Welcome to Atlanta

For those who last heard from us when I was extolling the virtues of puckless homes who are wondering if we are currently living either on the streets of Atlanta or perhaps with Ludacris, I can assure you that we are under our own, very new, and very non-leaky roof. In fact we've been here for a month already, unpacking, arguing with Comcast, flying to the West Coast … you know, the usual.

See I had intended to throw a few brief updates up along the way, but there were a few hurdles that prevented me from posting anything of any substance. The first being that my keyboard, along with my mouse, and the other parts that are together known as “kelly's computer” (not My Computer, that's a different OS) were packed with the rest of our earthly belongings into some 200 boxes labeled with orange and yellow inventory stickers that looked a lot like raffle tickets. Oh by the way, we hit it big in the raffle. We won all our stuff back in like a week. It was awesome, two guys showed up in a big United Vanlines truck and single handedly hauled all of our stuff up the new stairs, and reassembled all of our furniture. With some of the furniture I had originally assembled, I think it was the first time it had been assembled properly.

But before the prize committee showed up to award us with our own stuff, we first had to go through the steps necessary to obtain keys to a house. There were no raffle tickets available, so they just had us sign and initial a lot of papers featuring large numbers. I suspect it all must've been something to do with our chances of winning a house, because the numbers looked like the denominator in a game of very unlikely chance. Sadly, at the end of the process, all you get is a heavy folder full papers containing only one useful sheet of trash pickup times and one little miniature manila folder containing two keys. I dug around in the bottom to see if there were some magnets with the numbers to lousy local pizza establishments, but nothing. What a scam. Those magnets have been free with every apartment I've ever rented.

Having the keys in our pockets sure eased our minds a bit. Not that we were able to move in since we had no stuff, but at least we knew we had a good hard floor to sleep on if all else failed. Even that didn't seem so certain in the days before the closing. I won't go as far as calling our loan processor clueless, but man that guy didn't have a clue. Let's take a vote real quick. How many people think you can call up Google just out of the blue and get a new employee's salary information. Our loan processor seemed shocked that they would refuse to give that sort of information out to just any person claiming to be from a bank … clueless, er. I mean not clueful. The whole affair then caused quite a stir when he left a message for us sort of indicating that we had not provided all the proper information and then proceeded to become completely inaccessible. It was so stressful, in fact, that I was forced at one point to abandon the serentity of joyful, temporary unemployment and jump in the pool to rough Trey up. Which proved to be a mistake as six-year olds are pretty resiliant to being roughed up and the presence of a grown-up in the pool draws other kids in like cows to a chik-fil-a casting call. I just can't overstate how well having three kids on your back in the deep end of the pool relieves the mind of loan worries.

In the end, everything with the loan worked out. It turns out that in addition to being clueless, the loan officer was also a bit of a drama queen. He later decided that the information wasn't all that important anyway. We closed on schedule and two days later the prize committee showed up with our stuff, including the broken end table I was supposed to take to the dumpster before the movers in Cambridge arrived. Oops. That's quite alright, though, they got their revenge by hiding the pump for our select comfort bed in an obscurely labeled box forcing me to open all 200 something boxes before we were able to sleep on the first night.

But moving complications aside, we got into the house and I've started my new job. My initial assessment of both the house and the job … I love em. It's truly an awesome time for us right now. Plus we're back in Atlanta which, unlike Boston, is where the playas play. At least that's what I'm told anyway.

So again, for all those people who have been wondering what happened to us. We're fine. In fact, we're better than fine. I'm still a little behind one my email and RSS reads (no seriously, look at the image), but otherwise our second Atlanta life is in full swing.