It's all good in the neighborhood.

Hey again!

We're going to try to keep up with the blog pretty regularly (especially at first, while we're both temporarily unemployed...ha), so I'll probably be updating with little random things a lot. It might be TMI for some of you, but I know others will appreciate it:]

For those of you who haven't been to Georgia, the architecture here is really different from that of Texas--and we LOVE it! There are lots of old two-story houses with big wrap around porches that are painted fun colors. Personally, my biggest aspiration in life is to live in a cute little yellow house with a huge porch, like this one (but I guess I'd settle for smaller).

We live in a part of Atlanta called Chamblee, but it's often referred to as North Atlanta. The area is quickly transitioning and the houses are a really interesting mix of huge, new "McMansions" and little old houses, like ours. We've been taking some pictures of the newly built mansions around our house to give you an idea of what we're looking at. The architecture is modeled after the older houses in the area, but on a much larger, fancier scale.

 This is the biggest house we've seen so far.

 I LOVE this house. It's right around the corner from us.

 We're noticing a red door trend in the neighborhood. I'm down.

This one is on our street.

 We saw these last two on a walk tonight. They are huge.

The final big one.

Contrasting these houses with our little house, pictured below, and our neighbor's house, is pretty funny. The people next door are a really interesting family, supposedly "old hippies" who have a ton of kids and a really weird combination of stuff around their place. They hang their clothes outside on a huge line--in this Georgia humidity, I wonder if they ever dry?--which we can see from our window (pictured below), and the husband drives around regularly with a canoe on top of his old Volvo. They also recently chopped down a tree in their yard, but they left the entire thing (cut in huge pieces) just piled up around their house. We like their house though, because it has a lot of character. It's really interesting to see the difference from house to house.

This is our house. We love the blue shutters and cute front steps.

Our view of the neighbor's clothes line. My mom thinks it looks like Swiss Family Robinson.

Tomorrow the State Farm adjuster is finally coming (I mean hello, a tree fell on our house 4 days ago!) and we should learn more about what can be done to fix the ceilings and roof. Mold was discovered in the insulation at the back of the house--no surprise since it was built in 1947 and it's so humid here--so the back two rooms have been blocked off and work has stopped until the adjuster comes. It's being called "secondary damage" since it was obviously there before the tree, so State Farm will decide what they're going to cover and hopefully reconstruction will begin soon!

I'm going to post some of the miscellaneous moving pictures we took this week, as well as some of the fun stuff we've done since we got here. There might also be some cute Jack pictures too...the best part of course!

-T, K, & J