Skipping Town

With many/most of the boxes now unpacked, we're starting to settle into the routines of our new life. Last weekend, my parents came out for the day, as well as my sister and her fiance, and her fiance's parents, who also live in Pittsburgh. They all toured the house and then we sat on the porch and visited, and then everyone went home. It was planned last-minute and was exactly the kind of easy, spontaneous gathering we'd envisioned when we decided to make this move.  The kids love their school and come home every day bubbling over with news and stories about their classes and new friends. They have new friends in the neighborhood, too, and have even had a couple of (outdoor, masked) playdates. I've found the Target, the Trader Joe's, the Home Depot. The girls went to their new pediatrician's office for a flu shot. I found a vet for Farrah. We met with a contractor to plan our (hopefully imminent) basement reno. It's as normal a life as we could possibly hav

I ask you: is there anything more invasive and disruptive than a move? Each day has been a blur of boxes, or unboxed piles of miscellany, or haphazardly shelved and stored items that may never return to the pleasingly organized state they'd once been in. The work is physically exhausting. This house is large, the boxes heavy, and there is a lot of brute hauling and pushing and relocating. Every day is like a demonic version of a cross-fit workout. (That comparison is Andrew's. I have no idea what a cross-fit workout entails, or even how to write out "cross-fit": Cross Fit, CrossFit, crossfit, Crossfit, Cross/Fit?) Over the past week and a half, I've laid hands on every single one of my belongings, from unmatchable lids of old sour cream containers to a pile of maternity clothes I've never been able to part with to my most treasured tiny things. I've never been this familiar with all the noise and clutter of my life. There are no mysteries to my home right

Yesterday was a very, very bad day. I began the day daunted by Box Mountain, but once I began unpacking--listening to an audio book in the quiet house--it was okay. I made progress. I didn't unpack ALL the boxes, but I unpacked many of them, and moved others to the right parts of the house.  Then the FedEx truck pulled up, and the downward spiral of my day began. We had a logistical hurdle with the closing documents: I was supposed to be in New Jersey to sign them, and we hadn't really thought to alert our lawyer about our change of plan, so there was a flurry of FedExing to get me the docs yesterday morning. I was instructed to receive the docs, get approximately five hundred of them notarized, and then immediately FedEx them back to New Jersey for morning delivery on Wednesday. Fine.  Off I went to UPS for the notarizing. The UPS cashier/notary laid out the docs, then took a phone call. While I patiently waited, I looked over the papers in front of me, and in that moment, in

It's a week of endings and beginnings. I was supposed to be in New Jersey today, overseeing movers and officially bidding farewell to our house; but it was not to be. This has been a very poorly timed, convoluted, logistically complex move, and we'd made a complicated plan to pull it off--and you know the saying: Want to make God laugh? Make a plan.  Or something like that. And so it was. A death in our family meant my parents could no longer stay with the kids this week, which meant I could not go to New Jersey, which meant Andrew is now tying up the ends of our life himself.   Life happens. Endings and beginnings are rarely separate. Maybe never. The mess and misery of a move are temporary, inconsequential. Though it's a sad time for my family, it's also a time of new beginnings, and we're getting there, day by day.  The movers packed up our Maplewood house yesterday with Andrew overseeing, while I greeted--at long last!--our POD here in Pittsburgh. I was overjoye

HELLO! We’ve been without WiFi this week, and I haven’t been able to post. A lot has happened. Rather, a lot HASN’T happened. I wrote a few updates this week even though I couldn’t post them, and they are below. Tuesday, 9/8/20 We spent last week with my parents, anticipating that we’d move into our new house on Saturday 9/5, when we’d greet our arriving POD and be reunited with at least some of our things. This was not to be. When I called PODS on Friday 9/4, nervous because I hadn’t yet received a call about a delivery time, I learned that our POD was still in New Jersey, and that there was no delivery date scheduled. There was a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but there was no way to compel PODS to magically transport a giant storage container overnight, so we were stuck. We decided to move in anyway and just...wing it. We borrowed cots, an inflatable mattress, folding chairs, and a card table from my parents, and on Saturday Andrew and I drove around Pittsburgh, pickin

It’s been a week. After our emotional goodbye on Saturday, we drove to Pennsylvania and got ready to launch our new life. On Monday, we had a final walk-through of the house and signed the documents to make it ours. Is there any stranger feeling than being alone for the first time in a new house that you OWN? Once the realtors and title guy left, we looked around in amazement and glee. “Glee” wasn’t guaranteed. After all, we hadn’t seen the house since July and had been scared silly by the inspection report (TL/DR: “This is an old house. Hope you like projects. Good luck.”). The length and detail of this report nearly made us SELECT ALL / DELETE the whole new-life endeavor. But standing there, keys in hand, we loved it just as much as we had back when we made the offer in the first place. Whew. We met with a plumber on Monday, and on Wednesday I met with an environmental remediation guy we’d hired to remove the cat-toxic carpet in the (finished) basement and remediate the cat-toxic sme