Home, Sweet Home

Hallelujah!

After two weeks of waiting, we've finally found a place to call our own. It's a quaint and quirky two bedroom apartment about 30 minutes away from post. It's part of an old house and while not perfect, it certainly meets our needs for now.

There are sooooo many soldiers being assigned here that there has been great difficulty accommodating soldiers and their families. This post has been, and continues to be, one of the most frequently deployed divisions in the War on Terror. There's alot of coming and going. While many soldiers are due to leave here and move someplace else, the turnover has not been that quick. The pressure the housing office has been feeling is enormous. There's just not enough room for everyone. There are new housing developments being built but they will take time. Housing here has become such an issue that it's in front of some joint council. It's an issue of readiness -- how can you focus on your mission when your family has no place to live? When my husband in--processed, we were around 200 -- two hundred-- on the waiting list for housing. We had hoped to hear something from the housing office since our needs were not great. There are no kids yet so unike many others, we didn't need to worry about a school district. We didn't require on-post housing, either. But for two weeks we waited with no word from housing other than our phone call to them and dealing wtih a rather rude clerk in that office and watching our position slip further down. Let's face it, when you start at 200, you know it's going to be a long wait. So we took matters into our own hands.

The first place we looked at was in Lowville. Lowville is a cute little town with some Amish farms nearby. Unbeknownst to us, we took the long way there and had a scenic tour of Lewis County. We also met a NY state trooper personally after he stopped James for speeding. God bless that officer for not giving us a ticket but wisely advising us to drive slower or we surely would one day get that ticket. He really was a nice officer, giving us directions to the street we were looking for once we got to Lowville. The apartment was a dump. Seriously. It was a 1BR, one window dump on the second floor. The kitchen had no counter space and the living room started in the kitchen. We had the second appointment for Wednesday evening and the minute we drove up, I knew we had a much better possibility. The house sits on a huge lot with lots of sunshine. The private entry is through a sun porch (or what Alaskans call an arctic entry) and enters through the kitchen which has lots of counter space. The smaller of the two bedrooms is off the kitchen and although it has the larger closet, we'll be putting the computer in there. Off the kitchen and facing north are the living room and the master bedroom. Both rooms are large and roomy and will be able to accommodate ouir furniture. The master bedroom's closet is rather small and this is a concern but Husband and I have already agreed that hel'll take the larger closet in the second bedroom for his uniforms and such. The bathroom is one of the smallest rooms I've ever seen. It must have been a closet in a previous life. the only way two people can be in the bathroom at once is only if one of them is standing in the shower. There's also no linen closet but there is shelft unit just outside the door. There's not much storage and all of the rooms have doors that go nowhere and it's been hot the last few days and we'll have to purchase a fan or two but for all my complaints, it's a place we can finally call home.