A Cursed Day

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 that UPS store full of Pitt students, I realized with sudden clarity that when I signed those documents, I would no longer own our house on Hickory Drive. The reality hit me with such force that I began sobbing, a complete ugly-crying breakdown, which grew worse when the UPS guy came back and explained that he actually couldn't notarize them because Pennsylvania law required me to have a witness, despite the fact that our New Jersey lawyer had told me I didn't need one. I cried and cried and apologized and assured him I wasn't crying about his rules / laws, I was just upset because I was selling a house I loved, while he looked on in mild alarm and lent me his iPhone charger, since I'd drained my phone battery listening all morning to an audio book. Sigh. My dear dear friend Beth, answering my distraught call, left work and served as my witness. And that part of the day was done.

But the day wasn't over! Not even close! At three, I picked up the kids at school. Distracted and still a little wrung-out from the UPS episode, I misjudged a curb while making a turn out of the school parking lot and heard the dreaded flapping of a shredded tire. I drove as far as I could--we live about five minutes from the school, and I thought maybe I could get home--but it was not to be. I pulled onto a side street into a legal parking space, made a flurry of WTF DO I DO NOW phone calls to Andrew and my parents (because I was driving their car!!! Andrew has our Volvo in New Jersey!), and accepted the reality that our Volvo On Call membership would do me no good since I was driving my parents' Honda Civic. I Googled "Pittsburgh flat tire" and called the first result that came up. Fortunately he was super nice and said he'd come out right away to help.

But that's not all! While I was on the phone with the tire guy, crouched on the street to read off some numbers from the flattened tire, the young kid who got into the parked car in front of me BACKED INTO MY CAR. The tire guy was privy to my string of disbelieving exclamations (ahem) and gave me a discount because, he said, it sounded like I was having a Really Bad Day. Indeed. 

Fortunately, there was no damage to my parents' car. Fortunately, the tire was easily changed. Fortunately, once we (finally) got home I did not have to leave the house again. We ate a pretty terrible frozen pizza for dinner and I opened a bottle of wine. 

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, early in the morning Andrew went out to the garage to gather up some garbage bags full of paint cans he'd arranged a trash hauler to pick up, and realized that the paint hadn't been dried out after all and had, instead, leaked in a giant puddle all over the driveway. He had to hose it all off, desperately, trying to push all the paint into the grass alongside. You know what that was, right? That was the equivalent of my red-nail-polish-in-the-bathtub moment, Brooklyn 2012. Just sheer desperation and horror. Poor guy. I've invited him to write a guest post about his time alone in Maplewood, doing the work of ten people to get our house in final shape. So stay tuned for that.

But--yes!--THAT'S NOT ALL! At 2:30am last night, I was awakened from a dead sleep by the chirping of a low-battery smoke detector. (I'm plagued by wee-hour chirping smoke detectors. But that's a whole other post.) This house is so empty and echo-y that it took me a long time to figure out where the chirping was coming from. I will tell you that I do not like being alone at night, and I definitely do not like skulking around the house at 2:30am with a chair, and then standing on that chair in the back stairwell, unscrewing a smoke detector, and then going back to bed and HEARING THE CHIRPING AGAIN because it wasn't the right smoke detector, and doing the whole thing again. 

Today the movers will arrive with THREE TRUCKS' worth of our life. I have no frame of reference for this. It's going to be chaos. Chaos. This whole week is just a week to get through. I really can't wait to be on the other side of it. 

I don't have a picture that accurately encapsulates the terrible day I had yesterday, so I'll just include this picture of Farrah giving me the side-eye. She's absolutely miserable. I keep finding her hiding in odd places in the attic, huddled in closets and corners. She does not like boxes, she does not like Andrew not being here, she does not like L&G off at school, she does not like not having any furniture, she did not like sitting in the car for two hours yesterday waiting for a new tire. Her look is a very accurate #mood.