Who just happen to be myself and (e:Uncutsaniflush). Yes folks, it has been a whole year since we moved to Buffalo.

We arrived at about 4pm a year ago today, afer a 2 days in the car (i don't drive, so (e:Uncutsaniflush) broke it up into a 2 day drive) from Knoxville, TN. In our little Toyota Prius were all the possesions we could cram into it; things we thought we may need in the coming and unknown days, weeks or months.

Our house in Knoxville sold really quickly. We geared up for it for a long time. With a brief break in early 2004 due to some dental problems and tramas for me [inlink]leetee,24[/inlink] we worked for about a year getting things ready. We painted and repaired things. I got into those decorating shows telling people how help sell a house with careful placement of plants and removal of clutter. We had our agent over once before we started to tell us what would be important to do and again after we had done a bunch of things. She listed our house on September 24, 2004, and the following weekend, we were off to my cousin Krista's wedding in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

When we returned home, we found a couple of messages on our answering machine. It seemed there had been a problem with one of the keys in our lock box thingie. Someone had wanted to see our house while we were away but wasn't able to. Could they come soon? Yeah, ok, we cleaned up, unpacked a bit and left so they could see the house. Then see it again soon afterwards. The second time we went home and they were still there, so we drove around our neighbourhood for a while. We thought it was a good sign. And it was. They made an offer on the house.

There was some confusion about decisions and i felt a lot of pressure to move on their time frame and get things done in the house they were asking for (like fixing a toilet that had nothing wrong with it) and i broke into tears in our agent's office. Eventually, things got sorted out. There was a bad day in which we had to pay way too much money to have someone backhoe our backyard looking for our septic tank on the same day we had to have poor Diamond put to sleep [inlink]leetee,15[/inlink] that i somehow managed to survive. It was a stressful time. We managed though.The moving guys were really good... and the people that bought our house bought some of the stuff in it, too.

Our last night in Knoxville, we had dinner with friends at our favorite mexican place, El Charro. Little did we know we would find 2 places here that had a connection to East Tennessee. We joked that we needed to convince someone to move to Buffalo from Knoxville and we had no idea that someone would. Check out El Caporal on Union... they have good food. OK, where was i???

Dinner Knoxville. We stayed in a hotel our last night in Knoxville, too. Poor (e:Uncutsaniflush) wasn't feeling well after celebrating too much with margaritas and didn't even have the comfort of his own toilet to puke into.

We drove to our house the next morning to load up our car and give the keys to the people who bought our house. I cried as we pulled away from the house. We were married on the deck of that house...

Two days later we were here. We have been trying to remember where we ate our first meal as Buffalonians... and we think it was either the Towne or New York Pizza on Allen as a take away.... We think we want to eat at that place today.

Thank you, all (e:Peeps) for welcoming us. Thank you so very much (e:Paul) for creating and maintaining this space for us to get to know our new city and some pretty damn cool people in it. We learned a lot about Buffalo through here. I know there are people i have met through this space that i will cherish always.