Starting to settle in

Yeah, I’ve been gone for several days, and I have a (few) reason(s) for that. The main reason has been, THE MOVE. I HATE ABHOR moving. One would think that after all the moves I’ve made, just as an adult (10, excluding going into & back home from dorms in college), I would have this down to a science, right? Never mind the fact that by the time I graduated from high school I had moved 9 times already. Yeah, notsomuch. I am a packrat. I save EVERYDAMNTHING, just in case it might 1. Be important someday, or 2. Be valuable someday. I come by this quite honestly, because my mother did it (and she openly admitted to doing so), and so did my grandmother (though she denied it vehemently). Edie (my grandmother), unlike her daughter & granddaughter, however, was relatively organized about it, and most of what she kept was paperwork. Over the years, we have gotten rid of tax returns and bank statements that were as old as my mother was. I have NO CLUE why Edie felt she had to save those things, they didn’t mean anything to anyone except her, and after 5 years, she really didn’t need to worry about having to provide them to anyone. Mom, on the other hand, bless her heart, had good intentions of being organized with her paperwork, but it just never happened. Her desk was virtually always chaotic, regardless of how many organizers and sorters she had. I suppose that technically there was some organization, which was only understood by her, because usually she could put her hands almost immediately on whatever it was that she was after. Where my paperwork is concerned, I am much the same way, I tend to have piles here and there on my desk, and while most people can’t see any method to the madness 99% of the time I could put my hands on the requested item quickly. Mom’s problem, however, went beyond paperwork to dolls (which, granted, the collection was started for me), cat figurines, angels, Christmas stuff, books, and miscellaneous other tchotchkes. In the 7 years since she died, there have been multiple purges of her stuff. The first was in the weeks after she died, trying to make some sense of her ‘study’. The second came about a year later, when we were getting ready for the estate sale, and to put the house on the market. That one was pretty big, and a whole crew of folks (mostly friends of my sister & b-i-l) came over to help get junk out and CLEAN. The following January came the 3rd, when the house had been sold, and I was moving into a tiny apartment, and small storage building. A little over a year later came the 4th, when I moved from that apartment into a small house with it’s own storage building. The 5th came last spring, when I moved into the house I’m moving out of now. Mission Arlington came and picked up about a half a roomful of miscellaneous stuff, and I tossed even more. Now that I’m moving from a house to essentially a bedroom, it was time for a MAJOR purge. Last weekend my sister & b-i-l came over and we emptied the shed… filled 2 big rolling garbage cans with misc. paper crapola and other stuff that was not worth trying to sell because of damage, or worthless, or whatever. On Tuesday afternoon, Charter rang my doorbell. Now, I’d been up to the Charter office and talked to them the week before, told them I was moving and that my contract needed to be cancelled effective on Wednesday, and that I wasn’t transferring because I was moving to someone else’s house and I wasn’t allowed to have Charter (true), and that I would bring my digital box & remote by on Wednesday afternoon. They said that was fine. The guy at the door said I needed to either pay him the entire bill, or turn in my equipment. WTF? I told him that the service was supposed to be cancelled the next day, and he told me that regardless of what the agreement I had with the office was, I needed to hand over the equipment & he was disconnecting the service unless I forked over the $. (He was in the Charter truck, uniform, and had paperwork, so I feel certain he was on the up&up. I’ve got my receipt, just in case, showing that I turned in the equipment). That’s another part of the reason I’ve not been around, my service got shut off a day early. (BASTARDS)
Wednesday morning we loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly Weatherford (on a hill, actually). That move entailed my bed and most of the bedroom furniture, along with clothes and a handful of boxes. I did manage to get everything put away, except the clothes that are in totes and the big suitcase in the closet still, but I have enough out to get my through a couple of weeks if necessary. On Friday I went back over and had another friend helping me get some of the kitchen stuff sorted into sell or store, packing up some of the Snowbabies, and emptying the freezer before the fridge move the next day. (By the way, a Snowbaby has gone MIA, and I’m not happy about it. I realized today, however that perhaps it’s Karma or something, as it was called I Have Lots to Give, which I have always been able to say, but now, I really can’t. There was an initial idea that we could, for the time being, do a whole ghetto internet hookup, and run the wire down part of the stairs from the modem, and across the ceiling in the hall, then drop it down into my room. Yeah, that didn’t work out because the modem is not a router too, it is ONLY a modem, and her desktop doesn’t have a second ethernet connection. Now, I was welcome to use her computer (which is in her bedroom) if one of them wasn’t on it, or in the bedroom for something that they needed/wanted privacy for. A fine and generous offer. The biggest problems there are 1. I intrude on their space, and 2. My ass is just about 2 inches too wide for that chair to be comfortable. Yesterday we went and did more sorting, dumped about 4 bags of misc crapola trash, and boxed up about 10 boxes to come over here. Those need to be unpacked over the next couple of days until I’m planning to go back to the house on Wednesday to do some more fine sorting and pick up a another load. The estate sale is being put off until the 19th, 20th & 21st, because I just physically can’t have everything ready before then. My goal is to have the sorting and packing DONE by Thursday, so that on Saturday, we can arrange the sale stuff and get to pricing things. In other news, I DO have a trip planned, to Galveston, the first weekend in December for Dickens on the Strand. This will be my 3rd trip, and I’m excited to see the differences from immediately post-Ike last year to the state of recovery now. My Rogues will be performing, and with all the awful I’ve been dealing with lately, I’m so very glad to have something to look forward to! I’m staying home with animal-sitting duty for Thanksgiving, and that will be fine, because, well, did I mention the bagpipes at Dickens?? I think that’s about it for tonite, my drugs have kicked in and this is about to become a redonkulously silly & non-sensical post!

rough day

Today has been a hard day. I managed to coax all 4 of the kittens into the house with the food, and trap them in. The 3 originals were easy to get into the carrier, but the beautiful tabby boy was NOT having any part of being handled, and tried to get out the closed door, and then made his way into the kitchen and tried to go out the window that he usually sits in. THAT was a mess, he took out my pink ceramic parrot from Campo Verde, and my little elf man that had survived 1 leg/hand amputation & reattachment.

I had planned to clean him up and repaint him, because I do love him, he is older than I am, and spent MANY years sitting in a potted plant at my grandmother’s house, then at Mom’s. He’s now had his leg/hand amputation reamputated, his arm amputated to match that leg/hand, and had his other foot amputated, and chips are everywhere. *sigh* yeah, I think he’s going in the trash with the ceramic parrot. It could have been much worse, the crock from the large crockpot is still on the counter, the butter bell survived, and so did the garlic cellar. I eventually gave up and just opened the door to let him back out, and haven’t seen him since. I cried all the way to HSNT. I know that they stand a better chance there, probably, than at one of the city shelters, and I have a friend who works there, and can help be sure they find homes. The little tuxedo boy and the girl (lynx point) have already been vaccinated and taken to pet adoptions. They are both sweet, handleable kittens. She is much more of a cuddler than he is, but both allow themselves to be picked up and petted without putting up a fight. The grey is personable, but still pretty feral, he’s a flirt, and wants someone to talk to him, but doesn’t want to be touched, and is, of those 3, the mighty hunter… he regularly brought snakes and birds to the porch to show me, and there is a woman in the area who adopts cats to control critters around her barns, and he has a home there. I realize that this is the best option for them, but it was terribly hard for me to give them up, I suspect largely because they’ve been such a little spot of joy in my world lately, when it has seemed otherwise very dark. My situation is forcing me to give up so much, both physical possessions, but also my independence, and my lifestyle, and giving them up is one more thing that I am having to give up. I’m not nearly done packing, but most of what MUST go with me is packed, other than electronics that I’m not going to disconnect until the morning of the move.