The Zereps

OK. I’ve uploaded the pictures from yesterday this morning.. These are from our drive from Richmond, IN to St. Louis, MO (that’s the skyline you see in some of the pictures.) (EDIT: nevermind.. I take that back.. that’s not St. Louis–it’s actually Indianapolis, IN. hehe.) I haven’t written captions for them yet, but check back later as I’ll probably be editing them on the road since we’re in a hurry to get out of the hotel this morning. Today we’re going to Salina, KS (a town west of Kansas City) which will take us half-way between where we are now and our final destination.

Click here to get to the photos.

OK.. OK.. so today is day three–I know. But yesterday, we couldn’t connect to the hotel’s wireless network and I only had dial-up speed on the Verizon wireless card. But without Further ado, I present to you  ::dun, dun dun:: Day Two Road-trip Pictures

We have plenty of pictures of our super-duper trip mascot–bringing us the powers of the ‘Freezepeach‘ from whence he came; also, the obligatory shots of Jabba in the car, some of us driving, some of the road, and a couple of the hotel we stayed at. We’d take pictures of other things, but so far on this trip we haven’t had time to stop and do anything touristy… maybe I’ll track down a Geocache or two on the way to Boulder. Three days down, two go to. I’ll try to get today’s pictures uploaded very soon….

We’re on I-70 heading west towards St. Louis, MO. Candice is driving (she usually does about 2/3rds of the driving on these trips because she likes to drive more than I do–plus if I’m driving, how am I supposed to blog or check my email? 😉 ) I just realized we’ve been on the road for 3 days now and Candice has done all the blogging!

We’ll if you’ve been reading our blog in the last week or so, you should have figured out that we bought a house in Longmont, CO. Candice flew out there in November after scouring the internet listings for houses that fit in our budget and looked like something that we’d like to live in. Another qualification that Candice had was that it had to have a pretty good-sized backyard. The picture that Candice posted the other day was supposed to be a ‘teaser.’ 😉 It was fall, so the grass was turning brown and the trees had lost their leaves. We’ll post some more pictures of the inside and the backyard soon. It’s probably covered in snow by this point, though, so even we don’t know what it’s going to look like when we get there. Many thanks to my brother, Marc, for telling us about ACORN Housing and helping answer all of our frequent and numerous questions!

My company has an office in Boulder, CO, which is about a 30 minute drive from Longmont. All of the development team/systems guys are out there in that office, so I should fit right in. In the past 3 months or so, they got a new ‘lodge’ office, so there should be plenty of room for me (the previous office was a little cramped because they started with 2 people and are now up to 7.) I met most of them when I first started working when they flew me out for training, but there are a couple guys I haven’t met yet; even so, I talk with most of them on almost a daily basis through Skype and email.

More to come soon…

just to let everybody into the loop, eric and i bought the house shown in the picture 2 entries ago. thursday was the closing day, when it officially became ours!

we were trying to keep everything kinda confined to our families and on the hush-hush, in case things didn’t pan out, but now it’s official, we’re homeowners! and last month, when i was driving that crazy suv out in colorado, that was me house hunting.

i had spent hours and hours and hours and hours pouring over all the MLS listings for the area and i was able to narrow down the search and schedule appointments to see the ones we’d actually consider buying. we made an offer as soon as i got home, and viola! after some really hard hustling we closed a few days shy of a month. 🙂

the house is 3 bedrooms, 1.75 baths, a partially finished basement, 2-car garage, and (counting the basement) comes in at around 1800 ft. which is the perfect size for us–not too big, not too small! i will post pictures of the inside later…we’ll see what happens. it also has a nice sized backyard for jabbajuice to romp around in and views of the mountains from both the upstairs bedrooms. the flowerbox outfront holds a nice little treat for me…ornamental cabbages!!! i LOVE green and purple ornamental cabbages so much it’s crazy. but the cabbages didn’t make us buy the house, needless to say. 😉

i’m sure eric will post about the house, too, btw…..

the road is calling so…….on the road again, dur dur dur dum….just can’t wait to be on the road again, dur dur dur dum…

we did it! this morning we walked out of our empty and echo-ey ny apartment and into a 4wd ford escape and drove out of ny state.

our current location is in harrisville, pa, and our current state is TIRED!!! forgive me for not putting photos on the blog itself, but you can find day one’s album here over in our gallery.

after eating baked potatoes and salads from arby’s (bleh yuck), we’re ready for bed. tomorrow we’re hoping to hit a grocery store because we need food and beverages besides water (and *yes* mom, we’re getting enough water every day :)).

i had my doubts about the rental car when eric called me from the hertz location in manhattan, but it’s a pretty nice little car. sucks gas like a mother-fudger, but handy. and *yes* everything works on it, and the tires are new. 😉
we can’t wait to get to boulder to see our new house, well, new to us anyway. jabba is excited about the yard. hopefully there will be a bit of powder in it, he LOVES powder snow so much it’s insane!

anyhoo..goodnight! hopefully we’ll have better internet coverage tomorrow!

Well… it’s that time again… packing time!  We’ve been up to our ears in alligators lately finishing up last minute things for our move to Colorado–canceling utilities, cleaning the house, ‘showing’ the house to new potential tenants, selling all of our furniture on craigslist, packing all of our personal belongings into boxes, and all that other fun stuff that goes along with moving to a different state.

We’ve lived on the west coasts… we’ve lived north of the border… we’ve lived on the east coast… and now it’s time to settle down in the midwest, so here’s hoping we like it out there enough to stay longer than a year or two.

Once again, we’re going to be driving cross-country in a rental car. But since it’s winter, we’re not taking any chances; we’re paying extra to rent a 4WD vehicle from Hertz, which I will be picking up this afternoon. We’re also going to stock the car up with tons of food and water, a camp stove, blankets, a portable air-compressor/battery jumpstart, multiple flashlights, kitty litter (yes, that’s right–for extra traction in the snow,) 2 laptops, and all sorts of other goodies. We’ll have 3 cell phones with us and a plethora of other wireless technologies to aid us on our trip.
My company was generous to let me borrow one of their Verizon BroadbandAccess air cards, so we should have high-speed wireless internet in the car whenever we’re near a populous area, and at least dial-up speed for the remainder of the journey. Like our last big haul, you can expect daily updates from as as to what we’ve been up to that day, with plenty of pictures AND I’m going to be signing up or a service called Perdiemco that is going to upload (in almost real-time) coordinates from our in-car GPS system that will allow select people to track our journey online as we go along using the site’s web-based google maps API tracking system (so you’ll always know exactly where we are!) Email me if you want the password, and as soon as I hook that up I’ll send the information to you. We’re traveling on major highways the whole way out there, so we should have at least some sort of internet coverage the whole way, so the trip-tracker should be pretty continuous.
That’s all for now… today’s going to be a hectic day, so we probably wont update again until we’re somewhere on the road.. see you then!

Ahh…Thanksgiving. Even though Christmas may be a ‘bigger’ holiday and is still to come, there’s just something really nice about a holiday that is always on a Thursday and working for a company that’s generous enough to allow it’s employees to take the day after it off. Christmas falls on a Monday this year, though, so that amounts to a 3-day weekend, but I think I’m going to take some vacation days before Christmas to extend that out a little longer.

As most of you know, Candice and I are moving to Colorado very soon. This is good in some ways and bad in others, but one thing we’ve learned living here is that New York is an excellent place to live/work/play if you have money to spend, but an ‘ok’ place to live otherwise–basically we enjoy ourselves more when we have more cash to burn through (and trust me there are plenty of things to spend money on here,) but when the money runs low, so do the good times unfortunately. And for us, the ‘bad’ outweighs the ‘good’ at this point in time as far as New York City is concerned, and hence our upcoming move to CO. Perhaps one day we will be back, but probably not for a few years.

Since there is so much stuff to do here (and yes, there are quite a few free or cheap things to do,) I thought it was about time to fit in some extra ‘touristy’ activities in before the big move. I created an album, which you can access here, that has all the pictures that I took today (unfortunately, Candice took our nice camera, so I had to suffice with the camera on my phone.)

Some of the stuff I saw/did today included:

–Geocaching/Walking around on Roosevelt Island

-Visited Grant’s Tomb

-Walked through parts of Columbia University

-Took pictures of Tom’s Restaurant (ya know, from Seinfield!)

Here are some of the photo highlights of my day: