Between August 25th, 2011 And July 3rd, 2012
So anyway, over the course of the ten months we were apart, we managed to get together roughly once a month...Missy would come down here, or I would drive up to Huntingdon. At some point in December I got a cell phone, and I began calling her at least once every day.
At some point Nikki got an apartment, so the only thing left to do was find a house and find Missy a job. Missy would send me links to houses for sale that she thought looked nice, and I would research the neighborhood. Last thing I wanted to do after spending two years selling her on the idea of moving to Philly, was move her into a high crime area. At one point she sent me a link for a property in the Cobbs Creek section of Philadelphia. I had never heard of it previously and asked about it online. A friend of mine from high school who works with the homeless in West Philly posted on my Facebook, simply, "You don't want to live there". That was all I needed to hear. But just to clinch it, another high school friend posted a link to a site called "everyblock.com" (I think that's what it was called) that listed all media attention that was recently paid to any area...good or bad. Cobbs Creek had had stabbings, shootings, rapes, drug busts, and home invasions. Yeah, fuck that. I didn't want to live there.
Then she sent me a link for a house in South Philly. Something inside me kinda....clicked. Both sides of my family had lived, at one time, in South Philadelphia. My mother had lived on Smedley Street in the Naval housing area (which ultimately became "mprojects" before being torn down), and my paternal grandparents lived in the same house on Moyamensing until shortly after my grandfather's passing in '98, when my grandmother moved out. So the thought of living in South Philly just seemed.....natural to me. In all honesty, the idea felt more like "coming home" than if I had moved to Glenside, the suburb I was raised in.
A guy at work is a realtor (he works in-stock part time) and told me if I ever wanted to see a house to let him know. So I told him about this house on Beechwood, and he asked me if I wanted him to arrange to look at other listings in the same area and price range. I said sure, why waste the trip, right? My Oldest Nephew, The Boy, and I took a short roadtrip a week before walk through, just to kinda get a feel for the neighborhood. I just wanted to drive past the house in question, park the car, and see how long of a walk it was to Geno's. Neighborhood wasn't bad...everybody we said, "Hi" to said, "Hi" back, and nobody shot at us. On our walk to Geno's we noticed a lot of racial diversity, something that was refreshing to me after living in the boonies for 22 years. It was a Friday night so our walk was a little more lively and crowded than it might have been on, say, a Tuesday. But I was sold. On the neighborhood, at least. Now I just needed to wait a week and look at the house(s)...(the realtor, Joe, had found us two more listings to look at, a second on Beechwood, and one on Mifflin).
The next weekend came and I met Joe in front of Saint Edmond's Catholic Church, a big honkin' cathedral on Passyunk, about a half a block from the first house on Beechwood. I'm going to cut to the chase here, because I could spend as much time writing about this shit as I did actually doing it. First house on Beechwood was a shit hole. Really bad. Needed work I'm not handy enough to do. We wanted a house we could just move into and live in...I didn't want any fucking carpentry projects, and I damn sure didn't want to have to paint anything. The second one (also on Beechwood) was much nicer. The staircase was a bit narrow, but the backyard had a nice cinderblock privacy wall on all sides. The house had been recently rennovated, and it looked like they had done a nice job. But I still wanted to see the third house, the one on Mifflin. We parked about a half a block away, and when I saw the front porch I thought to myself...the inside is gonna have to be a complete bucket of suck for me not to love this house. I am by nature a very social person...and the front porches on this street were open from one end to the other. They were built for waving and saying, "Hi", and for bitching about the Phillies. We walked through the house and I liked it more with every step. It's not perfect. Not by a long shot. The steps creak, as do spots of floor throughout the house. The bottom bannister is a bit loose. The floor in the front bedroom is a bubble off plumb. And the lady right next door is a bitch. (She seems to like me alright, but she has no time for Missy. I can't for the life of me figure that out. I'm an asshole and Missy's a sweetheart.) And the backyard has ugly chain link fencing as opposed to the cinder block wall at the other house. But overall, I felt like this was The House. So I called Missy and she, Joe, and I scheduled a walkthrough for her with the two houses. The move was all me, so I was going to let her pick the house. If she had hated both houses, we'd have kept looking.
We put our house in Huntingdon on the market the day before she came down to do her walkthrough. She came down, we walked through both houses, and she, too, liked the second one. The squeaky steps and sloping floor bothered her more than they did I, but they certainly weren't deal breakers. We told Joe we wanted to move on the house, but everything hinged on the sale of our house in Huntingdon. We thanked him for his time, and we parted. Missy and I started walking towards Snyder, with the idea of heading to Geno's for some lunch. We got maybe two blocks down Snyder when my phone rang. It was our agent in Huntingdon. She'd just accepted an offer for full list on our house in Huntingdon.
Now, I'd like to say the purchase of the South Philly house went as smoothly as the sale of the Huntingdon house, but it did not. There was a lien that was thought to belong to the one seller that held us up, and while our possessions (the ones that we brought, anyway...we threw out over two fucking tons of shit we didn't want or need ) sat in storage in South Philly, Missy and I lived in the Motel 6 in King Of Prussia. While it certainly wasn't ideal accomodations, it was dog friendly, and we were together. After ten months of separation, the Motel 6 wasn't all that bad.
We closed and moved in on July 3rd, our 13th wedding anniversary. We always loved the fact that Huntingdon had it's annual fireworks on July 3rd, so we always had a show. Well, we had to wait a day this year, but I promised Missy that when she saw the fireworks over the Philadelphia Skyline, it would be well worth the wait. So the next day we took our camp chairs to the Shop Rite parking lot, and set them up on a grassy knoll, facing the city. Found out later that the fireworks are set off over the water, facing fucking Camden! So we didn't see dick except for a few people driving by looking at the crazy white people sitting on chairs in the middle of the Shop Rite parking lot. We did, at one point, hear a few booms which I'm sure were the actual fireworks, and I briefly tried to convince Missy that they were gunshots. She was having none of that. I think next year we'll go to Adventure Aquarium in Camden and watch the fireworks from there. Not as glamorous as the Shop Rite parking lot, but the view is better.
At some point Nikki got an apartment, so the only thing left to do was find a house and find Missy a job. Missy would send me links to houses for sale that she thought looked nice, and I would research the neighborhood. Last thing I wanted to do after spending two years selling her on the idea of moving to Philly, was move her into a high crime area. At one point she sent me a link for a property in the Cobbs Creek section of Philadelphia. I had never heard of it previously and asked about it online. A friend of mine from high school who works with the homeless in West Philly posted on my Facebook, simply, "You don't want to live there". That was all I needed to hear. But just to clinch it, another high school friend posted a link to a site called "everyblock.com" (I think that's what it was called) that listed all media attention that was recently paid to any area...good or bad. Cobbs Creek had had stabbings, shootings, rapes, drug busts, and home invasions. Yeah, fuck that. I didn't want to live there.
Then she sent me a link for a house in South Philly. Something inside me kinda....clicked. Both sides of my family had lived, at one time, in South Philadelphia. My mother had lived on Smedley Street in the Naval housing area (which ultimately became "mprojects" before being torn down), and my paternal grandparents lived in the same house on Moyamensing until shortly after my grandfather's passing in '98, when my grandmother moved out. So the thought of living in South Philly just seemed.....natural to me. In all honesty, the idea felt more like "coming home" than if I had moved to Glenside, the suburb I was raised in.
A guy at work is a realtor (he works in-stock part time) and told me if I ever wanted to see a house to let him know. So I told him about this house on Beechwood, and he asked me if I wanted him to arrange to look at other listings in the same area and price range. I said sure, why waste the trip, right? My Oldest Nephew, The Boy, and I took a short roadtrip a week before walk through, just to kinda get a feel for the neighborhood. I just wanted to drive past the house in question, park the car, and see how long of a walk it was to Geno's. Neighborhood wasn't bad...everybody we said, "Hi" to said, "Hi" back, and nobody shot at us. On our walk to Geno's we noticed a lot of racial diversity, something that was refreshing to me after living in the boonies for 22 years. It was a Friday night so our walk was a little more lively and crowded than it might have been on, say, a Tuesday. But I was sold. On the neighborhood, at least. Now I just needed to wait a week and look at the house(s)...(the realtor, Joe, had found us two more listings to look at, a second on Beechwood, and one on Mifflin).
The next weekend came and I met Joe in front of Saint Edmond's Catholic Church, a big honkin' cathedral on Passyunk, about a half a block from the first house on Beechwood. I'm going to cut to the chase here, because I could spend as much time writing about this shit as I did actually doing it. First house on Beechwood was a shit hole. Really bad. Needed work I'm not handy enough to do. We wanted a house we could just move into and live in...I didn't want any fucking carpentry projects, and I damn sure didn't want to have to paint anything. The second one (also on Beechwood) was much nicer. The staircase was a bit narrow, but the backyard had a nice cinderblock privacy wall on all sides. The house had been recently rennovated, and it looked like they had done a nice job. But I still wanted to see the third house, the one on Mifflin. We parked about a half a block away, and when I saw the front porch I thought to myself...the inside is gonna have to be a complete bucket of suck for me not to love this house. I am by nature a very social person...and the front porches on this street were open from one end to the other. They were built for waving and saying, "Hi", and for bitching about the Phillies. We walked through the house and I liked it more with every step. It's not perfect. Not by a long shot. The steps creak, as do spots of floor throughout the house. The bottom bannister is a bit loose. The floor in the front bedroom is a bubble off plumb. And the lady right next door is a bitch. (She seems to like me alright, but she has no time for Missy. I can't for the life of me figure that out. I'm an asshole and Missy's a sweetheart.) And the backyard has ugly chain link fencing as opposed to the cinder block wall at the other house. But overall, I felt like this was The House. So I called Missy and she, Joe, and I scheduled a walkthrough for her with the two houses. The move was all me, so I was going to let her pick the house. If she had hated both houses, we'd have kept looking.
We put our house in Huntingdon on the market the day before she came down to do her walkthrough. She came down, we walked through both houses, and she, too, liked the second one. The squeaky steps and sloping floor bothered her more than they did I, but they certainly weren't deal breakers. We told Joe we wanted to move on the house, but everything hinged on the sale of our house in Huntingdon. We thanked him for his time, and we parted. Missy and I started walking towards Snyder, with the idea of heading to Geno's for some lunch. We got maybe two blocks down Snyder when my phone rang. It was our agent in Huntingdon. She'd just accepted an offer for full list on our house in Huntingdon.
Now, I'd like to say the purchase of the South Philly house went as smoothly as the sale of the Huntingdon house, but it did not. There was a lien that was thought to belong to the one seller that held us up, and while our possessions (the ones that we brought, anyway...we threw out over two fucking tons of shit we didn't want or need ) sat in storage in South Philly, Missy and I lived in the Motel 6 in King Of Prussia. While it certainly wasn't ideal accomodations, it was dog friendly, and we were together. After ten months of separation, the Motel 6 wasn't all that bad.
We closed and moved in on July 3rd, our 13th wedding anniversary. We always loved the fact that Huntingdon had it's annual fireworks on July 3rd, so we always had a show. Well, we had to wait a day this year, but I promised Missy that when she saw the fireworks over the Philadelphia Skyline, it would be well worth the wait. So the next day we took our camp chairs to the Shop Rite parking lot, and set them up on a grassy knoll, facing the city. Found out later that the fireworks are set off over the water, facing fucking Camden! So we didn't see dick except for a few people driving by looking at the crazy white people sitting on chairs in the middle of the Shop Rite parking lot. We did, at one point, hear a few booms which I'm sure were the actual fireworks, and I briefly tried to convince Missy that they were gunshots. She was having none of that. I think next year we'll go to Adventure Aquarium in Camden and watch the fireworks from there. Not as glamorous as the Shop Rite parking lot, but the view is better.