed, although not yet loaded into the car.

The house looks amazing. All that’s left to get ready to put it on the market is tidying and cleaning the last elements of the office. Most of what’s out and about is related to Jill’s work, and I’m afraid she won’t be able to find important things if I put the rest "away."

It isn’t actually ON the market tomorrow, but that’s because the agent recommended waiting until next weekend so she has more time to do pre-listing marketing stuff. She’ll list it Thursday afternoon.

I have class tonight, and before she left for rehearsal, Jill got me into exactly the right mindset for it.

Tonight’s class is the midpoint of my final quarter of the Team Management and Leadership Program, a yearlong course I’ve been in that gave me a lot of the management skills the new job requires. I know that whatever we’re up to in class tonight, it’s going to be the perfect thing to set me up for an awesome first day of work on Monday.

I’ve been being sad about leaving DC and my friends, and about not being in the same week to week experience of the course — I’ve made special arrangements to complete it in spite of the move — but the fact is, the job is going to be awesome, the house we find is going to be an unbelieveable step up from our 4th floor walk-up condo, and Jill’s choice to stay here in order to take a course with Joy Zinoman is going to provide her with the opportunity to take her acting skills to the next level. And she’ll be in Atlanta by the time I get through the toughest part of the new job learning curve.

The best part is how easy and low-stress the whole experience has been.