Home Sweet Home

Well, I'm finally comfortable saying that we have arrived.  I spent days last week unpacking boxes and building shelves.  We have driven all over town to tax, tag, register, license,and insure ourselves and our vehicles, and we are officially Texas residents.  We unpacked the last of the boxes just yesterday and hung the art on the walls.  Today I took the last of the broken down cardboard to the recycling yard.  We certainly have some fine tuning left to do, but for all intents and purposes - we are home.

To have arrived in Austin during the worst part of the year for weather (the first thing my outdoor thermometer did upon installation was to instantly shoot over 100!), things are not as horrid as I had feared.  The outdoor temps in the late evening and early morning are quite bearable, and it is certainly a pleasant change to walk outside barefoot to a driveway that feels warm underfoot.  I don't have to keep my jacket handy - that's for sure!  Our air conditioner works well, but with utility costs (and of course my cool counter-cultural persona) to think about, we've kept our inside air warmer than most :). 

Living next to the campus of the school will be a blessing indeed.  I have been attending morning prayer in the chapel, and I can walk out my door at 7:59 and be there before they start the service.  As well, my neighbors are all fellow seminarians, and several have children.  The family that shares our duplex have a 5-year-old and 2-year-old, and already the kids all consider both houses theirs.  For a little while today their kids were at our house and ours were with them! 

Our house here is really wonderful.  Being in an older neighborhood means there is lots of mature landscaping around us.  Because of this, our house gets very little direct sunlight during the hottest parts of the day.  There is a fair amount of available garden space for us when we finally get the chance for that.  Just outside our back door is a carport with a laundry / storage room.  It is a great outdoor space and I have already worked on several projects there.  We've even put out a table and chairs there for when things cool down a bit.  We had no trouble fitting our things here -- because our condo was so much smaller we actually have a few empty closets and fairly sparse rooms here.  After years of being so tightly packed, the empty space feels luxurious. 

The kids are in heaven here!  They have next-door neighbors their age that they maraud with through the day.  There is actually a front and a back yard that they can simply walk out into any time they ask (at our old place the yard was downstairs and they couldn't be there alone).  They have already spent countless hours outside discovering things like ants and birds' nests.  The driveway is on an alley, and there is plenty of room for the kids to ride their bikes around.  There is even a swimming pool just across the alley -- we can see it from our back door -- and they get to swim almost daily.

The transition time is finally coming to an end this Thursday, when New Student Orientation begins.  I will be in sessions off and on for the next week, including a two-day retreat, in order to get to know my classmates and learn what to expect for the next few years.