Week One and I Am Still Alive

The worst part about buying a house is that you have to have some mechanism for moving all the crapola in your current residence to your new residence. I think that the reason castles had moats was to discourage the liege from building a bigger, better castle down the street. Moving was bad enough, but taking your stuff across the moat down the street across the new, wider, deeper moat into your new, bigger, better castle was just too much. I also believe the reason the Vikings plundered much of northern Europe, England and Ireland was that they wanted to move there, but didn’t want to have to take all their stuff across the North Sea.

Moving is the great revealer. Moving drags all the stuff one has accumulated out into the open, forcing one to either put it in a box to move, throw it away or give it away. Moving also drags all one’s yarn stash into the open for one’s spouse to see. This produces no small amount of stress.
After all of this, I am happy to say that I am alive. The move did not kill me. The move did not provoke me to kill Hubby, although the temptation certainly presented itself on numerous occasions and still threatens to recur. I have begun to enjoy the house, though not fully as we are in stage 543 of the move – unpacking. Whoever came up with this idea is the worst person ever. Live through the move, only to take your stuff out of the boxes you worked so hard to get things into in the first place. YEAH!

I had my first dinner party, makeshift as it was the day after the move. We had pasta and salad provided by a good friend of mine. We ate on the good china as that is what we could find. It was a lot of fun and I wasn’t too exhausted to enjoy it. That says a lot.

Now that we have been in the house for about a week, I am getting used to not being able to find things and the millions of decisions about where to put things when I do find them. We have also quit having our own reality show as witnessed through the front windows of the house that remained blindless after the pre-move painting until we could maneuver the blinds out of the garage and get them hung. I am sure the neighbors were getting tired of seeing me in my red and white polka dot bathrobe. It would not have been so bad except our neighbors across the street are nuns and I didn’t want them thinking that pagans had moved in across the street. Then again perhaps from their perspective pagan or Baptist is the same.

The best decision we made was the after the move self care. We gave ourselves a few days to live in the space before trying to decide where to put everything. I have also enjoyed doing a little decorating – nothing that would grace the pages of Architectural Digest, but enough that it doesn’t look like a frat flop house.

Hubby has been working in the Man Cave. The Man Cave is beginning to look pretty nice. He put in a new outlet there so he can use the microwave and have a small fridge for his man snacks. I will no longer have to stop breathing when he works from home, as he will now be able to work from the Man Cave. The only problem with the Man Cave is that Hubby has become a nerdy cliché. At least I am not his parents and he isn’t some socially retarded nerdy hacker who has to team up with Bruce Willis and save the planet.

I am trying to organize my room. My room overlooks the back yard. It has several windows and good, natural light, which I need for writing, knitting and spinning. The space doesn’t feel like my own, yet. Actually, I feel that way about the entire house. At least I have stopped waking up with that sense of not knowing where I am and how to find the bathroom.