Blair's Blog

Christmas Eve – another Christmas is upon us and we are grateful for the days off that we have to enjoy a break at the end of a busy year.  2014 was a year of change for us as we made a move from our place in Chestermere into Calgary.  Although  our place in Chestermere was very suited to life when the kids where small, with a large yard on a quiet cul-de-sac, as the years went by the burden of driving back and forth to Calgary mounted. By the autumn of 2013 it was clear that a change was in order, so we began the search for a new home in Calgary and in January made an offer on our new place.  We chose to buy in Calgary before listing the Chestermere house to allow us to stage and list the old place in the summer time.

We moved into the city in March, then spent about 5 weeks getting the Chestermere house cleared out, cleaned up, repainted and re-carpeted before staging the house and listing at the end of April. We had quite a bit of interest and had offers to consider within a couple of weeks, eventually selling in mid-June.  There was a bit of a scramble towards the possession date in July, but on the 18^th we handed over the keys and ended that chapter of our lives after 15½ years.

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Woo hoo!  This past weekend was the grand opening celebration of the new 14000′ parallel runway at Calgary International Airport.  Brenda had been working with the YYC marketing department for the past 5 months to get a selection of vintage aircraft for the static display portion of the event.  Brenda had nearly 50 aircraft that had expressed and interest – on the day of the opening celebration, 15 June, there were 36 aircraft.  A few had dropped out due to mechanical, paperwork or scheduling difficulties. Then the weather kept a few more away.

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When we got up on Friday morning, I looked out our bedroom window and noticed that the flame on the Calgary Tower was lit.  I can’t remember the last time that I saw the flame at the top of the tower, and it seemed kind of unusual at 6:30 in the morning.

Later in the morning, I heard on the radio that the flame was lit to mark the Olympic Celebration of Excellence. I’m not quite sure what that even means.  It was probably excellent, though.  Especially since the flame was burning so brightly … and excellently.

The cloud cover cleared out, and by the time I got to work downtown, it was quite sunny and bright out. I took the picture above from the stairwell going up to TransCanada’s +15 level patio from 4th Avenue SW.  I’ve always liked the view that you get of the tower from that location, framed by the patio light standards and the two Suncor Energy Center towers.

 

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Well at least we got out for a walk this morning. It was a beautiful day and we woke early and decided that we should get out for a walk before the kids were up and the day got away from us. Days do get away from us all too easily of late. Something about taking care of two houses, working, still dealing with moving and finding somewhere in the new house for all the junk treasured possessions. We still have lots to do before we will be considering ourselves to be settled into the new place.

However, for this morning, it was nice to just get out into the sunshine and explore the new neighbourhood. We went nearly 5 km, walking to the Glenmore Dam and back. It was a little cool at first, but once we were moving it was fine.

In case you are wondering, the map comes from a site called DaftLogic Distance Calculator, it’s pretty interesting.

Even though I grew up in this area, so much has changed since I was in high school, it all seems only partly familiar. Walking across the top of the dam was interesting – I still have faint memories of back when you could drive across it. Anyway, it was a nice morning and hopefully the first of many like it.

While I am here, I suppose a bit of an update on the house move would be good! I am still not really organized enough to have taken any pictures of the new place so here is the set of pictures that were on the MLS site. All the furniture is that of the previous owners:

And, for good measure, here are the pictures of the Chestermere house. These are also from the MLS listing (which is active now and you can see it here until we sell…) and show the place after all the work that we did to prep for listing:

In both sets of pictures, the realtor trickery is quite evident with the use of excessively wide-angle camera lenses. It is quite amazing how important form is over function in this. We hardly recognize the place – with new carpet throughout the main and upper floors, new paint (walls and trim) everywhere and all of the staged rooms without a shred of our own personal touches it really doesn’t look or feel like home any longer.

We have had quite a bit of interest, with a half-dozen second showings and two offers (both from the same couple!). We do hope that we can close a deal on the place fairly quickly, it would be good to just have one house to look after!

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