Yeah, it's been a while

Sure, it's been a year and a half since my last post, but who really cares?  No one reads this anyway.  But I'll share/update anyway.

We moved about 5 months ago.  It's a nice house on a golf course (which isn't all it's cracked up to be, by the way).  Our old house was on the market for 10 months, 10 agonizing months.  We had hoped to build in Byron Center in a great community, but those plans fell through when our house didn't sell, and didn't sell, and didn't sell.  When we finally got and accepted an offer, we had to scramble to find something.  I knew this was the house when we walked in.  The floor plan works great for us, and there wasn't much hesitation for me.  I wanted this house.  It had been on the market for 2 days when we first saw it, and we made an offer just a few days later.

Then shit started happening.  It's a  long, frustrating list, which includes (as just a few examples): the water heater at the old place broke before closing, so we had to replace it.  The master bath at the new house had a crack in the bathtub that was actually leaking into the garage (and the owners claimed it was just a cosmetic scratch).  The furnace broke at the new place 2 weeks after we moved in and needed replacing.  The contractors we hired to redo part of the master bath and finish part of the basement ....well, that's another story.  Let's just say it was a really bad experience that lasted 4.5 months (rather than about 3 weeks).

But, the master bath is now gorgeous, and the basement will be getting carpet very soon and will be a lovely room for us to hang out in.  I'm very excited about this.  It will be so nice to feel like everything is complete and finally start REALLY LIVING in this house.

I have a good-sized office, which is a disaster area at the moment.  I'm still trying to figure out the best places for stuff, but this is a process that I almost enjoy.  I'm really going to make this a great, functional space.

We're attempting to build a darkroom in the basement so that I can pursue my photography hobby.  I love being in a darkroom and just making the best print I can from a negative.  For me, it's fairly relaxing (without being boring), and I have a real, actual product at the end.  This is actually an important thing for me.  Though I love to read, there's no product at the end, so I sometimes find it hard to justify (to myself) my reading time.  There are also time-wasting computer and phone games, which, again, definitely don't produce a product at the end.  With darkroom photography though, I get a beautiful (if I'm lucky) print at the end.

There's more, but that will have to suffice for now.  Or for a year.  Who knows?