Wow. Someone has posted instructions for making this wicked cool Cylon jack-o-lantern, complete with oscillating LED eyes. If this didn’t look so darn complicated, I’d love to try it.
Okay, maybe I still will 
PS: In case you’re confused right now, Cylons were the shiny robot badguys from the Battlestar Galactica TV show of the late seventies.
Well, our house has been listed for about a week now and things seem to be going okay so far. Frankly, our past experience selling a house was comparable to a root canal with a jackhammer, but we’re pretty confident this time around.
So far we’ve had two showings. The first one was a realtor tour where about seven agents looked at the house. Everyone feels the house shows well and the price is perfect. And later that day, we had the house shown to an out-of-town buyer. Unfortunately they passed because of the small yard. We had another showing scheduled this week but they canceled at the last minute.
Today they came and took some 360-degree panoramas, which turned out nice, even though they don’t seem to work on a Mac. By the way, the web developer in me can’t help but point out that Cranston’s site totally sucks, but I could be biased.
We’re still planning on going back down to Atlanta sometime early in November to look around again and check out apartments one more time. I also will have a meeting with a guy from another web firm down there that seems fairly interested in me. Whether he wants to offer me a full-time job, freelance work, etc remains to be seen. But he’s also not ruling out buying FireBox as a way to get me on board. Sounds like he’s serious, but I’m keeping all doors open.
I’m including some photos of the apartment complex we looked at last year. They’re soooo nice, and sooooo unlike anything we have up here. Gated community with a pool, exercise room, car wash and areas to walk dogs. We’ll also be allowed to take all the pets. Each apartment has nine-foot ceilings, fireplaces and patios. We liked it a lot, but our final destination may depend on where we end up working. This place I mentioned above is in Midtown, which is under fifteen miles from Norcross, but we’ll have to see what the traffic is like. The good news is that most places do 3 or 6-month leases, and there’s so much new construction, there are many incentive programs. We’ve heard of some places offering multiple months free just to move in!
It’s been a year since our initial trip to Atlanta. There still is nothing available for Brenda job-wise, and I feel I’ve hit the limit of what I can accomplish in Marietta. We’ve decided it’s time to pursue our fortunes elsewhere.
So this is our official announcement that we are indeed moving to Atlanta in the very near future. This is not an impulse decision and not one we’ve taken lightly. When was the last time you knew either of us to take a year to decide on something?
Options for both social work and paralegal jobs in Atlanta are abundant, so we’re confident Brenda will land something fairly quickly. I still have a colleague down there that may be buying my company and/or hiring me as a developer. But I’m not waiting on him and may have a promising job interview with another firm very soon. I’m not thrilled with the idea of ditching my company, but life is all about changes and new adventures. Neither one of us has been outside Ohio so it’s time we do something new while we’re still young and don’t have to drag a kid out of school.
We’re very much hoping our friends and family will understand why we’re making this move, as we’ll need all the support we can get throughout this transition. And of course, we’ll make regular trips back to Ohio for holidays or just for the heck of it. And our door will always be open to anyone wanting to come down, spend some time or hit a Braves game.
One of the main obstacles right now is selling our house. We have a lead on a realtor that might want to buy it as a rental property, which would be great and save us the commission. But if anyone reading this is interested, or can pass it along to someone wanting to live downtown, let us know. I’d like to walk away with a couple thousand bucks, but we’re not looking to make huge money on a sale. The next few weeks will be a major purge of everything we won’t want to take to Atlanta, so we might be having a sale, or just taking everything to goodwill. This includes most of our furniture. So if you’ve ever had your eye on anything, now’s the time to speak up
Hopefully we’ve eased enough people into this idea over the past year so that it’s not a complete and total shock. We just want everyone to understand why we’re taking this step and continue to support us through this new phase.
More soon!