Week starting 29th September – A new month and more unpacking
At long last we are starting to have a bit of time to catch up with life as we don’t have a million appointments, bureaucrats and hassles to sort out. The biggest outstanding job is going through the dozens and dozens of anonymously labelled shipping boxes. We are trying to be methodical, keeping a record on each box’s contents before we consign the contents to the basement. The storage room down there is fairly full, so we have to store things along the sides of the garage, We are so nearly finished upstairs – now the process gets reversed as the boxes in the storage room can be examined to find the mysteriously missing items (Lisa is convinced that there is nutmeg and other spices somewhere there, and our everyday china is strangely incomplete – plates but no bowls). A lot of stuff we brought with us is heading for the local charities – luckily there is a clothes recycling bin a couple of miles down the road.
The first draft of revised plans for the downstairs in the new house arrived, rapidly followed by a second version. Lisa and I (well, mainly Lisa) have been busy redrafting the plan to closer to what we want, and Bill has then run his experienced builder’s eye over our version. With his approval, they have gone back to Garrell Associates for (we hope) the final definitive version. There’s not been much progress on site this week, as the concrete footings cure. Next week, the basement walls will be constructed using wooden shuttering and poured concrete.
I have been asked what the area we have moved to is like. “North Georgia Mountains” doesn’t really give much of an impression. So here are a couple of photos to give a flavour. This area is the Southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretch a further 1,500 miles North. Around here, they are not mountains like the Alps with sharp pointed rocks scraping the sky. The mountains are more rounded, and very heavily wooded all the way up to the crest of the ridges. There is a mixture of deciduous hardwoods and American pines, and very little exposed rock and cliffs. The forests continue down to lower ground, meaning that often the mountain views are invisible due to all the trees immediately in front. The vegetation on the mountains transpires, releasing water vapour in the mornings and especially after rain to give a blue-grey haze like the smoke of countless campfires. No wonder parts of the Appalachians have names like Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains.
Next week, we are off on a lamb hunt (to visit a shop selling local reared meat, not going out to kill sheep ourself), keeping our fingers crossed for the Atlanta Braves in the Division Series for baseball’s National League (currently 1-1 in a 5 game series against the Los Angeles Dodgers) and I will provide a bit of a description of exactly where we are living. And, of course, progress reports on housebuilding.
