Our basement is slowly taking shape. The walls are roughed in and there is insulation in the exterior walls. Most of the plumbing and electrical has also been completed. We were told today that they would be painting next week.
Month: October 2010
Renovations
As some of you know, we decided to renovate our basement. The space down there wasn’t as functional as it could be–you had to walk through three rooms to get to the back corner–and it certainly wasn’t pretty or comfortable. After getting several contractors to quote us on the job, we decided to move ahead with the project. We were told, originally, that work wouldn’t begin until after Christmas, but then our contractor informed us, on the day before we left for Alberta for Thanksgiving, that he would like to start work on the day after we got back from our trip. This sent us into a bit of a scramble, since we hadn’t done any organizing of our things in the basement since we moved back. We were able to push the start-date back a day, giving us a day to move our things into our garage before demolition started. Here is the basement just before the start of demolition.
Here is how it looked after about 80 percent of the demolition was completed.
Thanksgiving Trip to Calgary
So we decided that, since we hadn’t celebrated Thanksgiving with our Manitoba families for five years now, they wouldn’t miss us if we made it six. We took a short road trip to Calgary to try to reciprocate for all those years that Aunt I made the trip to Massachusetts to celebrate Thanksgiving with us there.
Being Nostalgic
So we’ve been back in Manitoba now for about three and a half months. It’s been (mostly) great–I say “mostly,” because it’s been difficult (so far) for me to be productive on my dissertation. However, it’s also been long enough to begin to miss some things about our lives in Massachusetts.
For one, we’re already missing the fall and winter seasons in Massachusetts. Not that anyone particularly enjoys winter, even Massachusetts winters, but the winters there were exponentially more endurable than they are here. It’s not winter here yet, but the colder days have been enough to make us dread the upcoming winter. And even though the fall season is pretty here, it’s more pretty and longer in Massachusetts.
I’ve also missed my running route. Part of my running route here is Wellington Crescent which, don’t get me wrong, is nice, but the route also requires me to run a significant amount on streets and sidewalks. In Northampton, I had a nicely reclaimed rail line I could run. There were mature trees along the sides and most of it was a significant distance away from busy streets and car traffic.
There is also just a sense of loss, knowing that we will probably never again live where our children were born and, in L’s case, spent the first few years of his life. I, and I’m sure Pam does too, have a lot of fond memories of our time there, and we may never again be able to spend significant time where those memories were formed. That makes me sad. Oh well, as the cliche goes, you can’t have everything.