Brad just called me from my unpacking work to see a roadrunner in the shrub just about a foot from our window. We’ve seen tons of these birds running down the road, but I’ve never seen one close up. They are really huge and beautifully marked. (Ours was a little browner and a bit fatter than the one in the linked picture.)

We’ve had a productive weekend. On Friday, we arrived at our new home at Mountain Shadows, which is about a mile or so from our property. We were hoping that our moving truck would arrive on Sat., but when I called the office they said that everyone had gone home and that the truck was not expected to arrive Sat. We spent Fri. getting mail, getting some supplies, and doing some preliminary unpacking.

At about noon on Sat., Charles our mover called. He was in Phoenix! He said they’d probably unload the stuff for storage (the bigger part of the shipment) that night and the house (an hour and a half away from the storage facility) the next morning. At about 4:00, we met at the storage unit to unload. As before, the movers were really great and very happy to accommodate my arrangement ideas so that we could have easy access to stuff we might need. We work with a lot of people that we don’t think much of, but these movers were really the best. By about 6:30, it was dark and getting very cold, and they were done.

Charles said, “So we’ll follow you, ok?” Huh? I thought we were doing the house in the morning. I was worried about how long they’d been driving and that it might be difficult to navigate the back roads and unload in the dark. But after talking it through, we decided to proceed. By 9:00, everything was unloaded. It was really pretty easy. We offered the guest room to the movers for the night, but they declined, electing instead to press on back to Phoenix. We were glad we didn’t have to do the same. Exhausted, we had dinner (creamy pesto tortellini and salad) and went to bed.

By morning, the cold Brad has been getting kicked into high gear, so we took it easy Sunday. I spent most of the day unpacking boxes, washing dishes, and doing laundry. (We did take a quick trip to the property to move a few things and to “de-horn” the property. The previous owner had put deer antlers up on various fence posts, very disgusting. We also saw our resident great horned owl in our front tree, and I drove the new truck on the back roads for the first time. It was very easy.)

We are considering a bit of out-of-the-box rearranging of the house we are staying in. (It is furnished, and we are hoping to make it work as both house and office for a year or so until we’re done building.) There is a large front room that has large floor-to-ceiling windows and gets wonderful light. It has a couch, two humongous easy chairs, a TV, and a few tables. Adjacent to that is a smaller room, open to both the front room and the kitchen. We were planning to use that smaller room as the office. After thinking about it, though, we’re considering making the front room the office and the smaller room the living room. We spend most of our day time in the office anyway and need more space for office-related things. The smaller room would be much cozier for evenings, and we aren’t really easy chair kind of folks. Tomorrow, we’ll move stuff around and see how it goes. Stay tuned.