Hello from sunny Florida. Since I last corresponded with you My Jane and I packed up and moved from The Pocono Mountains and began to settle in to our new home in Central Florida. (To be near the grandchildren.) deckids2  This was quite the adventure and one I do not plan on repeating again in this life time. Moving when you are in your forties is a whole lot different than moving when you on in your sixties. decmove  But, we now feel a little more balanced and ‘connected’ in our new environment.

Just one story to give you a taste of some of the challenges this move provided. After closing on our house in Pennsylvania we invaded Jane’s Mom’s (my mother-in-law) house for a Thanksgiving Day extended visit. Jane’s Mom, as always, received us with grace and love. dechickes6 One thing Helen has not done on her life journey is keep up with technology. Her computer is one of the first ones sold (I exaggerate). I do not exaggerate when I tell you it is an antique in computer years. You need to know about Helen’s computer to be able to understand the rest of the story.

To begin with, our mortgage company (who’s name will not be spoken) loan officer called to inform me he needed some more information from me to process the loan application. Now, remember, all of our possessions have been packed away in a moving van and are somewhere in a storage facility because we do not own a house anywhere. I had with me my computer and the paper work we thought we needed to close on a new home in Florida, nothing else. To add a layer of confusion to the story you must know that I now had a new email address resulting from leaving our former telecommunication company behind. Our loan agent said I could simply FAX the needed information to him to complete the transaction. I could not reach through the phone to ‘touch’ our agent at this moment and I was having difficulty finding the humor in the situation. (I admit I have been having difficulty finding humor in most situations since Nov 8.)

Okay, so Helen has a printer and a computer, I tried to encourage my computer to talk to Helen’s printer. This would be the simple way to accomplish the task. My computer could see Helen’s printer but the two machines refused to talk to each other. I couldn’t believe it! Oh well, I can send the documents from my computer to Helen’s computer and print from there, Right! Remember Helen’s computer? Her computer couldn’t read the documents. We tried to install Adobe reader on Helen’s machine but it refused to change the way it had always been doing things.technology

I finally, emailed the Termite Inspector and asked him to send me a second receipt at my new email account so I could send that along to the loan officer by email. I copied documents from my old email file, attached them to an email in my new address and sent them to the loan officer. The documents we did have on hand were carried downtown where we found a place to FAX them to the mortgage company. The loan officer received all the documents from the various sources and our loan did get approved.

I won’t bore you with the delay in arrival of closing documents from the seller (who lives in England) because of the horrible fires in Tennessee. Just to give you a hint about that situation, we were squatters in our own house (which wasn’t ours or the sellers) for two nights until the paper work came through.decsunset

That is all old news today and I have found my peace and am enjoying this ‘rest of my life vacation.’decpool