Packing

You guys, I have to move again.  AGAIN.  Twice in one year.  We’re only moving a couple of blocks down the street, which mitigates the packing somewhat – we can just stack pictures and other wall hangings, and I will just grab up the hanging clothes in my two arms, drive them down the street, and hang them right back up.  But still.  I spent a lot of yesterday packing up the boys’ toys, games, and books, as well as the kitchen, and kept grumpily thinking “I just did this.  I *JUST* did this.”

The logistics are still uncertain, as the old house is being tented for termites before we go over.  They are everywhere, in everything, so that floorboards are crumbling under our feet and – worryingly – even our furniture has tiny holes bored into it and little piles of termite detritus in it.  We don’t want to bring the termites with us to the new house so we asked that the fumigation occur before the move . . . and we close in a little over a week.  Supposedly it’s happening next Monday.  I’ll schedule it myself if they forgot – I cannot have these punk wingless bugs chewing through my books and couches and the floors of the new place.  I’m glad we’re leaving here because it’s so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if some structural elements of the apartment may be at risk – there are soft spots in the floor literally throughout the apartment.

I’m looking forward to being settled.  It has been a loooooong period of temporal living.  The big boys – old enough to understand what’s going on – are pretty excited about a new room plus playroom upstairs.  Craig is too little to get it and he was a bit nervous watching me pack things.  I anticipate some crappy sleep in our near future, as he gets adjusted.  Nevertheless, I am looking forward to having a dishwasher that works (ours doesn’t), a toilet that works (ours runs and you have to bend down and turn off the water supply, then turn it back on, if you want it to re-fill after a flush), no more termites pooping my kitchen cabinets, no more fireplace with no hearth (just plywood) that is prone to sudden explosions of dirt and detritus falling from the roof, no more splinters in our feet from crumbling floorboards.  This apartment has some nice features – soaring ceilings, gorgeous ornate details including hinges and door knobs, a giant front room and large bedrooms as well.  But it’s very old, and has lots of Old House Problems that we were not empowered to fix.  I’m moving into another new house and I’m totally fine with it.  I don’t need history, I need working appliances.