A few seconds ago I emailed our agent all the forms needed to officially list our house in Florida and put it on the market. Doing so makes me sad.

I am not unhappy to be here at this job. It is so much better than the last one that there is no comparison at all. I am not even unhappy to be out of Florida. It isn’t a bad place by any means (although Brandy may differ) but I am not attached to the state or even the town. But I am very sad to leave the HOUSE. It felt like home, and it was something I was proud of and enjoyed. It had enough space for the three of us to spread out and still feel comfortable. And I love the lanai and the pool, although we didn’t get to use it enough cause by the time the screen was up, I was practically on my way here. I loved the layout and the tile floors. I just liked how it all fit together. It just felt like a home. It felt like a place I could be in for many many years. It felt like a place that could be a place to settle down, not just a place to be for a little while. But it was just not to be.

And here, we’re going to be in a dinky little apartment for the short term, in a slightly better and larger apartment for the medium term, and then who knows how long it will be before we buy again, and even then it is most likely going to be smaller and not quite as nice. (Unless something unexpected happens, which could always happen, you never know…) Not saying we won’t be able to get something that is OK and nice in its own way, but it will not match the place in Florida. The economic realities of real estate in the two places are just that way.

I may or may not even be able to go back to visit it one last time. That is up in the air. I may have seen it for the last time and not even known it at the time. Sigh.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually do like the Seattle area a lot. In many ways I like it more than I liked Florida. And I like the job. And there is absolutely no question that this was the right choice and the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, not just by a little bit, but by a lot. Overall, when all things are considered, in all other aspects of life other than abode, we will be so very much better off here than there…

But that doesn’t keep me from being very sad and mourning the loss of my house.

(And yes, I felt the same way about the house in Pennsylvania… I loved that house and still miss it too, although I think I feel this one more strongly.)

The market has slowed to a crawl in Florida though. It may take us longer than we would like to sell it, and we won’t make as much as we had once hoped. We would have put it on the market a couple months ago, but there was some work on the house that HAD to be done first, and it wasn’t like we were vacating before June anyway.

We’ll see how it goes, hopeully it will sell in one or two months, not five or six months. But you never know. The days of selling in a few days are long gone though. And until the day it sells, we’re still paying the mortgage, even if we are not there, and that paying for double housing thing makes everything very tight.

Oh well, one way or another it will work out.

And in the end, this is a better place for us than Florida ever was.

Got a call earlier today from Sue Schwer, who had been my boss at the financial company which shall not be named from about 1998 to 2000 or so. Turns out that in addition to her turn to the real estate world, more recently she has opened an online store selling Yoga supplies. It is linked above. I don’t do the yoga thing myself (although Rebecca has told me in the past that perhaps I should) so I can’t make any sort of educated comment on the inventory.

But it sounds like Sue has a good start on her new venture, and I wish her well!

And it is good to catch up with the folks from back then every once in awhile. I guess it was only six years ago, but it seems like many lifetimes ago already.

Yesterday at lunch I ran a little errand. I went and dropped off the check for our deposit for Amy’s school next year. We had applied to six. One was eliminated when we visited because they were a bunch of Jesus freaks. Another was eliminated simply because we never managed to schedule an onsite visit with them and they were not very proactive about anything. Another was eliminated because it was just a little too noisy and urban for us. That left three. They were about equal on our list at the time we saw them, although after visiting both of them, Amy started leaning more and more toward the second one. The two were Forrest Ridge and Eastside Prep. As mentioned, at the moment we walked out of the door after having been to five of the six schools, these were the top two. The third choice was The Bush School.

We got notice from Forest Ridge first. They would like to have Amy as a student… but… they had no spaces left at the moment, but they would put us on a waiting list. We were glad to be in, but I was anxious about the waiting list. I wanted to hurry up and call to find out if we were 2nd in line, or 50th… ie, is there any chance of actually making it off the waiting list this year. Brandy wanted to wait to hear from the other schools.

Next we heard from the Bush school. They would not be offering Amy a spot next year. They had seemed very positive during our visit, but I guess that is the way things go.

Finally we heard from Eastside Prep. Mind you, Eastside Prep was the last school we visited. They sent us their answer just a few days after we visited. It was a yes!

At that point, Brandy (and especially Amy’s) mind was completely made up. Amy went around school announcing to everyone that she would be going to a school called Eastside Prep next year and telling all her classmates about the kids she met while visiting the school and some of the things about the school.

I was still holding out to see if we happened to hear from Forrest Ridge again before our deadline for giving Eastside Prep an answer. We did not. Which might be good. If we had gotten that call from Forrest Ridge, it might have been a hard decision. Forrest Ridge has a lot going for it. It is pretty big. It is very established. It is connected with a network of schools internationally that allow for easy exchange programs in high school. It has very deep resources. On the other hand, it is a religious school, which is a major turn off for me personally… I’d come to peace with that however, because unliek the Jesus school we visited, they are very open minded about it. You have to learn a bit about Cathoilic beliefs, but you are not required to actually believe. They have students of all sorts of different belief stripes. The whole having to take classes about a random imaginary diety and his supposed acts was bothersome, but I’d come to terms with it once balanced with all the other good things at that school.

But while I was still thinking of two places and their pros and cons, the decision had clearly already been made by Amy anyway. She was VERY excited about Eastside Prep and had told Brandy very early on that of all the places we visited she had been most comfortable and felt most like she fit in there.

And I’d been very impressed by them too. In my mind I may have still had a tie, but it was definately still a tie and a hard choice (if a spot had opened up).

Lets see:

Eastside Prep is a very new school. They have not yet graduated their first Senior class. (The first graduating class will be the class of 2009. Amy will be the class of 2013.) It is brand new. The students and faculty who “founded” the school are for the most part still there. On the one hand, this made me nervous. What, no track record? But on the other hand with everybody we talked to there there was a palpable feeling of excitement, and not just excitement but PRIDE. Pride in what they had built over the last few years, and prinde in what they were indeed still building. These were not just people who were hired to teach and go home at night. These were people dedicated to buidling something. Building something new and something good. And that was something you could just feel walking around. That isn’t to say that you couldn’t tell in the other places we visited that people liked where they were and what they were doing and were proud of their schools… but this just had a qualitative difference. It was a sense of direct ownership. I liked that a lot. When Brandy and I walked out the door, leaving Amy to spend the day at classes, that was absolutely the first thing I said. “Did you see how excited and proud they are about what they are doing?”

It is also a small school. Between that and the newness that means they don’t have all the things some of the bigger places have in terms of fully established clubs and activities and all that sort of thing. But at a student body for the whole school of less than 100 kids, and only about 15 per grade… it means there will be a LOT of individual attention, and there will be no “slipping through the cracks” or getting bored because the class is moving to slow, or whatever. This is exactly the kind of environment Amy needs to thrive.

While small, they are clearly growing and building. You can see the newness. You can see that there is new “stuff” coming all the time. The day we visited they announced that they had just acquired more buildings to make their current location a “perminant home”.

There is not a required number of hours per quarter or whatnot that parents have to volunteer. However it was also clear that parental involvement is very welcome and families are VERY involved in the school and its growth. That is exciting as well.

They talk about how they are using new and innovative techniques. At first, that sounds scary. What kind of freaky new-age stuff will they be doing with my child?? But what it seems to be is things like being heavily project based and interdisciplinary. What you do in English class ties in to what you do in Science and History. And as well as the usual homework and classwork, the number of longer term projects, both individual and group based, are perhaps more frequent and more prominant than in some other programs. Also, each grade in each year has an overarching question that provides a theme for the year. Everything for that year is tuned to provide different avenues and insights into that question, approaching it from many different directions. There is a lot of “learning to think and explore” here as well as learning the specific topics you are supposed to learn in each grade (Although of course you also get that.)

Oh, and of course they use USB thumb drives to hold much of their coursework rather than lugging a backpack full of textbooks, which is cool. Lots of other uses of technology where it makes sense too. It is a Windows campus unfortunately. (What can you do being only a few miles from Microsoft headquarters?) But that is OK. You’re allowed to use Macs, they just don’t have the resources to offically support them. :-) And then in the high school years, you are required to use a Tablet PC. But that is years away.

They were also very engaged and personable with us. A couple of the other schools actually got Amy’s name wrong at one point and got us confused with another family… etc. Some of them it definately felt like we were being stepped through an exact and defined procedure… ask them these questions… show them this stuff… tell them these things… then say goodbye. All friendly of course, but scripted. Eastside Prep was much less formal, much more engaged with our specific situation, and just generally felt more welcoming.

All in all we are very excited about Eastside Prep. And Amy is THRILLED. I think this will be a very good place for her. This is a very big decision. There is a lot of money involved. (Although Eastside Prep also is helping with some generous financial aid this first year when I am doing the whole pay for two houses thing for most of the year, which completely depletes resources… next year we shouldn’t need the aid I hope.) And it is just plain a big life decision. If the school goes well and if (cross fingers) my current job goes well (or at least I stay in Seattle) then this is a place that is going to be a huge part of Amy’s life for the next SEVEN YEARS. And her experiences there will very strongly affect the kind of adult she grows into and how her life will evolve through her teenage years, into college, and then into adulthood. It is a HUGE decision. If we make the wrong call, it will have consequences for many years to come. I think we are making the right decision, but it is still quite a big thing!

And we almost didn’t get to visit Eastside Prep. Brandy had initially asked if we could visit them during Amy’s spring break at the end of March. They had tentatively said yes. Then all the OTHER schools said they could not wait that long, and could we come earlier. We scrambled and set up an earlier time for Brandy and Amy to come to Seattle in early MArch rather than late March. All the appointments were set up with four of the other five schools. (The one that we didn’t get an appointment for… we’d already done a phone interview… is the one we never visited or heard back from.) We sent a note to Eastside prep saying we were going to be there earlier than expected and could we possibly come for the day visit in early March instead.

We did the vist and saw the four schools. We had not heard back from Eastside prep. We got an email from them just a few hours before Brandy and Amy were due to fly back to Florida confirming a date and time for the LATE MARCH time frame we’d asked them about first. At that point it would have been too late for a day visit with them in the first trip anyway, and we’d been fairly booked. But a round trip for both Amy and Brandy is expensive. And as this was in the Spring Break timeframe, it was more so than usual. And to get flights that were still open and allowed enough time in case there were delays, Amy had to miss more school again. It would cost us almost $1000 to make a second trip back to Seattle for the two of them, and with the whole house plus apartment thing going on at the moment, things are very very tight. There was discussion of not making the second trip. We were not even sure if we COULD finance the trip even if we wanted to… In the end though, we figured out how to squeeze it in… barely. So Brandy and Amy came out again for Spring Break… not just for the day of the school visit, but also for a full week. Which was very nice.

But I am VERY glad that we were able to arrange that second trip. After visiting the school we walked out with it a tie with Forrest Ridge. And as mentioned, within days with Amy and Brandy that had evolved into a #1 spot although I was still on the fence a bit. After leaving Forest Ridge Amy was very excited about that school (alone of the four we visited, although some others were “OK”.) Over the couple days after we visited Eastside Prep, her attention and interest had very much shifted to Eastside Prep. She really liked it there. If we had not had a chance to visit, we might not have gotten in, and if we did get in, although we might have eneded up with the same decision, our feelings about it would be a lot less clear. Visiting was crucial. I am so glad we did.

So… back to the beginning… I dropped off the deposit check yesterday. This acts as a downpayment of sorts. We start paying monthly when school actually starts next Fall. I handed the check to the same person who had interviewed Brandy and I during our day visit. They seemed very glad to have us. Brandy mailed the paperwork and contracts from Florida several days earlier. Our spot is reserved. We are going to Eastside Prep. And we are very excited.

You need to put in a zipcode, a year, and a gender (not necessarily related to yourself of course) to view the article, which is annoying… but my Google News alert on my mom just popped…

Birthday Celebrated by Church
(D. L. Stephenson, The Republican)

Initially, Second Congregational rented space in what was then called Whitman Hall, located on the corner of Elm Street. In 1860, a church building was erected on Main Street, where worship services were held for more than 100 years.

Having grown too large for that structure, the church erected another building on Western Avenue in 1962, where it continues to serve about 230 active members, said the Rev. Ruth M. Brandon, the church’s pastor.

Congrats to my mom and her church!

Since Brandy never did, I figured I’d go ahead and post about her car. Well, one of them. You see, Brandy has a Nissan that she drives every day (and hates). But in the garage she keeps and only very rarely drives, a Buick Reatta, which she loves. There were less than 22 thousand of them ever made, and it is getting to be a decently old car. (And hers was one of the ones with the touchscreen computer, of which they made less than 12 thousand.) The resale price of these cars has bottomed out and is actually starting to go up again as they start becoming collectables. Brandy hopes to keep it until someday we are actually able to do a full restoration and make it a nice classic car. (Something I wish I could have done with my 1976 Dodge Colt, but alas, it is long gone…)

Since we moved to the Palm Bay house, the Reatta never left the garage. It needed a new battery, some repairs to one of the seats, and some other things. Last month it was time. Brandy took the Reatta to the local Buick dealer. They did the work they were supposed to do. Then they called her and said it was ready to pick up. She said she would pick it up the enxt day. The next morning, before she came in, she got another call from the Buick dealer. Overnight her car had been broken into in the dealer’s parking lot. The lock was smashed and removed and then inside the car whoever it was had completely ripped apart the center console. Lovely.

The first call to the insurance company… Insurance company felt this was all the dealer’s fault and they should pay everything… however, they said that if a claim was made, they would most likely just declare the car totaled due to the age and the fact that replacement parts are no longer made and are in many cases very hard to find (particularly for that center console). This was very upsetting. Losing the car was not desired. Brandy had carted this thing around for many many years and was very attached to it. At first the dealer said they absolutely would not be responsible. (Oh, and by the way, there were not even any security cameras pointing at the lot… what’s up with that?) A few calls up the management chain though fixed that and they decided they would after all handle the repairs due to the break in. Well… as best they could… they couldn’t replace anything for which no replacement parts were available.

So, next question… was there anything missing? The pattern of the break in matched someone scrounging for parts, not someone looking to steal the car itself, or grabbing valuables from inside the car. When they did the complete examination though, nothing was missing. The biggest difficulty was the center console though. It was pretty beat up and torn, but that is one of the parts that there are no replacments for absent scrounging through junkyards and such.

In the end though, they were able to patch it up relatively well, replace the lock, etc.

Brandy picked up the car on Friday. The immediate things needed for it to be drivaable are all done. A bunch more would still need to happen to do the whole full resoration thing, but that wasn’t the goal quite yet. We just wanted it out of the garage and ready to drive and such. The Nissan will not be coming to the West Coast, only the Buick will be. The center console is a little worse from the experience, but not as bad as it initially looked and the lock and such has been replaced properly, and the intial things Brandy had taken the car in for in the first place are also all done.

And so yet another adventure on the way to the move…

Fun.