Packing and packing and packing

Thought I'd check in to let everyone know we're still alive, packing, packing, packing. We have SO much stuff. So far we have packed about 70 boxes, and in most rooms it looks like we haven't even started yet. Very disheartening. It's now Tuesday night and the movers are coming at 8 am Thursday morning, so tomorrow is IT. I must frantically pack all afternoon. Can't pack in the morning because I have little helpers...

Boos are excited about the new house and want to visit it every day. Yesterday, most unusually, it rained, and in the morning the boos and I went over to the new house to deliver a few things. We sat at a card table in the kitchen eating muffins and watching the rain, and I taught them "It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring..." They were entranced and wanted to hear it over and over. (The other thing they want me to sing these days is "I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair." I'm not sure why.)

One nice thing about the new house is that it's walking distance from a park. This weekend the boos actually rode to the park on their tricycles. I was a basket case by the time we got back, but they had fun.

Rocket Boy has been madly working on the garage (both our current one and the new one).

Here's the new garage with one wall of shelves about half done:

He's now finished that wall and also put up shelves on the wall across from it. Unfortunately all the shelves are full already. But our current garage is mostly empty, so that's good.

The new house really has a lot less space than this one, and more importantly, far fewer cupboards and cabinets. Our Boulder house has less square footage but it has cupboards and shelves tucked into every available nook. No one has thought to do that in our new Ridgecrest house. I keep telling Rocket Boy "we have to thin" and he keeps telling me "we don't have time" and we're both right.

Today I brought my clothes over to the new house (from my closet) and discovered that I have too many clothes for the new closet. So I did a massive "thinning" and came up with a huge pile to donate. Of course I didn't have time to go donate the huge pile, so now I'm driving around with it. I put the huge pile in the back of the Subaru and covered it with a blanket. I'm hoping it will just vanish. Along with about a third of our other stuff.

This too will pass, but not soon enough for me.

Dismantling

So we have a new house, papers are signed, money has changed hands, and we have a key and a garage door opener. Here's the house we chose:

Nothing too special, and a distinct lack of lawn, but it's pleasant inside and we think we'll be comfortable there. It's smaller than our current house -- smaller lot, smaller driveway, smaller square footage -- but I think we can learn to live in a small house again.

We now have two weeks to organize the move, so I've started packing books. Fortunately we saved all the boxes from our move 3 years ago. Spiders are living among them, so one can't just go out to the garage and grab a box -- one must gingerly grab a corner of a box and take it to the front yard to inspect it, then de-dust it, rubbing it on what's left of our front lawn, and only then bring it inside to be used.

Today I decided that it was time to dismantle the tortoise pens. Our landlord gave us the OK to set up new tortoise pens in our new backyard, which means we have to bring along all our cinder blocks. So I laboriously picked up each extremely heavy cinder block, knocked all the dirt and leaves and dead spiders out of it, and stacked it with the others next to the gate. Here I'm about one third done, with one pen mostly dismantled:

Here are some of the little critters that were living in one of the uncovered cinder blocks:

So THAT'S where cockroaches spend the winter!

And this is hard to see, but if you look at the inside corner in the foreground of this brick, you might be able to see a black shape with lots of legs and a little red hourglass? And it was very much alive. I decided to leave this one alone for now.

And here are two boos, helping me stack bricks.

Ha ha, helping, yeah right. See those two colored disks that Baby B is holding over his eyes? Those are toy "coins" that are supposed to go in his toy cash register. Instead, he dropped them into the stack of bricks, which meant that Mommy had to go get the picker-upper-thingie and manipulate it way down into the dark and grab the little toy coins and then DROP them just as I got them almost out of the cinder blocks...

Their little toy cash register was not my friend today -- earlier, when I was getting ready to go outside, the boos brought it to me and complained that it wasn't working. I inspected it and discovered that the slots where the toy coins are supposed to go were filled with all sorts of other stuff. Cursing, I tried tweezers, pliers, a letter opener, and finally a screwdriver, which I used to take the cash register apart and out popped all the stuff that they'd jammed it with: toy cars, pieces of a plastic toy fence, a marble... Grrrrr. Here they are, the little angels, having snack and making a puzzle, while the toy cash register watches over them serenely:

When we moved out here 3 years ago, boos were 11 months old and we couldn't do any of the packing ourselves -- just impossible. Now boos are 3 years and 10 months old and maybe packing is a little easier. Maybe.

House hunting

I'm not keeping up with any of my resolutions, minimalist though they were, but I'm going to cut myself some slack on that. In fact, I think that's going to be my #2 resolution for the month (#1 being a successful move): CUT SELF SOME SLACK. This is all just too stressful for me to also be critical of myself while it's happening.

So anyway, the last few days we've been looking at a lot of houses: eleven, to be exact. I think that makes a total of 17. Or something like that. They all blur together. If I didn't bring the camera along, I wouldn't remember anything about them at all. Actually, I'd remember lots of details, but I wouldn't remember which details belonged to which house. An hour after our jaunt this morning, when we looked at four houses, Rocket Boy was already getting them mixed up: "Wasn't the garage with all the shelves on Sherwood?" (It was on Rawhide.)

Certain aspects of Ridgecrest houses are a lot like houses anywhere in California. Other aspects are different. For instance, here is a fairly typical Ridgecrest backyard:

Isn't that lovely? Doesn't it make you want to move right in? I should note that inside this was a nice house. And it's in a very nice neighborhood.

Here's a backyard we saw yesterday evening, with Baby A running happily across it. It was associated with a very nice house, and a big back patio as you can see. Covered patios are popular in Ridgecrest. You can sit out there in the evenings and admire your dirt.

Another house we saw yesterday actually had a patch of astroturf in the front yard. We were not sure why.

Here's a yard we saw a few weeks ago, especially nice because it has that tree:

But we were iffy about the house, and while we dithered, someone else snapped it up.

The house I think we're going to apply for has absolutely nothing in the backyard, not even a weed. Just dirt. During windstorms, we'll really have to keep our windows shut tight.

It's so hard to keep plants and trees alive out here, and requires so much water, that a lot of people just don't try. Like they say, "Not xeriscaping, ZEROscaping."

We've always thought the backyard of our current house was odd, but man, it is a PARADISE compared to what we've been seeing. We're going to miss it.

Onward into January

Well, Ridgecrest is waking up after its long holiday sleep. I think a lot of people must leave town for the holidays -- if not for Christmas, then for the week after. But school started up again today and most of the boos' little friends seemed to be back at daycare.

The weather is very pleasant, not at all like winter. Highs in the 60s every day. On Sunday we drove out past Trona to Homewood Canyon and wandered through the old buildings associated with the old Ruth Mine, which was interesting. Perfectly beautiful day for it, even though my tummy was still unsettled.

January. Never my favorite month, even in years when I'm not being evicted. Four years ago in January my mother died. But even before that it wasn't my favorite month. It's always so hard to make the transition from colored lights and cookies to the cold clear light of a new year and all those resolutions.

I haven't made mine yet. I did write my list of accomplishments for 2011 and that's always cheering. Biggest success: potty trained the twins! Yeah baby! All else pales by comparison.

Number one on this year's resolution list will of course be a successful move, but once we're done with that I will need other goals. How many books do I want to read this year, what do I want to write, what else do I want to do with myself? Must give it some thought. Maybe I won't finalize the list until after we move.

For the month of January, my goals are to freecycle something every day, pack at least 2 boxes every day, finally get the holiday cards written and sent, and not let myself get too stressed out.

It's very cheering to spend time writing cards, fun to spend a few minutes thinking about each old friend.

Freecycling, on the other hand, is terribly irritating. Yesterday I successfully freecycled our original double stroller -- just about broke my heart to give it up, so many sweet memories of using it, but we don't use it anymore, so might as well pass it on to someone who will. Today, however, I spent several hours attempting to freecycle a dozen old baby sleepers, and I've still got someone coming tomorrow for some of them. It should make me feel good to (a) get rid of things we don't need, and (b) give them to people who do need them, but it's mostly just irritating.

And I didn't manage to pack any boxes today. Tomorrow for sure.

Hello 2012

Just a quick post to welcome in the new year. It isn't starting very auspiciously. Last night we had takeout Chinese food, and as we were sitting down to eat I thought, what the heck, let's open the bubbly now. Silly to wait until midnight. So Rocket Boy opened the bottle of sweet rose sparkling wine that I'd bought, I poured each of us a champagne flute full, and we settled down to our food and wine.

The wine was great -- not too sweet, just very very drinkable. I drank my whole glass and felt marvelous. The food wasn't bad either. The kids even ate it. As we were putting them to bed, though, I started to feel not so good, and after we said nighty-night and closed their door, I decided I needed to lie down for a bit. I spent most of the rest of the evening lying on my bed reading.

Around 11:45 I thought I felt better, so I got up and joined Rocket Boy in the family room. I refilled our glasses and sat down at my computer. I took a sip of wine and suddenly I didn't feel so good anymore. I raced to the bathroom, and at the stroke of midnight I was vomiting. Copiously.

I felt a little better today, but tonight the stomach cramps hit, and I had all that to deal with. Either sweet rose sparkling wine is not my friend, or I have some sort of bug.

Well, after this beginning, maybe the rest of 2012 will be fabulous. Fingers crossed.