Moving Out, Moving In & Moving On

Shelly and I (okay, mostly me) have been very busy lately working on selling Casa Swift Rivers in Barre and getting a new place for ourselves in Worcester.  Much smaller digs, mind you and not a house either, instead we're renting a condo in a densely populated neighborhood.  The building we're moving into has quite a history, built back in 1904 it was once Worcester's first synagogue.  Now renovated, it's all modern inside and right in the heart of civilization, or at least as civilized as the city can get.

 

This move has been a long time coming and we're still unprepared for it.  There's so much to be done towards getting our things together and ready for transport to the new location but the move is inevitable, mostly because we've already got a lease signed and money invested in this.  Plans are in place to have a truck rented before the end of the month and our sons are expected to come down from Maine to help us get everything loaded and unloaded in various locations.  It's not just a straight trip from point A to point B, there's going to be some rented storage space involved and even a trip to my Mom's as she's getting a lot of my tools and my pride & joy workbench that I built several years ago.

There are some mixed feelings about this but most of them are good ones.  Some things I'll miss about the Barre homestead are the quiet privacy of space between houses, the variety of birds (and other wildlife) that visited the yard and clear, cool nights with the haze of the Milky Way clearly visible overhead.  But things I definitely won't miss are feeling like every trip to the grocery store is a major expedition, driving on some of the worst roads I've ever been on in my life (seriously, I replace tie rods on my Hyundai more often than wiper blades) and spending an hour and a half every day just getting to and from work in the city.

Shelly's therapy will continue but we'll be looking into getting her into Fairlawn, the acute rehab center where she spent the first few weeks recovering immediately after her stroke.  If so, maybe we can get a schedule that's more accommodating to my work so I won't have to take quite so much time off and in the process save a little money, vacation time and cause less aggravation for my co-workers who often have to cover the gaps in the schedule that my absences cause.  We'll also be closer to the majority of her doctors in the city with monthly trips back to Barre for check-ups with her PCP.  As for me, I'll have a much shorter commute and no yard to maintain or leaky roof to try to repair which means more free time to spend on more relaxing pursuits.