I meant to post earlier and let everyone know we survived the move, but on top of everything else going on we were both hit with some sort of nasty cold last week and in my case it decided my lungs were a nice place to settle in for the long haul. I finally had to take a day off work yesterday and just stay in bed to try and fight it off. Still coughing a lot, but much better today.

So we are moved in and slowly getting settled. The weekend we moved we couldn’t use the tub until Monday but the rest of the plumbing was operational and we have a brand new tub. The plumbing is now connected for the washer, but the hot water doesn’t work so we’re using the laundromat for some stuff while we wait for that to be fixed. The old tub and all the other crap torn out of the bathroom is still on our front porch, but we’re trying to be patient about that.

Joy’s recently repaired Jeep seems to have the ‘hiccups’ when accelerating and we still haven’t had a chance to get the Ouchlander looked at. We’ve made at least a dozen trips to Lowes and Home Depot, mostly to buy and return the same couple of items over and over that we just couldn’t find in the right size (stove burner insert pans for the old house and new) and the new house came with both fleas and ants. Hopefully things will settle down soon.

It’s been a huge relief to get away from London Road, which has a speed limit of 30 MPH but has a constant flow of delivery trucks, cars with loud bass, motorcycles, and 18-wheelers, all going between twenty and fifty miles over the posted speed limit. We’ve got one neighbor at the new place who has kids that zoom up the road with an ATV and a dirt bike, which is annoying, but it’s not the constant barrage of noise and exhaust smell we lived with before. We wake up to the sound of roosters crowing instead of sirens screaming now. Running out of milk or realizing we’re missing a recipe ingredient is a bit of a pain; no more quick trip to the grocery store as the nearest one is five miles away — but I suppose it does cut down a bit on ‘impulse munching’ as well. We’ve got a resident chipmunk that lives in a rockpile on the property, and lots of cardinals, blue jays, and other birds. It’s neat to sit on your back deck and hear cows and geese (or ducks? we aren’t sure) off in the distance.

On a sad note, we had put Wednesday to sleep last week. She was in an increasing amount of discomfort from both the rapidly growing tumor on her back, and the bladder stones that could not be treated, and we felt her quality of life had deteriorated to the point where it wasn’t fair to ask her to endure any more. Her passing was as peaceful as we and the vet could make it, and at least her pain is over. Coming in the middle of so much other chaos, I think we’re partly still numb over it, and I half expect to see her come walking into the living room every morning.

We’ve taken a couple of pictures and started a small gallery of the new house. The animals all seem very happy there and are enjoying being able to see out all the windows and bask in sunbeams (we loved the last house, but except for one room, it didn’t get much sun) and we’re slowly putting things in order… We did end up renting an “emergency storage locker” at the last minute on moving day, when it became apparent that all our crap was not going to fit unless we planned to live with boxes stacked to the ceilings. How the heck did we accumulate this much stuff? We’re making a serious stand on clutter and have made several trips to Goodwill with boxes. The idea is that we’ll bring the boxes out of storage a few at a time and anything we don’t need/use/wear on a regular basis just needs to go. It’s ridiculous for two people to haul around this many material ‘things’ – especially as often as we seem to wind up moving.