Week starting 3rd November – Filling the house and two sorts of Meetings
Autumn is moving rapidly towards winter in North Georgia. The temperature is falling to near freezing temperatures some nights, though it is not consistent – short sleeves are fine some days. The long range forecast even predicts snow next Wednesday. The leaves are falling fast, and the roadway outside has become covered in pine needles. The UPS delivery man was quite concerned that if there was a rainfall, the steeply sloping road could become so slippery as to be impassable. So I was out clearing it away with our leaf blower. Being a good Samaritan, I cleared all the roadway for our elderly English neighbours and Kathy down the bottom of the hill, too. The pine straw will be useful as mulch for the flower bed in the front of the house.
Back on the building site, Kim and Tony have been hard at work with their heavy earthmoving equipment. As well as filling up the space between walls which will serve as the lower ground floor slab and other raised surfaces, they have been generally flattening the space around the house and further afield, removing unwanted vegetation and cutting a pathway to the nearby power lines. A temporary overhead connection will be installed soon to provide electricity to the building site. Bill and his team have also been busy building a substantial storage hut close to the main road. This will initially be a secure garage for the utility vehicle, and later serve as a bear-resistant store to keep our garbage cans. The Polaris Ranger was supposed to be delivered on Friday, but the dealer failed to deliver as promised, and we are looking at next Wednesday now for that. Meanwhile, Mike Garrell (the architect) has agreed that we do require revised side elevation views of the house (in addition to a plan view) reflecting the changes to the lower floor, and has these in hand.
On Wednesday we had an expedition down towards Atlanta. The main reason was to attend an evening function where our friend Allison was being honoured as one of the ten “savvy and successful North Atlanta women of the year”. It was organised as a charity fundraiser, and the first occasion calling for a jacket and tie since we arrived in Georgia. Allison received a large framed copy of the magazine article about the savvy successful women, whilst we came away with a goodie bag of samples, pens and brochures from the commercial sponsors. We will be entertaining her and David for a post-Thanksgiving dinner at the end of the month. We took advantage of the trip to open yet another bank account – this one is not for the build, it is for the estate of my cousin June who died last year – I am executor of her estate here in USA, a long drawn out business. And Lisa got an early Christmas present, a new iPad Air.
Thursday was another meeting day. Regular readers will remember concerns at the Halloween party about proposals to move a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre into a property close to our new home. We have been doing quite a lot of digging for information – this is not something we really want. At very short notice, the promoters of the proposal organised a meeting to present their plans and, I assume, attempt to defuse local protests (or at least be able to claim that they have reached out to us). Their plan requires a significant change in the land use zoning of the site – this will be discussed next week at the county planning committee. We and five other neighbours attended, outnumbered three to one by the promoters and their supporters (I assume they all had a little more notice of the meeting). I cannot say that there was a meeting of minds, and was personally annoyed by the holier than thou attitudes of some of the scheme supporters. We have registered our formal protests to the country planning office, and will be going to the planning meeting on Tuesday. And there were we, thinking coming to Georgia would take Lisa away from all the planning disputes in Ealing!
Lisa and I have made our plans for Christmas, and have booked a few nights in a hotel down in Savannah. That was where we went in December 1998, sixteen years ago, just after our wedding at Stone Mountain, Atlanta. So much for those who said it would never stick.
Come back next week and read about :
. Rough plumbing – burying pipes for plumbing in and out before the lower cement floor is poured.
. Wednesday – will it really snow, and will our utility vehicle finally arrive?
. What happened at the county planning committee meeting to the proposal for a drug & alcohol rehab centre
. Meeting some new folk.