With considerable assistance and patience from sophia_katt and a last-minute save by spoomeister, we're finally moved into our new house. The dishwasher doesn't work yet, the floor still isn't finished, and we've still got some electrical work to do, but we are, by God, moved in.

File this one under "things I don't want to do again any time soon."

A couple of quick stories:

Thursday morning I was having a not-really-suppressed panic attack as we still had some furniture with stuff in it, notably our liquor cabinet. sophia_katt was still emptying stuff out 30 minutes before the movers showed up. Fortunately we finished up before they arrived.

The senior mover hated building furniture and tried to move everything in one piece if he could. That worked right up until he tried to move my desk, which is *huge*. Somehow he got it down the stairs but then was stymied by getting it out the door. He made me take it apart. I made *him* take apart the bed.

Once we got to the new place, we had a genial fight over rebuilding the furniture. ("You don't really want to pay our rates to have us rebuild this stuff, do you? You'll do it much faster...") We compromised: he assigned his junior mover to help me rebuild the desk and the bed. As long as I don't have to do it, I heard him thinking.

sophia_katt's methodical moving style was a sharp contrast to my pick-it-up-and-let's-go moving mantra, but all credit and hosannas to her: this is the first move I've ever had where my kitchen was fully set up and unpacked the night that I arrived.

On Friday the storage pods showed up, all four of them, including my two tons of books. I was about a third unloaded before the hand truck my father loaned me finally died. I struggled through unloading the rest of the books into my back yard before opening the third pod to discover that it was full of heavy furniture.

That was a couple of hours after the installer told me that my brand new dishwasher had a leak and the Maytag service people told me that the earliest appointment they had available was ten days away.

Having a nervous breakdown has never sounded so appealing.

I called spoomeister instead, and on no notice at all he was able to come over and help me get my books and furniture stowed in the basement for unpacking at leisure. Blessings upon his well-shaven head.

And now, I must quit stalling and finish unloading the last storage pod. Someday, I say someday, I'll be able to get the last of the boxes out of here.

I'm shambling around like a tired and sore zombie. However, we're less than 12 hours away from the house move we've been working on for about ten months. I'm finally allowing myself to believe that the movers aren't going to take one look at our house and say, "sorry, call us back when you're finished packing."

I'm immensely grateful to sophia_katt for her help and patience all day. I only wish I'd thought to ask spoomeister for some lift-carry-and-place help, but oh well.

Weird moment of the day: On the first trip over to the new house this morning, I walked into my living room and was immediately greeted by a white-and-black cat.

I don't own a white-and-black cat.

Turned out it was one of the felines patrolling the neighborhood, who'd crawled in an open upstairs window to see what was going on. I ushered him out the front door. If he tries that trick when our cats are in residence, life could get a bit interesting.

"Yeah, these old houses are always archaeology projects," said the painter.

For instance:

There are three walls on the main floor covered with mirrors. Two of them are back to back, and I'm convinced that they're hiding a no-longer-used door to the bathroom.

Underneath the third is a weird matting that looks for all the world like woven grass. It reminds me of things I've seen in sixties ranch houses. I have no idea what it is or how it got there, and neither do the painters. Offhand I'd say it looks like something that would have been put up in the 60s or 70s.

If the whole room was wallpapered in that stuff - and it might have been, once upon a time - I've just discovered a new candidate for the ugliest room in world history.

Tomorrow they're going to start ripping up the floor in the kitchen and back room. Please, Lord, let there be no surprises under there.

I'm at that level of exhaustion-plus-adrenaline that makes it very hard for me to sleep. I just can't...stop...moving, or I fear I'll never get started again....

We have a couple of small home-improvement projects I want to get wrapped up before we get moved in, so we've been negotiating with a steady stream of contractors for the last month. The only *really* big project is some electrical work. Don't ask. The work is more or less lined up, and the electrician says he'll be able to start on Tuesday.

I'd given up on the push button light switches, but my mother and step-dad thoughtfully bought them for me as a birthday present. It was a very sweet gift, and I think it'll do a lot to make the older areas of the house look a bit more classy. The electrician will be installing them next week.

Yes, yes, the idea of the house was that we weren't going to have to do lots of work on it. And we don't. The idea here is that once we've finished with the current round of work, we don't want to touch the house for anything more than routine maintenance and the occasional plant or two for several years to come. If fortune is kind to us, we shouldn't have to (he says, knocking hard on a piece of wood). The roof is fine, the foundation is in good shape, the plumbing is nearly brand new, and we're getting the electrical fixed up.

My work is suffering. I was supposed to be working at home on a long-range planning project today, but was interrupted so many times by contractors and other folk that the day ended up being essentially useless. I'm way behind on my contributions to Metblogs and NikkiNewsNet. I'm just too damn busy.

I honestly don't know where I'd be without my friends and family. I'm getting a lot of help with the organizing and moving work, and I'm grateful for every bit of it.

Somewhere in the process of buying our house, I said to one of the sellers, "Hey, I didn't know you had a koi pond."

It was true. Our new house has a typical small Seattle back yard, mostly grasses and bamboo and beautiful Japanese maples. Along one side of the yard, there's a long, narrow pond, immaculately maintained. The pond has two tiny waterfalls, one on each end, babbling to each other constantly. And it's stocked with about a dozen tiny, juvenile koi.

"I know," said our friend apologetically. "I'm really sorry. We can have the pond removed if you want..."

"Don't you dare," I told her.

I love fish, and I've had an aquarium for a couple of years now. Now, apparently, I'm about to inherit a dozen more.

Why are they all juveniles? I wondered. "We'd decided a year and a half ago that we'd wanted to remove the pond," explained J. "So we gave away all of the koi and left the pond fallow over a winter, planning to remove it the following summer. Then one day we looked in the pond and discovered that the older koi had laid some eggs, and they'd hatched...."

The pond is sheltered and appears on first inspection to be well designed, with ample filtration, good pumps, and very clean water. It's quite small. We'll likely have to give a few of the koi away to avoid having too many fish in too small a space. But it's lovely.

So now I have an aquarium and a koi pond.

It could always be worse. sophia_katt pointed me to a page explaining how to obtain a pet cephalopod. Hm. I always did want an octopus.

As of 9:15 this morning, and after eight months of work and waiting, we have now, officially, sold our house.

It was surprisingly anti-climactic, only ten minutes of signing paperwork. We're renting the house back from the new owners for another month, so I didn't have to chase back to the house and supervise movers. Just another day at the office.

Now we wait another two weeks for the purchase of the next house to go through. Then comes a month of utter madness. Afterward, we'll finally be moved. If God wills it, we won't have to think any further about this crap for a long, long time to come.

There's still a lot of work to be done, but it feels good to know that everything else is under our control. All this waiting, well, sucked mightily.

I'm working at home on an "official" work at home day, designed for us to do some heavy thinking about a future project, and damn me if I ain't feeling more productive today than I've been in the last week. I should work at home more often.

We had an invite to a "Mock the Academy Awards" party tonight. I'd wanted to go. Unfortunately, my stomach picked today to go on general strike. I've been spending most of the day feeling wretched and subsisting on saltines and flat soda.

I'd feel better about the hangover if I'd been drinking the night before.

---

This afternoon I'd made it down to the breakfast table when I noticed a couple strangers, apparently local joggers, wandering around my front yard and side staircase.

I went outside. One of them cheerfully turned, pointed out the SOLD sign on my house, and asked if I was one of the buyers. No, I said, I'm the seller. Can I help you with something?

Oops.

It turned out one of the joggers was a co-worker of one of the buyers, and hadn't realized that the house was still occupied by the seller.

I'm so pleased that the buyers are excited and happy enough to be talking up the house at work. I am, truly. But I'll be so very happy when we get the move over with.

---

For our part, bubblesutonium and I have been spending some free time the last few weeks looking at decorator ideas for the new house. Nothing major. The new house has one bathroom with the World's Ugliest Wallpaper, and a number of Random Mirror Walls, and we'd like to fix everything up and repaint a bit.

I keep lusting after these push button light switches, appropriate for the house's age, but ridiculously expensive compared to a modern light switch. I might put a couple in the living room. It's the one room in the house that still looks more or less like it did in 1927.

---

Honestly, I think our cat Sandy will be as happy about the move as anyone in the house.

She stayed with friends for a week, in an area much less densely populated than ours. Her favorite perch was apparently right next to the window, where she could watch the local raccoons and birds and squirrels and the occasional wandering possum.

She's been bored to tears since we brought her back home.

The new house has a bunch of kitty-level windows looking out over a backyard full of birds and the occasional cat. I'm hoping she'll approve.

Once again, it's time to put the house back on the market. Once again, we must lose our pets for awhile.

The good news is that we think we've found a better situation for all of the pets. Our cats, Grover and Sandy, are staying with friends in Totem Lake. Our dog is going to day care during the day and otherwise remaining home with us. It's less money going out, and better comfort for all.

We hope.

I was only slightly less anxious when I dropped our cats off with our friends than I was when I dropped them off at the kennel last fall. I hope they'll be OK. It was very strange to go to bed last night and not have the cats around to snuggle with.

Layo & Bushwacka!, "Blind Tiger"

Sleep has been in short supply this weekend. We keep having to get up and get out of the house to avoid running into potential buyers.

With the dog home, we decided to take her to her Saturday morning greyhound "fun run." This is a weekly event sponsored by a local dog day care, where the greyhounds are allowed to romp together in a safe, fenced area. Amy was too tired to really appreciate it, but it was fun to catch up with folks, and it did get us out of the house.

Bubbles spent the afternoon in a law school study session. Lacking anything else to do with my time, I went to see Serenity by myself. It was a fantastic movie, a worthy follow-up to the sadly unfinished TV series. My only regret is that the Firefly DVDs are packed, so I can't go back and spend some more time with the characters.

And I didn't twitch after the movie either.

Had a lovely evening of dinner, talk, and wine with a couple friends last night, after which I crashed about 2 AM. 8:30 arrived earlier than usual. We were supposed to leave no later than 9:30 to avoid some folks who wanted to see the place at 10 AM.

The 10 AM showing didn't materialize, so bubblesutonium, Amy and I went home. Bubbles started in on her homework while I laid down for a nap. I got about an hour before we heard voices downstairs: another realtor had showed up, with her client, without calling first. We scrambled to get out of the house and ended up taking a 20-minute walk in soaking rain while they took a look at the house.

We'd just settled back in and started to dry off when Realtor #3 called and wanted to look at the place. "Once is happenstance, twice is a conspiracy," I told Bubbles, and we decamped for the afternoon.

We're hanging out in a favorite net-enabled cafe, the one with the cupcakes. I've had my headphones all day to drown out the sound of hyperactive children. bubblesutonium, gifted with the ability to tune out any audio stimulus short of a 135 decibel siren, has been crafting a legal analysis for some homework. I've been catching up on my news and blogs, noodling a bit on a chess problem, and reading through a primer on UNIX use for the Mac. It beats doing real work.

Ever onward.

The house has been on the market for a week and I'm being driven stark raving mad. It's not the lack of stuff. It's not even the fact that we try not to stay in our own home for twelve hours at a time. It's the lack of pets.

I derive some sanity from the fact that, no matter what else goes wrong with my day, my cats and my dog are always happy to see me when I get home. Unfortunately, my cats and my dog aren't here. So, when I walk in the door from a hideously bad day, I'm greeted by an echoing silence from my incredibly clean and empty house.

I hate it. I hate every last minute of it. I want my pets back, dammit.

I'm a motivated seller. Somebody buy my house.

---

While we were digging out a couple of weeks ago, I found a picture of my grandparents.

It must have been from the early '90s. They're both clearly aged, but Grandpa still has his glasses and his sideways smile, and Grandma still looks alert, and active, and happy.

Grandpa's been in the ground for five years now, and Grandma lives on still in an unending dream, unable to see or speak or or chew her food or move unassisted.

I like the picture better. I framed a copy and left it on my desk.

It's good to see them smile.

Our house just went online:

Buy this!

If you know anybody who wants a lovely house in one of the best neighborhoods in Seattle....

In no particular order, here's what bubblesutonium and I did all weekend:

- Painted the front door
- Painted the front fence
- Moved a bunch of crap out of the office (and my desk, in particular)
- Filled the shredder with paperwork twice
- Cleaned the garage
- Made a dump run
- Removed a bunch of recyclables from the house
- Moved a bunch of dirt and fertilizer from the garage to the sub-basement
- Cleaned the daylight basement
- Spackled several walls
- Attempted and failed to install two light fixtures
- Moved some furniture from the office to the garage
- Cleaned up the yard
- Moved a few pieces of art around
- Reset the light timers
- Cleaned the fish tank
- Did many loads of laundry
- Bought a new rug (for staging purposes)
- Bought new towels (for staging purposes)
- Tried and failed to fix a closet door
- Took the dog to playgroup and hydrotherapy
- Took the dog to the trainer who'll be boarding her while we sell the house

Oh, and somewhere in there bubblesutonium managed to get to all of her homework for her upcoming week of classes.

Labor ipse voluptas, my calendar says. "Labor is its own reward." I'm glad we're getting a reward here somewhere.

To everyone who made it to cons this weekend, and everyone who went to parties, and everyone who went to Bumbershoot, and everyone who relaxed, I can only say to each of you with love in my heart: You suck. Except for newlyweds blueraccoon and morganminstrel. Trust me, friends, you had more fun than we did, and you deserved every moment of it.

We wanted to put in the offer over the weekend, but the agent wanted to wait until Monday. The pre-approval letter took longer than we expected, so then we couldn't put in the offer until Tuesday. Our agent didn't get an offer form to us until 6 PM Tuesday night, so the offer didn't go in till Wednesday afternoon.

Somebody else gave the sellers a better offer on Tuesday.

Welcome to a hot real estate market.

I'm annoyed and disappointed, but it's probably for the best. Last time we bought a house we let ourselves get into a bidding war and regretted it deeply later. This time we're being smart: if they get competitive offers, we weren't meant to get that house.

I'm a bit annoyed at our agent for the delays, but in this case it wouldn't have mattered anyway: the other offer was for more money and fewer contingencies.

Ever onward.

Four years ago, Bubbles and I decided to move out of our townhouse. We'd picked out a place to live, set up a moving date, and taken a well-deserved vacation when a few humans decided to drive three airplanes into several prominent buildings.

This year, Bubbles and I decided to move out of our house. We'd picked out a place to live and set up a date to put our house on the market when a hurricane blew in like God's own fury, drowning a city, flattening several smaller towns, and leaving thousands if not millions temporarily homeless.

After this, I'm never moving again.

EDIT: Oh, and:

Go read Cherie Priest's comments on 'looting'. Then go give some money to the Red Cross. If that link doesn't work, try this one. You might also drop a contribution to the Humane Society disaster relief fund for their continuing efforts to round up and care for the thousands of animals abandoned and left homeless by the storm.

Edit #2: If you need other ideas, check out this excellent summary by rosefox.

Tomorrow I have essentially non-stop meetings or meeting prep from 8:30 till after 5, when I need to rush home to feed all the pets and take the dog for a walk.

Tomorrow we're putting an offer on a house we really like, which means I'm going to lose some time to filling out piles of paperwork. It also means I'll get to spend the next 24 to 48 hours on pins and needles waiting to see what happens. I hate waiting for things I can't control.

Tomorrow I'm going to my boss and explaining that I want to take six full weeks of vacation time all at once at the end of the year. When he climbs back down off of the ceiling, I'll remind him that the week of Thanksgiving and the two weeks at the end of the year are basically write-off weeks anyway, so it's not really that much time. We'll see if he buys it. I need him to take me seriously. I truly do need the time. I'm having a horrible time concentrating at work. I'm tired, cranky, mildly depressed, overweight, out of shape. I need to get my head screwed back on.

Tomorrow is my last chance to make the house somewhat presentable before real estate agents start to show up.

Tomorrow I need to not be nauseous at work again.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of this week. If I make it to Friday in one piece, I'll be very pleased with myself.

Some paperwork snags came up, so we're holding off on putting in the offer on the house for a few days.

Meanwhile, we're continuing to look at a few other options, so we thought we'd go take a look at some townhomes today.

In Seattle, lots of older homes are getting knocked down in favor of zero-lot-line townhomes. Often on smaller lots, they're laid out with a single standalone house in front, and a matching duplex townhome in the rear (or vice versa.)

When we pulled up to townhouse #1, a group of obvious UW frat boys were coming out of the unit, with a realtor barely older than they were. We were getting the evil eye from all of them, and it took me a minute to figure out why: they'd decided to buy the front unit for their new frat house, and they thought we were going to give them a competing bid.

Actually, we were interested in one of the rear units, and it was a nice one - well laid out with decent features. I wouldn't have dared put an offer on it. Our realtor's comment as the frat boys drove off: "Well, the value of these homes just dropped by $10K." I wonder if the frat boys noticed that the garages are going to be completely unusable until the builder rip up the concrete and move the drains to where they belong?

Townhouse #2 was cheap: cheap design, cheap structure, cheap fit and finish. It might have made a decent starter home for someone, if they'd knocked the price down by about $50K.

Townhouse #3 was well designed and constructed, but had bilirubin-colored carpet and a couple of weird spaces built into the wall for flat screen televisions. No, thanks.

House-hunting is such fun.

"I'm here to pick up your storage boxes," said the gentleman from Hansen Moving.

He lowered a small forklift off of his flatbed truck, made several small adjustments, and pulled it over to the first storage pod. Once he had himself situated, the driver pulled a lever.

The storage pod didn't move an inch. The forklift rose a few feet in the air.

Oops.

Turns out we were a bit too efficient in packing one of the pods. It's about twice as heavy as the forklift. So tomorrow they're going to deliver a fourth pod, whereupon I'll get some exercise transferring about half of the contents of the first pod to the fourth.

Murphy, meet Finagle. Finagle, meet Murphy.

The pod people arrived awhile back. They deposited three large red storage pods in our driveway and then left. But they'll be back. Oh yes. They'll be back.

We didn't have as much packing help this weekend as I'd hoped, but we made do. I'm very grateful to spoomeister, achyvi, sophia_katt and Strahd for agreeing to pack, lift, and haul stuff.

With 95% of the books, art, and general clutter out of the house, the house looks and feels very odd. It's larger than you think, for one thing, and right now it looks very...bland. A lot of the personality of the house, for me, was the artwork. With the art gone it feels like...just another house. A nice one, to be sure, but not ours.

We took an hour out to look over a couple of house possibilities this weekend. Home #1 was a beautiful remodel in a fabulous location. It suffered from two problems: first, there was no gas line to the house, and it was still running an oil furnace. Second, the house had a river running through it.

No, really.

Just in front of the house, in a deep ditch, was a protected stream. To reach the house, you walked over a bridge, carefully designed to look like a regular walkway. The basement of the house had recently been redone and looked beautiful, but if you looked in one hidden corner, you could see the extensive water damage marks.

Home #2 was a huge house, close to the size of our current place. Like our current place, it was used as an 'illegal' duplex, meaning that it was set up for two independent families but had only one electric and gas meter. Unlike our current place, it had never been retrofitted back to a single home. In fact, it had never been retrofitted at all. The whole place had the same decor, kitchen(s), and quirks as when it was built around 1962.

No more project homes for us right now, thanks.

Ever onward.

Awhile back somebody asked how many books I had, and I said I didn't know.

Now I do.

I have too damn many books.

Specifically, I have enough books (and art, and DVDs) to fill a portable storage pod, floor to ceiling, front to back, with a few left over.

I know this because I, and several heroic friends and family, have spent most of the weekend packing almost every book we own into many, many boxes.

This is how insane I have become: when we came home from dinner tonight, both H and I noticed an odd odor. When we couldn't find an obvious pet-related source, I waited until H was looking the other way before unobtrusively sniffing one of the tape dispensers. No, the odor was not the fumes from the packing tape.

Aside from huffing packing tape and dust bunnies all weekend, it's been very quiet. The dog is neither well nor happy, especially now that we've cut back her pain meds. Sadly, there isn't much more that we can do for her at the moment.

(Yes, we've cut back the pain meds even though she's still in discomfort. We suck. The pain meds were knocking her flat, and coming off of them was not fun. One night the meds wore off in the middle of the night, and Amy became so disoriented she fell down the stairs. We decided it was better to ease her off the meds gradually.)

Meanwhile, I need to go to bed, but not before I give public props and appreciation to Ms. C, my Cuz, ferneyes, and SG for no-notice packing help above and beyond the call. May you each find a long lost and beloved item this week.

Did you ever have the feeling that you were watching your life unfold in front of you as a dispassionate observer? As if everything that was happening around you was a documentary being filmed by someone else, with lousy production values and a terribly boring script?

OK, maybe not.

---

We're moving. Time to downsize into something a bit smaller and more affordable. I've little idea where, yet, though H has been pursuing an interesting sustainable-construction project one neighborhood south of here. We're not leaving town, since H is in school. We kinda like it here anyway.

The first challenge will be to sell the current place. We've hired a jaded-but-highly-effective real estate agent and her brother to help us get something together. The current plan is to get the place cleaned out and ready to show by early September. And hope and pray that it sells quickly so we can get on with our lives.

I hadn't wanted to do this yet, particularly since we're likely to move again in about 4-5 years or so once H gets out of school. Oh well. Change is good.

---

I seem to be terribly nonverbal tonight. I'll try this again tomorrow.