Life goes on

. As it always does. With hiccups. We are solidly in the new house. The garage is slowly losing its load of cardboard boxes but it is quickly becoming apparent that we moved here with far too many 'things' and we may have to refill some of those boxes. For instance; our new kitchen is a delight to look at with roll out shelves in the cupboards and large drawers beneath the range and the oven...but they don't hold as many pots and pans as we own. Something has to give. We are going to have to simplify our kitchen; get back to the basics and let the thrift store benefit. It's the same story in each room. We moved without a real plan as to where we were going to put all of our stuff. When you are house hunting, do you really take along a tape measure and a folder listing all of your possessions and their sizes? I didn't think so...and neither did we.
Back to the kitchen; we do have a gas range for the first time in many years and I'm loving it! But gas ranges do have some drawbacks, one of them being the electronic ignition. I'm from the generation that used a pilot light to light the burners and it was a silent and efficient method. The other day I turned on a burner to heat the water for vegetables and although I heard the clicking of the ignition for a second, I turned the control knob right past it and settled it on 'Low' without looking to see if it had lit the burner. Noise equals ignition in my mind. A few minutes later, closer to five minutes, my wife noted the gas odor. Lucky for us!.A quick airing out and the cooking resumed with a lesson learned.
We finally straightened out all of our phone problems and our DSL service was allowing for uninterrupted streaming of movies from Netflix and Amazon. The internet was spread all through the house...except on my computer. Well, the computer guy left with my PC yesterday and will attempt to cure it. It needs a new hard drive and it will be upgraded to the Windows 7 OS. He sold us on buying a three user license for the Windows 7 so that all of our computers will be upgraded at the same time. And we will have to learn something new...and that's good!
In the meantime, I'm stuck with a (reliable) netbook with a tiny keyboard. I have backspaced and deleted two dozen times so far in his post. But it does connect to the internet.
All of the irritations I just mentioned fade to nothing when I compare them to the joy we feel at being at home in this small city. A small city with a University and all of the attendant benefits that it brings. I can drive to the Art Center. I can go and have coffee with my middle daughter. I can visit my eldest daughter at her nursery and gift shop. We can see our grandchildren more often...well, some of them. The others live not too far away, up in the mountains of Lassen County.  There are so many benefits to this move of ours! We've done 'country' and now we're city folks. Again.