I talk about my feeeeeelings. AGAIN.

I stopped at Whole Paycheck Whole Foods last night for some groceries, and swung through the card section to pick up a card for Greg's teacher.  The card section was chock-full of positive affirmations.

One of them really jumped out at me:

Leap, and the net will appear.
   ~zen proverb

I am not really the kind of person who leaps without checking for the net.  I am the kind of person who Yelps four recommendations for net makers, asks what kind of tensile strength the rope has, how long the net maker has been making nets, and how sturdy the edifice is to which the net will be attached.

Moving to California feels very much like leaping and hoping that a net will appear.  

One more day.

Here's hoping all those Zen followers are right.  

Comedy of Errors

Who's got two thumbs and will never again agree to move across the country on seventy-two hours notice?

THIS GIRL!

Who decided not to stress out and try to get everything done in 24 hours and accomplished packing only what she and the kids needed for traveling in a leisurely fashion, until she received an email the night before the movers showed up notifying her that her belongings were estimated at 525 lbs over the weight limit and thus she owed an astronomical sum of money to the movers, and had less than 12 (nighttime) hours before the movers showed up to get rid of stuff?

This girl!

Who dropped her keys in her mother in law's car, thus necessitating a two hour trip to go get them while the car shipping guy twiddled his thumbs in her driveway waiting for her to return with the keys?

This girl!

Who sent all her food to Grandma's house the night before in a stroke of brilliance, and discovered the morning of the move she had three children, two baby yogurt cups and one spoon?

This girl.

This girl is tired, yo.

This girl has Project Patch All The Holes and Project Paint Over All the Crayon On the Walls to accomplish, but today I am going to hang out with my girls for a last hurrah. Onwards and upwards, peeps.

Shiz just got REAL

I have been informed that the moving company will be here to pack on Thursday.  As in, approximately thirty hours from now.

(picture me running in circles, eating many, many brownies, fanning myself, and generally having a nervous breakdown.)

*pant pant pant*

Friends of the interwebs, I am waving the white flag of surrender.  I had hoped to get more stuff organized and purged and sorted before moving.....but it is not going to happen in the next 30 hours.

The relocation company will be here to pack all of my stuff Thursday morning.  This is fabulous, in that I don't have to pack it.  So why am I having a nervous breakdown?

I'm just not ready to uproot my entire life yet.   Life will be fabulous in California, I'm sure.  But life here was kind of fabulous too, blog title notwithstanding.  I already miss my family and my friends.  I miss my sisters.  The movers coming on Thursday means that this is really happening. I am really moving three thousand miles from everyone we know.

I'm just not ready.

I encouraged the Mister to apply for this job.  I believe that this is a good move for our family. Its going to be good.  But its also the end of an era. I've lived in New Jersey my entire adult life, and most of my childhood.  Its what I know, its what I'm familiar with.  My encyclopedic knowledge of New Jersey highways and ability to find my way home from any exit off the NJ Turnpike will be useless in California.

The movers will load the truck on Friday, along with my car, and then the kids and I are camping out at Grandma's for two weeks while our belongings wend their way to our new home.  They will be delivered on March 15th.  Greg will continue to go to his old school in NJ during those two weeks.

Tomorrow I am going to focus on packing two large suitcases with enough clothes for two weeks in NJ, and a few days of warmer weather clothes for when we get to California.  I will clean out the fridge, as it will be going on the moving truck.  I have a number of other small errands, like picking up the kids' medical records, and I have to make a number of phone calls, like enrolling Greg in a new school.  And that is all I am going to do before the movers get here.

I will try to remember to put aside some spackle and paint and painting supplies and cleaning supplies so that I can patch and clean after the house is empty.

I should probably go pull all the medicines and the passports.  (I am aware that California is not a foreign country; I just don't want to leave our passports on a truck in someone elses's possession for two weeks.)

For now I am going to have a caramel brownie.  Or five.  And read some blogs.

Mah back ache, my booty shake*

Oh, invisible internet friends, have you missed me as much as I have missed you?  I still do not have the magical internet connection thingy, but the Mister did some dohickey thingy to my cell phone and it provides the magical internets, yay!  Internet service guy coming tomorrow, hopefully.

We are all moved in to our new house, and it is lovely.  Except for the kitchen.  The kitchen and I are not getting along.  But otherwise! Its a lovely house.  It has a backyard, and a big garage I have filled with stuff, and a basement I have also filled with stuff, and an attic playroom, also filled with stuff.  The attic playroom will be culled in the near future, because gah, the toys seem to have multiplied like rabbits on the drive over.

 

We are 98% unpacked!  The remaining unpacked stuff is in the basement.  I have been through every box, but the stuff not yet unpacked is largely artwork and tchotchkes, which will remain unpacked until I figure out places to put them.  I had grand plans involving a large Expedit for tchochtke display and our television in the living room, but I was foiled by the tv mounting hardware not being large enough and thus, no tchotchkes and same old boring wall-mounted tv over our campaign dresser.  I am very disappointed by this but I will just have to soldier on.

The previous tenant "reinstalled" the cheap miniblinds that were supposedly there when he moved in.  Except he only "reinstalled" the blind in the living and dining room, and didn't put the cap hardware on, and thus any attempt to use the blinds results in them falling on your head.  This is better than the other two floors of the house, where he placed the blinds on the floor in front of the window but neglected to leave any of the mounting hardware.

Since we weren't anticipating replacing every single window covering in the house on moving day, we went to Home Depot and got roller shades cut to size for all the upstairs windows (nine in all).  They are cheaper than bamboo blinds but nicer than those crappy miniblinds.  I measured all the windows at 6 am and we were off.

Except I measured all the windows at the bottom. Where there was some fancy molding.  Not at the top, where they would actually be installed. (It was 6 am on the morning after the world's longest move ever, cut me a break.) So I cut to size nine roller shades wayyyyy too short.  I couldn't exactly take them back and tell them to cut them longer, so our blackout shades were installed with some spare scrap wood (oh, Sarah, btw, I may have used the frame to the Marimekko wall hanging to hang up my roller blades), and now the blackout shades are at least an inch too short all around.  I will just have to keep the curtains pulled to an inch inside the frame.

My kitchen....oh, my kitchen.  (This is getting long, I know, and without pretty pictures to keep you entertained. I'll try to wrap up in a sec.)  So, when I rented the house without ever showing it to the Mister, I had a list of things we wanted, and they were good schools, walk to train, central air, 3 bedrooms, minimum 1.5 baths, a playroom, and a yard.  This house fit all of that criteria.  However, its a turn of the century side hall colonial, and while it has a lot of "large" storage, like a basement and a garage, it has very little small storage, like closets, or kitchen cabinets.  I knew this, and since this house is temporary, decided to deal with the trade-off.

For the life of me I cannot figure out where previous tenants stored their pots and pans in the kitchen.  For a person who does not like cooking, I have a fair amount of cooking accoutrements, but seriously, I would have to give away all of my pots and pans save one, and that one would have to be stored on the top of the stove.  There is not a single cabinet in the kitchen deep enough to accomodate a stockpot.  WTH??

Here is my current pot and pan (and lids and colanders and serving dish) storage:

See that large moving box? Its labeled "glassware."  There were nine boxes labeled "glassware" by the movers.  I own 8 glasses. Apparently "ceramics tchotchkes" and "dishes" and "tupperware" are "glassware" to movers.  

I want to show you all pictures of the house, but while everything is unpacked, nothing is decorated, or styled, no artwork hung, etc.  So maybe a glimpse or two soon, but there probably won't be big reveals until I find a handyman to install stuff, because the Mister is going back to work tomorrow.  But! I am super excited at the way the Princess's room is coming together, and I have a chiang mai project for my bedroom that I can't wait to get started on.

There is more, invisible internet friends, so much more, but its past my bedtime and I need some sleep.  Hopefully in the next few days I will be back to my regular near-daily posting schedule and commenting.

*Someone please bring a videocamera to camp, I need the rest of the lyrics to that song.  We've been singing that one line for a year now. To the left, to the right, to the left....

hair and moving estimates

One has nothing to do with the other, I'm just going to talk about both.

Two weeks ago I posted on some possible haircuts I was contemplating getting.  The day has finally come.  I didn't get any of those haircuts.

This morning I was perusing Pinterest and saw this picture, so I asked for something similar, but a little longer.  I've been trying to grow my hair out for nearly a year and had hit that patch of "ugh, this looks terrible", but I knew if I cut it all of I'd kick myself.  This cut had a bit of length but also had the swoopy bang I liked about the Mandy Moore haircut.

image via 

Here's what I got:

How much do I look like my Auntie June here?

It looks like there is a weird layer right in the middle, but there isn't.

I am pretty happy with it.  I would take some more pictures, except without fail, every single time I get my haircut it pours, and my salon-beautiful hair is ruined within ten seconds of walking out the salon door.  Today was no exception.  But it looked good for the ten minutes before I left the salon.

***********

I've been getting estimates from moving companies, and holy cow.  I am choking on these estimates.  Each one is higher than the next.

Two years ago when we moved from outside Philly to outside NYC, I had a four week old infant (plus a 2 and 4 yr old), was still recovering from a c-section, and all of our family was out of town.  We paid the moving company to pack up all our stuff, in addition to moving it, since I couldn't lift anything. Because of the distance and the packing, it was a three day move; one day packing, one day loading up the truck, and one day delivering and unpacking the truck. It took three guys and one very large truck.

Paying the  movers to pack was probably the best money we spent.  They showed up at 9 am, left at 3 pm, and the entire house was packed in six hours without me lifting a finger.  The packers looked like the cast of Deliverance; there were maybe 10 teeth total among the three of them, but they were nice guys and quickly packed everything.

The estimates I am getting for moving, just moving, not including packing, are HIGHER than the cost of the moving AND packing of our last move.

Since moving in here we have acquired five bookshelves, one chair, a sofa, and a dining table.  I don't feel like this should DOUBLE the amount of money it costs us to move.  But apparently it does. I also need TWO trucks and SIX guys to move all our stuff.  And they are so judge-y about it.  "Well, ma'am, it takes time to pack up THIS MUCH STUFF."  As if I'm on an episode of Hoarders, for pete's sake.

I am working on purging the garage, but I don't feel that there is much I can de-crapify within the house.  I like my stuff.  I want to keep it.

If you have a recommendation for a mover in the North Jersey area, I'd love to hear it.