"Read by Mark Smith, of Greer, SC"

It's been a good run, but my fellow TechSmiths and I have the end of our Simpsonville residency in sight!

It's been our aspiration & intention since retiring to move to a smaller, more modern house, once we became empty-nesters. We made the effort in 2009, but the housing market was really, really awful. In addition, our nest re-filled with boomerang children!

As 2014 began, we took stock again. Family matters had progressed to where we felt we didn't need to relocate to Virginia, where Brenda and I both grew up, and where most of our remaining extended family reside. We had hopes of again being "on our own" in 2015. So we targeted this coming year to finally sell our home and move on - probably to some other community in the Greenville area.

About mid-2014, we began seriously thinking about where exactly that might be. We toured a Parade of Homes, and started paying attention to real estate listings. We went to a few open houses. Then we chanced to tour a house we really liked. Immediately, we had to discuss whether we could consider buying a house before first selling the old. Our answer was "yes!"; in fact, the attraction of gradually moving stuff to a new home over a series of weeks or months appealed to our lazy lifestyle! The house that sparked the discussion sold before we could make an offer, but at least we were then primed for future action.


In October, it paid off. We toured a house that enchanted us with its charm factor. We bought it! Now in December, we're just beginning the shuttling of stuff. First up after closing on the house: recover a POD-load of things we put in storage 5 years ago.

We had loaded that thinking we'd see our stuff later the same year... so it had all our winter coats & sweaters. Yeah, we had to purchase some new ones that year.




It also included six boxes of board games and nine more of my military miniatures. If you've followed this blog, you know putting all that stuff away for five years was a bit of a sad story. Yeah, we had to reload the game cabinet, too.

Now we have a real incentive to get busy, after the holidays, with prepping our old house for sale. (Did you know retired folks can get 30-year mortgages??!)

But will my LibriVox intros now say, "Mark Smith, of Greer, SC"?  I think not. It may be a tiny fib, but I think I'll keep my nine-year old brand: of SIMPSONVILLE, SC.