It’s been a month since we moved back to Boston and a lot has happened.

The Job

People often ask me how I like my new job and I never know how to answer those kinds of questions. I gues it’s been good so far. It’s been harder than I thought to get up to speed a new set of systems and get to know all the people even though I knew some of them already.

I like the people I’m working with though and this job is far less hectic than the one I left. I have the time to dig deeper into things and I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about different technologies. That was a big draw of this job. I’m still finding my place and my role and I wish that would happen faster, but I’m sure it will come. I really need to make a trip to Dallas and Sunnyvale to talk with some people, but I haven’t been able to do that in the last few weeks because…

We bought a house

We landed in Boston on a Saturday and met with a realtor referred to us by a friend the next morning. We saw about 16 houses that day in Lexington, Newton and Winchester. Anne went out and looked at more houses that week while I went to work.

By mid-week we had decided to live somewhere in Lexington. The other towns have equivalently excellent schools, but the public facilities in Lexington are better and it has a great little downtown area. By Friday, we had seen everything in Lexington on the market that met our criteria and we narrowed it down to two that we were seriously considering.

One was quite nice and had some great touches inside, but it had a tiny backyard with another house looking right over into it. The other was brand new and the backyard abutted a conservation area, but it was significantly more expensive.

On Saturday afternoon, we decided to put in an offer for the second house. I spent the afternoon printing, signing and scanning in documents, submitting the offer by 8 pm. It expired at 10 pm that night and there was an open house the next day. At 9 pm, the realtor called and said our first offer (below listed price!) was accepted. It was just over 6 days from when we landed in Boston. Who knew one could spend that kind of money that quickly?

We’re quite excited about it and we’ve been back several times to show our families. The builder has a few more little things to finish before we close on Friday. It’s hard to believe that we’ll finally own a house. We kind of skipped over the “starter house” and went right for the family house. We need to go on a serious furniture shopping spree for to not make it look ridiculous. Our stuff was supposed to be loaded from storage in California on July 3rd and should arrive at the end of this week.

When I tell people I’m buying a house in Lexington – they always react with the same word – “nice.” I’m pretty sure that’s just the standard way of saying “yikes, that’s expensive!” here.

We’re really looking forward to moving into the house. For one, it will dramatically cut down my commute. For the first 3 weeks, I commuted from Anne’s uncle’s house in Brookline, NH. While right on the Massachusetts border, it’s about a 75 minute commute each way to Cambridge on a good day and 90+ minutes on a bad day.

We planned to rotate amongst our families from the start and last week we moved our stuff to my parents’ house in Manchester, NH which is little further away, but a straight shot on the interstate, making it just over an hour commute. It’s tolerable knowing that it’s only temporary and I’ve been working from home one day a week as well. Since many of the people that I work with are in other offices anyway, it doesn’t matter so much where I’m working from ask long as I have a phone and internet access.

Being back

Moving back has certainly had its strange moments, but overall it’s been wonderful. Our cars, both purchased on the west cast, sitting in the driveway still with their California places on seem out of place. My parents’ lake cottage now has DSL and a wireless router.

We’ve had much time to spend with our families. Even if we weren’t living with them, they are at most an hour or 2 hour drive away, short enough for a weekend or afternoon visit. I’m thrilled to leave behind the stress of figuring out how much room we have for things to stuff our suitcases to fly back. It seems we did so just in time as flights and baggage have started to get expensive. Now the limit is only how much stuff we can put in a car. We’re going to end up with a lot more stuff now.

Places in New England that we’ve only seen during extended vacations during our 10 years on the west coast are now so casually seen, it’s scary. I feel very relaxed here. There’s nothing better than sitting on the porch by the lake and listening to a Red Sox game.

Things are about to get crazy again as we move into our new house, but for now I’m enjoying it and glad to be finally back.