Happy anniversary? Hardly.

Two years ago today we closed on our house here in Green Acres, Georgia, and moved in - two long, difficult, sad, disappointing years.

We moved here from Apex, North Carolina. Due to circumstances that are too long and boring to detail here, we decided to move so that J could take a new job. We never thought the move would be this difficult. I had lived in the Raleigh area for 16 years and considered it home, and really did not want to move anywhere. But as a good friend pointed out, we made the best decision we could make at the time with the information we had, and we chose to move. And we thought that, perhaps, our lives had grown a bit stagnant and that a new place and new friends might be exciting.

Our current location is 20+ miles south of the southern edge of Atlanta and is considered to be part of the Atlanta metropolitan area, but most days it seems a world away. We chose to move here because the school systems are rated among the highest in the state of Georgia (I won't comment on that) and because we knew that the job opportunities for J would be better on the southside of the city. But we never thought that it would be as rural and as dull as it is.

Some of our experiences since moving here have not been the fault of the move or the area, such as the deaths of six family members between our two families. But because those deaths happened since moving here, I think we automatically associate those deaths with the move, fairly or not.

We certainly never thought it would be this hard to make friends. Both J and I are friendly, interesting (we think) people and although we have tried and tried to meet people and to make friends, it has not happened. We lived in a friendly neighborhood in Apex but we barely know our neighbors here to wave at them. When we moved in our house, not one person from the cul-de-sac came over to say hello - so much for the mythical southern hospitality. As new people move onto our street, we always make a point to go and greet them, but then we never see much of them again.

J is finally making friends at his new job and I am slowly getting to know some women in my mommies group. I have been a part of a book discussion group for about a year and I like the people there, although I doubt anything outside the group will come out of it. It is as though everyone we meet has plenty of friends and family in their lives, and do not have need for any more. There is one woman in the book group who moved here with her husband not long after we did, so she is also not from here and new. But her children are grown and live elsewhere, so she travels to see them frequently and also travels with her husband on his business trips. So while we have enjoyed each other's company the two times we met for coffee, she just doesn't seem to have time for me.

We are determined to stick this out, at least for the short-term. We need several years to get out of this house what we have put into it, and to ride out this real estate slump. But if we had not bought a house, right now we would be living somewhere else - probably Buffalo, New York. J received a job offer from a company there in the spring but we knew we would take a hit when selling the house and he chose to accept a local job offer. But while winter in Buffalo scared us, the thought of living in a reputedly friendly area appealed to us.

So whine whine whine - happy damned anniversary to us.