New House

It's been a busy week.  Monday I had my monthly checkup at the Farber.  Fortunately, everything is still good with the MM.  Knock on wood.  The most interesting results were my red blood cell counts after getting the iron dextran infusion the week before.  Wow!  My hematocrit ("crit" in nurse speak) jumped from 37.7 to 44.4 (normal range is 38.4-48.2).  Similarly, my hemoglobin went up from 12.6 to 14.6 (normal range is 13.2-16.7).  That sure took care of the anemia!  I feel like Popeye--"I eats me spinach".  Watch out, Bluto!

After my appointments, Gretchen and I drove up to our summer place at the farm in upper New York state to join Jeff and Christine for a couple of days.  We had a great time cooking on the grill, sitting by the fire pit, and navigating the ATV trails.  We celebrated Christine's birthday on Tuesday by driving up to Montreal.  We had a delightful visit to the Museum of Fine Arts and then capped off the day with a wonderful meal at a nearby French (what else?) restaurant called L'Autre Saison.  It was scrumptious.  Montreal is a great city, and it is only a 45 minute drive from the farm.  Sadly, the season is coming to an end, so we closed up the place for the winter.  Until next year.

The biggest news of the week is that we have finally found a house!  Our experiment of dropping off flyers at houses that looked interesting to us has paid off.  We liked this house, and the owners got back to us saying they hadn't really thought about selling.  However, a couple of weeks later, they changed their minds.  We looked at it and it is the first house we have seen that meets all the criteria that are important to us.  It has a lot of privacy on a quiet street in a good neighborhood, an available first floor master bedroom/bathroom suite, two wood-burning fireplaces, attached two-car garage, upgraded granite kitchen and bathrooms, etc.  It even has a "drive-out" garage door in the basement that could accommodate storing our boat for the winter.  How cool is that?

 Here are some more pictures of our future home.  The eat-in kitchen features beautiful cherry cabinets and a gas stove.  It also has a three-season screened in porch that overlooks the private wooded back yard.  We haven't signed all the paperwork yet, but we are planning to close on the new place by January 2, 2015.  Hopefully, they will find a new house by then.  Otherwise, we may have to try negotiating an extension of our rental agreement here and renting our new house back to them for a couple of months.  Kind of weird, huh?  We'll see.  This is a really exciting time!

To cap off a whirlwind week, Jeff and I are going to the Patriots-Broncos game tomorrow.  This is a huge rivalry between two of the best quarterbacks of all time.  It will be a "Clash of the Titans" between Peyton Manning (#18) and Tom Brady (#12).  Some have referred to this as the "War of 1812".  Win or lose, this will be a memorable game.  It is supposed to be cold and rainy, but that's what NFL football is all about--pay $50 to park and $150 for a ticket to suffer in the stands in miserable weather with a lousy view.  Who wouldn't want to do that?