Our first rainy day in the new house. Well, first and a half, since the rain started last night. The skylight in the family room leaks. This must be our destiny, since the roof on the last house leaked right after we moved in, too. At least this is easy to fix. We just need to go up on the roof and replace the weather stripping. Not as scary on a ranch as on a 3-story victorian, for sure.

Right after the kids went to school, I drove down to the post office and then around randomly a bit. I can’t wait until the weather’s nicer – I didn’t realize >how< close we were to the water. I love it. There are boats docked a block away from the P.O., less than 5 minutes’ drive away. I want to check out Shelter Cove, too – it’s the town beach/pool/tennis courts. The town ice rink is really close, too, but I don’t know if it’s open or not, because I read something about construction.

And there’s a gym with indoor pools less than 5 minutes from the house, too. I’ll be making my way over there regularly now so I can get back in shape. Now if I could find a place that sells really good ground coffee and a nice Thai restaurant, I’d be bordering on bliss.

This might not seem all that exciting to anyone who hasn’t tried to navigate the maze known as “Customer Service” at Verizon. I was holding off, holding off, crossing my fingers each day that the phone book would arrive and I wouldn’t have to try to get someone at Verizon to send it to me.

So last night, in addition to the thrill of finding out that electric ovens SUCK for making pizza, even with a pizza stone, and that hot tubs are GREAT when the weather’s in the 20’s, my evening was spent perusing the yellow pages for insight into this strange new land of Toms River.

You know you’re in South Jersey when you look at these yellow pages. We could eat at a different Italian restaurant every night and still not visit them all before we died. 6 pages of listing under “Boat”. And it’s big. Really, really big. But now we can find things, and that’s good.

The other thing I did was find the recycling center. I had called and left a message on the town’s answering machine asking about when to recycle, because the information on the town website was vague, but didn’t hear back, so I figured that as long as I still had Mom and Dad’s pickup, I’d use it. We have a >lot< of leaves. I was so enchanted by the evergreens on the property, I didn’t even pay attention to the deciduous trees, and thought leaf raking wouldn’t be an issue. Silly me. So, anyway, I get to the recycling center, charm the guy into letting me dump my leaves even though I don’t have any ID with a Toms River address on it, and ask >him< about recycling. He was at least able to tell me how to put it out, but he was no more helpful than the website or the phone message as to >when<. It has something to do with my garbage pickup day. However, nowhere is it published what day that is. His advice was to look out the window and see what the neighbors are doing. I think I’ll just talk to them. “Oh, gawd, here comes that new lady AGAIN with some stupid question. . .”

The garbage gets picked up by a robo-truck, so we have to use robo-cans. If you have anything that doesn’t fit in the robo-can, you’re supposed to call and request a special pickup. This makes me nervous, because I didn’t get called back the last time. I think we’ll just put a little of the moving garbage out each week, and in 10 years or so, it should all be gone. . .