Actually…I know since our last post was on 1/18 just after we closed…and I gotta tellya…this movin’ out stuff is hard. We been pretty much running ourselves ragged getting furniture, deliveries, internet and cable, and schlepping stuff from the rig over to the house. We’ve hardly had a day off since we closed and there’s still a lot to go.

The good news though…is that we’ve made significant progress on getting the new digs setup. We have received our new Sony 65 inch OLED TV and sound bar and gotten it configured and setup with cable. We’ve got our internet connectivity active…we sprung for the gigabit ethernet and I gotta tellya again…after the limited speed and monthly bandwidth we have dealt with in the rig…speed of 1 gigabit (Neil got 900 MB when he measured it so it’s not quite gig speeds) and a monthly bandwidth limit of 1 terabyte is really nice to have. He downloaded the latest macOS version over the the other day and the 5.8 GB download took about 3 minutes instead of the 25-30 it would have taken in the rig on our MiFi connection. 

Our bedroom is completely setup…we ordered some built in cabinets for one side of the walk in closet in there and are still thinking on whether we might need a dresser in addition to those. Our recliners are due to be delivered this week hopefully and once we get those we will have enough over at the house to move in and sleep there instead of in the rig. Still need our TV stand but it’s coming the end of this month and it can just sit on the floor where the stand will eventually be in the meantime. Our garage second fridge and chest freezer will also be in late this month.

The spare bedroom will need a bed and furniture but we’ll handle that later once we get moved The office computer desk and chair are in and assembled, our new desktop computer to serve as the home file server is on order, and we’ve got a trip to Midlothian to get the stuff out of our storage unit the first week of March.

We’ve tentatively scheduled the Big Move© to start on Presidents Day weekend Feb 15 and since we have that whole week pretty much unscheduled on our calendar it should be enough…although realistically we expect to be done by about Tuesday.

We’ve discovered a lot of wildlife in the pond behind our house…should be able to get nice pictures once we get moved in. So far, we’ve found the obligatory gator like pretty much every water hole in southern Florida has, turtles, various herons and other wading birds, and an osprey.

This is Ragnar…he (or maybe she, you can’t see any reproductive organs and it’s not legal to wander around to that side of the pond to look anyway…and bull and female gators look the same externally.

This is our dining room set…we went with the glass top and rattan-style chairs as being much more Florida like than the heavier stuff you would have up north.

And naturally…we got matching counter height chairs to go at our bar where we’ll eat most of the time unless we’re in the recliners.

Our new bed…a soft sided waterbed. It’s not quite as comfy as the old hard side one with just a mattress cover over the bladder but with the pillow top, soft sides, and about 1/4 of the water of the old hard side style it is the second nicest place we’ve ever slept…better than our Sleep Number air mattress and way better than a standard spring and foam mattress. The nightstands and headboard are from the same set in the local furniture store and the lamps look like Royal Palms…again very Florida looking…we got 3 of them at Bed Bath and Beyond…two for the bedroom and the third for the chair between our new Lazy Boy recliners.

This rattan bench will go behind the table between the recliners and sorta behind and in between the recliners. We had one like this in our house in Fairfax and it is the best option we’ve ever had for storing laptops and iPads.

A better image of Ragnar…he/she is about a 6 or 7 footer I reckon.

Tom…our neighbor two doors down and the self declared “Mayor of Long Pond” since he was the first one living on the street…gave us this patio furniture. Still in great shape and that’s 500 bucks we don’t need to spend right away.

We saw this bamboo sailboat art in the Lazy Boy store and all agreed that we needed to have it.

Let’s see…what else is new?

Father Tom who has been the pastor at our local St. Therese parish ever since we started going there retired this past weekend so we went to a dinner honoring him at the Herons Glen country club (the next housing development north of Magnolia Landing) last week. His replacement Father Jan arrived this week and I guess we’ll meet him next Sunday.

We went to Sarasota for an orchestra concert yesterday and have another one on Thursday…we didn’t like one of the concerts in the Masterworks series we get season tickets for so utilized their ticket swap process to get evening tickets to a Beethoven Eroica Symphony #3 this week. We normally go on Sunday afternoons so we don’t get home so late…by the time we get out of the concert hall parking and drive back to Seminole it will be midnight. We did that the first two years we were season ticket holders but switched to Sunday afternoons as just a better idea all ‘round.

We have tickets to the Valentines Day soiree on the 8th…it’s a week before the holiday but I’m not responsible for the scheduling.

OK, on to interesting stuff found on the net.

This mathematical formula is correct.

Definitely not PC…but funny nonetheless.

And a few more winter related ones for those readers who are stuck up in the cold northlands…which by Neil’s definition is (a) anyplace where there is ever non liquid water falling from the sky and/or (b) anyplace where the low overnight temperature starts with a number lower than 5.

Cyas.