Exceedingly Mundane

I need to be catching up on my blog, I need to watch the mountain of shows on the DVR that are mine (cooking, Masterchef, Dancing with the Stars, etc), but all I seem to do is unpack! And then later, try to figure out where I put something! I think I’m going to be doing that for a long time, figuring out where I stashed something in the frenzy that is my unpacking.

Current phrase heard around the new house: “If you were an X, where would you be?” As in, if you were the scissors, where would you be? If you were the bath soap, where would you be? 🙂

Let’s see, this past week has been a blur, which is par for the course. Monday, I went to the old house to clean everything. Suzanne came and helped and cleaned out the fridge for me, and also broke down some boxes that were left in the garage. After that, we came back to the new house (gotta start calling it “home” now! LOL!) and had leftover pizza and then got to work lining shelves. We lined until we ran out of shelf liner. Tuesday, I went to Walmart to get more, a lot more! I think I got 18 more rolls, which turned out to be close, but I bought too many short rolls and not enough longer ones. Anyway, I picked up Rally’s for lunch on the way back, as Tim was busy at work all day Monday and Tuesday with conference calls. Wednesday, I stayed home all day and worked on unpacking, lining shelves, etc.

We got another offer on the house on Wednesday evening. We made a counter offer, then heard back Thursday morning that they did not accept our offer. Our realtor was pretty confident though, that after they had seen other properties in the area in our price range, they might think differently. And apparently, they did, because they made another offer late Thursday. We slept on it, prayed on it, made one final counter for a minor difference, and then had a verbal agreement Friday morning. We went and signed papers Friday afternoon at our realtors office, then went to Ridgeland Specialty Hardware to get the trash bins that should have been installed before we closed, but were not. After that, we came home and did some more unpacking.

Friday night, we went out to have a celebratory dinner and a long over due date night. Tim took me to Two Rivers, which we had never been to before. Tim had a ribeye and I had the grilled redfish with shrimp. Since we were celebrating, we had tiramisu for dessert, which was delicious!

Tim took two more vacation days, on Thursday and Friday. He has been SO wanting to work on his new surround sound, so he did just that. Thursday, I ran to Fresh Market to get the Thursday Little Meal deal (bacon, juice, potato/cheddar/chive pancake mix and some other items), and also stopped at the old house to check the mail. When I got back Thursday afternoon, he had started cutting holes in the ceiling in the great room (five). Friday, he worked on getting everything hooked up to his components, and we were busy Friday with negotiations on selling the old house. Saturday, he worked on getting his outdoor speakers installed on the screened in porch out back. They sound awesome! All of them 🙂 What really surprised me was that he has it fixed where you can listen to one thing in the great room on those speakers, and at the same time, you can listen to a different input of music out on the back porch. Way cool! Saturday afternoon, we also took both vehicles and loaded them to the max at the storage unit and brought and unloaded them here. Exactly what we needed, more boxes! But we are wanting to get that storage unit emptied so we can stop paying a monthly rental on it. We stopped and picked up Sonic on the way home and had a late lunch at 4 PM, ugh, I hate eating that late! 🙂

Sunday, always my favorite day of the week, was a very busy day for us. We made it back to church, after missing last week (which we both hated to do). We started a new sermon series, Next: A Study of Joshua, and had a great lesson in Sunday School. Gail had texted me on the way to church, saying that she was driving down to pick up David, who was flying home from Alaska. He’s been gone all summer, working for Holland in Alaska and is finally coming home. Well, for about 10 days, then he leaves for a month or more to tour Iceland, Europe, and take a cruise from Venice through the Greek isles, Mediterranean, Straits of Gibraltar and back across the Atlantic. That boy has a tough life 😀 Anyway, she said they would come out to our area of town to eat lunch and hoped we could meet them. So, we met Gail, David, Elizabeth, Jeremy, Kathryn, Katelyn, Sam and Suzanne for lunch at Newk’s. Afterwards, everyone came to see the new house and we visited all afternoon, which was great. Elizabeth stayed a while after to grade papers and watch some of the Saints game with us. It was great to hear it in surround sound! The Saints finally won one, beating the Vikings at home, and are now 1-2. After that, Tim and I split up, and I went to our bedroom to watch some of my massive amount of shows on the DVR and he watched an old movie in the den (Vertical Limit, I think).

So, that catches me up for a little bit. It’s Monday morning now and we are working on new routines. Tim is back at work, I’m doing laundry, but we still have a mountain of boxes to wade through and unpack. One box at a time! I need to go to the grocery story today, and one day this week, maybe tomorrow, I need to make a huge run to Sam’s Club. I had gotten low on many items that I regularly buy there, so there would be less to move. Time to start back stocking up (I don’t like running out of paper towels and toilet paper, LOL!)

Hope everyone is having a great day and will have a great week!

To make a long story short, we closed as scheduled (pretty much!) on Wednesday and got moved in over the weekend.

Tim and I had planned to start moving in stuff ourselves on Wednesday night, but after we closed at the attorney’s office and drove to the new house, we found it was still very dirty. I was SO disappointed! They finally got it cleaned Thursday afternoon, so we started moving small things and our electronics on Thursday evening. Friday, we moved our bed, a few essentials and the food. We spent the first night in our new house on Friday, then got up really early Saturday morning. Tim decided at the last minute to rent a truck (which pleased me no end!), and we had to go get it. That turned into another long story, as in, he gets to the place and they are like, sorry, we have no truck for you. Argh. I had to go back and get him and drive half way across town to a different rental place, but all’s well that ends well. We got a Penske truck, got it to the house, where a lot of folks were sitting around and waiting. All of Tim’s family got there early (Terry, Emi, Brittany, David, and Tony, and then Mark and Ethan, Gail and Don, Suzanne and Elizabeth came later). We got the furniture and boxes loaded around lunchtime, then headed to the new house. They all started unloading while I went to go get pizza, chips, fruit and drinks. They unloaded most of the big truck before the guys would stop and eat, they were dedicated movers, I tell you! We were so grateful for everyone who came to help and how smoothly it went. I only have one piece of furniture scratched badly (that we were eventually going to replace anyway), and so far, nothing breakable has been broken, so that is nice to have such a great move 🙂

Tim and I had a long day Saturday. After everyone left late afternoon, we headed to Home Depot to get a dryer cord and back to the old house to visit our dear neighbors and try to clean up the garage. Also, we realized when we got there that we had left a few things out back, so we loaded those up. By the time we got home and unloaded and moved stuff around in the new garage, it was nearly 10:30. I caved and ate a yogurt, even thought I detest eating that late 🙂

Sunday, we decided to sleep in and missed church. We were both so exhausted and I was extremely sore. I hit a new one day total on Saturday on my Fitbit tracker, over 33,000 steps! I cooked our first meal in the new house Sunday morning – scrambled eggs, grits and toast! Tim forced me to dive in and use our new gas cooktop for the first time, and needing to cook forced me to unpack some of my cookware! LOL! Let the unpacking begin! There are boxes everywhere, and we still have the entire storage unit to move here, but we are so happy and having so much fun, that we don’t even care! 😀

Sunday at lunch, we went *back* to Home Depot for a different dryer plug, and Tim got the washer and dryer going late Sunday afternoon. I did one load of laundry and was happy that the laundry room did not flood 🙂 After Home Depot, we ran by the grocery store for milk, juice and some lettuce. After all the fast food, I’m really craving a salad or something healthy, LOL! After that, we watched the Saints lose another heartbreaker (they are 0-2 now, with both losses coming in either the last 6 seconds or OT and being lost by a field goal). Then, we did some hunting, sorting, unpacking and trying to find a home for things here. That’s going to be the hardest part for me, figuring out where to put stuff!

Monday (today) was another busy day for me. I got up early and headed to the old house to clean. I spent about 3 1/2 hours cleaning, and my sister Suzanne came over and helped me a ton by cleaning the fridge and breaking down a bunch of boxes we had leftover, and getting them to the curb to recycle. She followed me back to the new house after we finished, for some leftover pizza and helped me line kitchen shelves at the new place. I did not buy NEARLY enough shelf liner. I’ll have to head back to Walmart on Tuesday for a boatload more, like 12 or 14 more rolls! There are a lot of cabinets and drawers in this new house, hahaha!

Tim is at the old house now (Monday after work), to take down a couple of items, and fix some holes in the wall and paint. He may be late getting in, but I hope not. He went back to work today and had a busy day, conference calls, and more scheduled for Tuesday. I think he wants to take more vacation and get things done at the new house 🙂

Maybe one day I’ll get industrious and take some photos, but for now, just text updates. I’m glad he got our server back online, so I can post to the ole blog!

I suppose it’s inevitable. You live in a house for over 20 years, you accumulate items, you make a house a home and make memories in it, and then, you decide to move. It’s natural that one gets nostalgic and one gets sappy and dare I say, one gets downright sad at times. Maybe it’s just hormones or so recently realizing how much I miss both my parents. Or some other maudlin thought pattern 😀

I am working on cleaning out magazines today. I realize how much things have changed since I first moved in this house. I used to get a ton of magazines. Back before anything was digital, I did silly things like subscribe to a newspaper that was thrown on my driveway daily, subscribe to magazines that showed up in my mailbox once a month, etc. My, how times have changed. I don’t subscribe to magazines any longer. I have dallied with online subscriptions, but I just find that I don’t read them often enough to justify it. So, once I page through the last ones (won’t be today, I have stacks of them, LOL!) and put them in the recycle bin, I will probably never see another magazine in my home.

Same thing with music cd’s (which I’ve packed) and movies, which have yet to be packed. We’ve done fairly good through the years with moving to new technology, yet I realize, I have lived through a time where there were just 3 local tv stations and no way to record tv or movies. Then, the advent of the VCR, and magically, I could record a tv show or movie to watch later. What a spectacular idea that seemed at the time. I think I have mostly purged the house in recent years of old VCR tapes that contained things I had recorded from TV. We’ve moved on to DVD’s and Blu-Rays (buying movies which we watch from time to time). I’ve packed up a boatload of music CD’s, realizing (much like the magazines), I probably won’t ever buy them again and may not even use them again. I do everything digital, with iTunes or Amazon and various and sundry electronic devices.

I remember a rotary phone and calling someone before you left the house to drive to see them, to let them know you were coming.

I remember my mom being so excited to get a humungous box for her kitchen called a microwave.

I think I’m getting old. And I think it’s starting to hit me how much work it’s going to be to pack up my adult life in boxes 😀

P.S. I’m also thinking right about now that maybe it was a good thing we never had children… not only more stuff to pack, but more memories and harder to come to grips with moving them out of a house they grew up in.