Feb 27: one year ago today

(our old house in NH and Petey)
People who know us well, like Denis and Alan, will remember that it was time for us to move from New Hampshire last year. Aside from the new NASTY neighbors up the street and their vicious and never tied up German Shepherd, in fall of '05 my wife was laid off and the property tax inspector showed up and quadrupuled our tax rate. Just before Christmas '05 we listed the house, had several interested parties, and got an offer 5 weeks later on January 31, '06, for closing February 28. Yes, we had been in the house 10 years, having purchased it at a very good price, we sold it at the top of the real estate bubble, which burst literally the day after we closed last year. And then, famously, we moved to New York state and bought a purple house in Ithaca last spring. Lucky lucky lucky us.
Anyway, Feb. 27 was one of the longest days of our lives: up packing at 6 am, spent the rest of the day until mid-night loading Uhaul's largest truck to the very rafters, not even room for one more cup and saucer. We then closed the next day and drove to NY and dumped our belongins in my parent's garage and lived in their barn for one month, cats and dogs included. (it is a nice barn) As you can see, we had a cute little cottage in the New Hampshire woods for 10 plus years, but despite 55 bags of trash and 5 trips to Salvation Army to donate, we had a lot of stuff, HEAVY stuff, like 3 kilns, several hundred pounds of clay, 15 glaze buckets, 1000 pounds of glaze ingredients, plus, of course couch, bed, chairs, 3 dogs and 2 cats. Our little dog Petey is shown here, his last job was helping us with this move, he was almost 19, and he passed away last May, 2 months after we moved into the new house. He was my best friend.