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Since I last bothered updating anywhere:

• Went to Mexico in January, had a fantastic time. Good thing we got a vacation in, because
• B started a new job when we got back, so
• We started looking for a house the last week of February
• Then I got laid off in May
• And then I started a new job 10 days later
• And then we bought a house June 28
• The sellers are moving out this weekend
• The movers are coming on Thursday
• About a month shy of 8 years in this house

(If you haven’t been here in a long time: Got married in 2004, Dork died in 2006, we have three 2-year-old dogs, the cats abide.)

One might think that knowing for 4 months that we would move at some point in the relatively near future would mean we only need to put a few last things in boxes and we’d be done. One would be so, so wrong. We have been culling, and cleaning, but not perhaps on the nuclear level we so desperately needed. Part of it was that we spent every one of those weekends, except for 3, looking at houses. We even went out in between my grandmother dying and the out-of-state funeral. We lost count early on, but my estimate is that we saw about 70 houses and made 7 or 8 offers (including several that we wrote up on Saturday or Sunday only to find out Monday the house had gone under contract over the weekend).

They say you often end up buying the first house you see. We tried; damn, we loved that house. That one went under contract while we were there. I don’t know if there’s any sort of folk wisdom about buying a house 6 doors down four months later*, but that’s what eventually happened. We did view our eventual house in March, but I said fft because it was too small. It’s still too small. But it’s ours, so there’s that. And it’s got a good-sized yard for the neighborhood, better than that first one. Better than a lot of houses we saw; in the places we were looking, you got a newish house and a postage stamp yard or an older house with some legitimate backyard space.

* After covering probably 75 square miles. When I got laid off, we had three offers going in Denton.

The upside of the whole ordeal, and contributing factors like our current commutes (40 and 80 miles round trip) and the elderliness of the air conditioner, is that I don’t give a crap. The newer furniture, cooking stuff, clothes, electronics, some books and photos: go in boxes. Everything else goes in the trash. I don’t care. It’s too hot to care, the new house is small (and I’m taking more furniture from my grandmother’s house than I strictly have space for), my job doesn’t leave me time to pack except on weekends. I don’t care.

And what I’m looking forward to, once we move, is not having to move. It might be nice at some point to paint my office (most of the other rooms are painted fine already, but my office is white), and I have got to get that 1980 Navy wallpaper off the kitchen walls and ceiling and paint in there, but anything else we want to do (screen in the patio, gut and redo the kitchen cabinets/counters/appliances, retile the shower and tub surrounds) will have to wait a bit.

No, I just want my couch in the living room and the projector set up, and the water line hooked up to the fridge so I can have ice without having to go down to the Psychic Mini Mart (I will miss the PMM) and buy a bag to dump in the dispenser. I’ll give us a couple of weekends to get the bulk of the important unpacking done, and then we’re spending an entire weekend scratching our asses and playing Resident Evil 4 on the Wii (or I will watch B play while I read Harry Potter). The liquor store (liquor! less than 8 miles away!) is a little too far to walk in the summer, and there’s a busy road with no nearby crosswalks between, so we might have to get in the car once or twice, but if we invite people over maybe we can convince them to stop on the way. But we might not invite people over that particular weekend, because we might not wear pants. I’ve spent every weekend the past month in the same pair of raggedy yoga pants (yes, they get washed, along with every single kitchen towel, every weekend) to guard against mosquitoes and cardboard paper cuts, and my knees need some air.

It’s a fairly scorch-the-earth move. Rather than move utilities, we changed electric companies, got a new gas account in B’s name, switched to Dish, got FIOS (which I guess means we’ll have Verizon landline service if Dish needs it), and of course it’s different water and trash. We bought the house in three days, more or less, and so had to hustle getting insurance (we got it while we were at the inspection the day before close), but they kind of pissed us off in the process so we’ll probably change house and car pretty quick. Oh, and our bank made me so angry last week I was seeing spots, so we broke up with them too.

I feel a little sick if I think about everything that needs to be done between now and Thursday. I may not get to go to bed at the hour we’ve been collapsing lately (9pm because we’ve aged 40 years in the past couple of months), but the packing will get done. I just also need to work 10 hours a day (and prepare to take a certification test that I need to do by Wednesday yay), clean the new house (we get the keys maybe Monday but more likely Tuesday), book the dogs in somewhere for moving day so we don’t lose anybody, get the cats moved (and two of them are so old and prone to being sickly that I’m really worried about the stress and how many inappropriate places they will eliminate), and maintain enough work clothes in my immediate vicinity to get through the week. B has a lot of vacation time he can use, though, which will help immensely as I have none.

So, that’s what’s up over here. Stay tuned.

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