Well, it’s that time of the year again and time for our family trek to get a Christmas tree. For a long time, we had been buying directly from one of the growers in the NC mountains at one of their stand in Greenville. Last year, we found a different grower in the Raleigh area and they also had a nice collection of trees and we got a free live wreath as well. We were worried it might not be there this year as they are putting up some medical offices in that space, but luckily it was still there this year (they will probably have to find a new location next year though). So, below is our customary photo standing in front of the tree we chose and the another one looking through the front window of the house to see it all lit up. You can also just barely see Sam’s little tree in his room above the garage. We’ll try to send more house photos at Christmas.
Ok, it’s been about 18 months since our last post… I guess time does fly when you are having fun? We really haven’t been too busy over the last 18 months – it’s kind of been a slow news cycle as they say. So, there is really not a lot to get caught up on but we will list a few things that have happened and add a few photos later.
After the last post in January 2022, we all recovered from the holiday rush at work and we started working on the Greenville house in earnest. Fixing, painting, refinishing wood floors throughout the house, cleaning, more painting and then finally decluttering (Hint: renting a shed and throwing all the crap that we didn’t need in there 😃). If you would like to see some after photos you can visit the zillow site: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/319-Scottish-Ct-Greenville-NC-27858/51413132_zpid/?view=public
During the floor refinishing – Dad dropped an angle grinder (w/sanding pad) on his leg. Of course, he was only wearing shorts at that time… 🤦🏻♂️. So, after a lot of blood and yelling and a pound of gauze bandage with a few days rest, he was fine. Everything healed nicely and only a couple of scars are still there.
Finally, in May of 2022 we listed the house in Greenville and had 2 offers within 3 days. We finally settled on an all cash offer and started seriously looking for a house in the Raleigh area. Luckily we had one of Dad’s friends helping us buy in Raleigh and he helped us find and negotiate a great price on a new house.
Since there wasn’t a lot of driveway space in the new house we sold the Yellow Freelander (2003). Dad and Sam(?) were a little upset as they really liked the car, but nobody else was very concerned.
Sam finished school at PCCC in June 2022 with a Associate Degree in Welding and several certificates under his belt. He took the next year off to help us move and get settled. Sam hasn’t looked for a welding job yet, because he feels he is out of practice, but he found a place in Raleigh that rents out work spaces and he might give that a try. In the mean time, he has been working PT at Harris Teeter for several months and seems to enjoy it. He also has done a great job banking some money.
Alex, started back in school and should finish up for his 2nd Associate degree in May. His first was in Health Information Management and this one is in Health Information Technology. He will have an internship in the Spring and then should graduate in May of 2024. Considering he has both degrees, he shouldn’t have any problem getting a job and there are a lot of places in Raleigh for him to work. He might go back and take a few more classes to get his 4-Year degree in Coding, but the plan is to get a job and bank some money so he can put a downpayment on a house first. Alex was able to transfer from the Greenville Best Buy to the one in Knightdale – just about 25 min away.
We finally bought the new house in Clayton, NC (about 25 min. southeast of Raleigh) in June 2022. Dad’s commute went from 95 minutes down to 25 minutes. For some before photos, you can take a look here: https://www.zillow.com/b/106-pearsall-farm-ln-clayton-nc-BKSNhQ/ The house had been rented out for the last couple of years, so it definitely didn’t look this good when we moved in. We then rented another shed in Raleigh and started moving stuff up almost immediately.
After a couple of months, selling some stuff on Facebook and several trips to the dump to clean out the workshop we were finally were done with the house in Greenville. The new owners were nice but…. very needy and seemed to call almost every day for a couple of weeks with questions.
Before moving into the new house we did a few things: painted the entire inside of the house, had all the carpet upstairs replaced with LVP. We also had the master bathroom remodeled and Dad built a big linen closet and put in new shelving in 2 of the closets. On the outside we started some landscaping projects including putting in a raised flower bed on the side of the house…. we later found out we needed HOA approval for this – luckily they approved it. We moved everything except the big stuff and had a moving company do the big stuff. Turned out that Alex’s friend Zack worked for the moving company so that was nice and part of his tip was a big plate of Dad’s homemade cookies.
In September 2022, Nana and Gung Gung (aka: Diane and David) moved in with us). They also did some more painting and remodeled their bathroom.
By Christmas we had pretty much settled in and everyone was in a nice routine. Gung Gung spent the holidays in France/England. We did have Aunt Becky and Aunt Courtney come down and spend Thanksgiving with us, which was very nice.
This Spring we continued the work on the new house, installing a shed in the back/side yard. We had to jump through a lot of HOA red tape and then deal with construction delays but we did get it finished. Mom has a small space for gardening, which is now finally done and Gung Gung has a nice workshop which he is still working on – he didn’t get started until much later. We also installed an attic fan, put in new cabinets in the garage, built a counter in the laundry room (cabinets will be coming soon) and put in a cat door for Kitty. Of course, Mom and Sam have been working very hard all year in the yard and they have it looking very nice – by next year all the plantings should look great!
Best Buy continues evolving it’s staffing model and Dad lost his position and transitioned into a new position. Of course, all the staffing cuts means that everyone is working much harder and really nobody seems very happy. Alex’s position didn’t change, but hours have been tight and he hasn’t picked up as many shifts.
We did have a nice visit from Aunt Sue from France in April. Aunt Becky and Aunt Courtney also came down to visit with us and Aunt Sue. Maybe next year we can fly out to see her.
Dad’s Honda Accord finally died. He was pretty upset because he had the car for so long commuting back and forth between Greenville and Garner, but it did have 345,000 miles. The Honda dealership gave us a $5k estimate for the repair, but it didn’t seem like a good investment so we ended up getting a new car…. at least new to us.
Well, as we said, not much really going on… although we sure we might have forgot a few things 😉. Hopefully, this gets you caught up and we will try to get you a few photos soon. We still have quite a few project to complete around the house before we are finally finished and we will try to keep you up to date as those get completed.
This year was a lot like the couple of years as we had our huge House Party on New Year’s Eve. 😃 😉 Of course, the whole family was invited, but everyone pretty much kept to their own rooms and in front of their own screens. We kept it to “to each his own” for dinner on New Year’s Day, since Mom and Alex had to work on the 1st, but we did go ahead and have New Year’s dinner on Sunday the 2nd instead. We kept it simple with steaks and turkey burgers on the grill, since the weather was nice. Dad did have his black eyed peas for dinner on the 1st to keep up the tradition though.
Sometime after the first week, we finished the Christmas puzzle with the elephant and since Sam and Mom had such a good time, we went to Barnes & Noble and picked up a couple of more puzzles during their BOGO event. The last one was just finished a couple of days ago. Today, the 22nd, we saw our first significant snowfall in about 3 years – about 1/4″ of ice followed by about 4″ of snow. Luckily Dad and Alex had the day off, but Mom did go in at 8am today – unfortunately for her between Covid and the snow, only 3 people showed up this morning. 😓 Dad shoveled the sidewalk and driveway, while Sam found a new and unusual way to clear off the remaining cars.
Hope everyone is having a good start to the new year and we hope this year is better for everyone!
Christmas finally arrived and Santa didn’t disappoint this year. Not only did everyone enjoy their gifts but we also had a very nice relaxing day with some beautiful weather. Even though we all agreed on Christmas Eve that we weren’t going to set a time to wake up Christmas morning AND the consensus was that 9am or 10am would be just fine, that didn’t seem to quite work out. Mom and Dad, unfortunately, woke up around their normal time (5-6am), but it was Sam who really got things going and was making sure everyone was downstairs by 8am. Luckily, Nana brought some champagne so Dad, Alex and Nana all started off the morning with mimosas. We then had a light breakfast, danish and/or ham biscuits while we opened presents. For Lunch we had Christmas pork loin with roasted potatoes and roasted carrots. Then to top it off we had a Yule log for dessert. We have lots of leftovers for dinner tonight and beyond, because we still have Salmon left over from our Christmas Eve/Feast of the Seven Fish dinner. To be fair we still haven’t been able to make 7 different dishes since we started this tradition a few years ago. This year’s feast was Grilled Salmon, homemade New England Clam Chowder, Lobster Crostini and boiled shrimp. Of course we had plenty of homemade cookies leftover and lots of sweeties from Santa to nibble on all weekend. We finished everything off on Boxing Day (Dec 26th) with breakfast dinner on the deck as it was 72° today.
Just for fun…..
Finally, we added some new lights this year on the Christmas tree. Generally, we will always have them on the traditional white lights, but we can liven things up if we want to… here is a sampling of some of the different effects.
We had another wonderful Thanksgiving this year as Nana came down for a visit (Gung Gung left for England a few days earlier) and Dad was actually at home before midnight this year. We had the traditional offerings for dinner, but we might have gone a little overboard on the Turkey this year. Nana did put together a very nice Turkey Tetrazzini on Saturday to make sure we finished all of the leftovers… it still took us a couple of more days to finish it all.
Can you believe we actually got them to pose for this one….circa 2010
Since Thanksgiving was late this year, we decided to go get our Christmas tree the Sunday before Thanksgiving. All of being so busy, it was really one of the few times we all had time together, other than waiting until after the 1st week of December. This year’s tree was found by Sam and it was a beauty and probably the tallest one we have ever had since going back to real trees. It was so tall, that we didn’t even know if it was going to fit in the car (probably should have taken the trailer). Even after Dad cut several inches off the bottom we still needed more ceiling in the Den! Of course, we can’t add more ceiling so we might have to leave the Star off the tree this year.
Santa’s helper on the left is wrestling our tree to the desk.
Apparently Sam’s big hobbit feet need extra wide steel toed shoes to do his welding in because we had to make not one, but two trips to the foot doctor in November. Turns out he had an ingrown toenail on both feet. Dad was lucky enough to sit in on the first trip and snapped this photo. Sam didn’t want to see the operation so they put up the little curtain. Good thing too, because Dad said it looked really painful when the doctor stuck the needle in and wiggled it all around to numb his toe. After that it was all down hill to cut out the toenail, except, of course, he had to go back a couple of weeks later for the other toe. If that weren’t enough, Sam also got an ear infection from the ear plugs he wears during welding and that was another trip to the doctor. More antibiotics later and Sam is now fully recovered from both ailments. Of course, he did get another pair of shoes and new over the ear headphones especially designed for welders in the process.
Not a whole lot has been going on recently, but we did want to get you caught up on a few things…
First off, Sam is doing quite well in school – currently straight A’s. The welding teacher did say that he needs to be a little more “neater” on his work but overall he has made really good improvement. See the photos below of his latest masterpiece.
Mom, threw her back out at work and has had to take a few days off from work. She did go to a chiropractor and is starting to feel better now but probably won’t be able to go back to work until next week. Since Mom moved over to the meat department at Publix, she has mostly been helping to unload the trucks and move product around on the floor, which is probably what has caused her back problems. That being the case, she decided to apply to Target to see about getting a new job, hopefully doing more merchandising than running freight. The only problem was that she had to complete an online video interview first. Luckily, Best Buy also started using this format this year, so Dad was pretty familiar with it to help her out. One of the drawbacks to the video interviewing process is that about 40% of the people will apply online, but never complete the video interview. Mom knows why people don’t complete the video as it was kind of stressful, but after much hesitation, a couple of false starts and some hilarity, she did get everything completed. The next morning, Mom got an email for a phone interview and was pretty excited, but then a few minutes later she got another email telling her that she had the job. After some confusion, she called Target and found out that they didn’t even need to complete the phone interview, and they wanted her to start next week working on dot.com orders. So apparently, she will be starting at Target next week as well.
Dad went ahead and got his Covid booster shot on Thursday. He received the J&J shot back in March and since they finally recommended the booster shot for everyone who receive the one-time J&J, he went to Publix and got the 2nd Moderna shot. Other than that, he hasn’t started any new house projects as work is keeping him quite busy.
Alex hasn’t been up to much lately… working, playing video games and sleeping. Alex did however have to go to a funeral last week. Virginia’s brother was killed in a car wreck – drunk driving, (Virginia is the girl he went to Homecoming with in HS) so he went with another mutual friend, Zak, to the funeral. Virginia’s brother went to the same school as Alex and Sam and they all played basketball together. Alex seemed a little upset about it as it was his first funeral. Alex is planing on going into to talk with his advisor at PCCC. He is trying to get into a medical coding program next year. The program was full this fall, but he is going to see if there are any additional classes he can take in the spring. Most of his credits from his previous degree will apply to the new program.
Finally, Halloween is almost here and then just a few short weeks until Thanksgiving. Dad has the T-Day off, but needs to be to work at 4am on Friday. Alex will probably be working something similar and we don’t know what Mom’s schedule will look like yet. Sam will be relaxing at home and yes we are all jealous. He will, however, be going to VA to help Nana over the winter break, probably just a week or two before Christmas to get some stuff done in preparation to put the house on the market.
Well, that’s about it – hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween.
Well Dad finally signed up to get his DNA results and we just got them back last week. No surprises here as the top spot went to Scotland at 36%. After looking at Dad’s results, we pulled up Mom’s results from a couple of years ago as Ancestry.com had updated her results with all the new data that they had been collecting and was able to narrow down the regions quite a bit more. For instance, when she first got the results she was 65% English, but now her top spot is England/Northwestern Europe at 38% with the remaining results split up between Scotland, Sweden and Wales. She did still keep her 25% Germanic. See all the results below. At some point we will have to get Alex and Sam’s completed to see how the numbers come together for them.
We once again got to celebrate Nana’s 60th birthday 😉 this weekend as Gung Gung and her made the trip down from Virginia. We spent most of the weekend eating, watching movies and doing a little shopping. The really good news is that soon we will know for sure whether Nana is allergic to eggs as she got a Food Sensitivity test for her birthday! The test usually only takes a couple of weeks to come back and will test for 204 different allergens. Mom got one for Christmas and loved it. Hopefully when they come back for Thanksgiving she will still be able to eat something for dinner 😄. On Friday was grilled chicken, pita, hummus, and mushroom risotto and we watched Zombieland, Double Tap. While on Saturday night we had the traditional celebratory feast: grilled salmon, roasted potatoes and grilled vegetables and we watched the Hitman Wife’s Bodyguard. Then Sunday morning we finished it off with waffles, bacon and sausage for breakfast before they had to leave. Everyone had a great time and we can’t wait to see them again in November.
The Payne Chronicles 