First Egg of 2011

This was the sight that greeted me a couple mornings ago: our first egg of the year! It’s a white egg, so it came from the Leghorn, who was also the last one to stop laying last year. It’s not hard to see why all the commercial egg growers went to Leghorns years ago — they just lay more eggs. I found this one on the 5th, and today there was another white one and a brown one. Here’s hoping they’re all laying soon, and that the move doesn’t disturb their productivity too much.

Speaking of the move, things are rolling right along. The house was only on the market four days and shown three times before it sold. Almost right up until the showings, I was worried that we hadn’t done enough to get the place ready. There are so many little imperfections in the average house — finishing nails where the putty didn’t match the wood, a small tear in the linoleum, a warp in the vinyl siding where the grill was too hot and too close one time, etc. — and you see them all when you live there. But when you see a place for the first time, you don’t see those tiny details (I don’t, anyway), and they aren’t that important. I thought I’d be improving a bunch of those things and blogging about them as I went, but things moved so fast we never got to many of them.

What we did do was remove about half our stuff so the place looked more spacious; give most of the walls a fresh coat of neutral paint; and clean, clean, clean. We didn’t do any fancy decorating beyond putting out a couple small rugs and bath towels that matched the decor. But by the time it went on the market, I was able to look around and honestly say it really looked sharp. Apparently the buyer thought so too.

So in about a week we’ll be living at the new place. Of course, the big snow last week hasn’t helped things any, but we’re managing. Better last week than this one. Angel’s been doing the fun job of calling to switch over utilities and get services started, and I’m working on the rest of the packing and digging paths through the snow so we can get everything to the moving van. As soon as we get settled, we’ll have to get garden seeds and plants ordered (asparagus and strawberries are at the top of that list) and decide how much to expand the chicken operation this year. It’s gonna be an interesting spring!