Crash and Burn

What a month!

Lest you think the worst from the post title, the new house has neither crashed nor burned, but I have and in sympathy, so did my motherboard on my computer.

You see, I had the bright idea to go ahead and put our current house on the market now rather than wait for the new house to be complete.  Well, it wasn’t completely my idea.  My realtors thought that there was enough activity in the market to make it worth the effort.

They brought in a stager.  Brave woman.  We have been in our house since 1992 and have raised 4 kids in it.  She didn’t know what she was getting into.

7 hours later, we had moved a bed to the basement and turned that bedroom into a study, emptied and moved a very heavy buffet that was going to be built into the butlers pantry in the new house, and basically turned our house on its head.  Then she told me what else needed to be done. I was a sport, though, and I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

In the middle of the first week, I was on a first name basis with the workers at the local Goodwill and the liquor store – for boxes, I swear, for boxes!

And my computer died.  I moved aside the legos and the outgrown clothes in the back of my Suburban and hauled it to the computer store.  They broke the news gently.  Apparently the power supply failed and fried the mother board.  I didn’t know about my motherboard, but at this point my power supply was pretty close to failing.  The good news was that the computer’s hard drive was fine.  All I needed was a new computer and I would be back in business.

Like I had time to shop for a new computer.

So, I packed the whole business into a box in the basement and pulled a Scarlett O’ Hara  (as in “Fiddle de dee.  I’ll think about it tomorrow”).

As the second week of packing, stacking, and hauling to the Goodwill came to a close, the Goodwill fellas were talking about naming a store for me and I was eyeing more than the boxes at the liquor store. 

Luckily, I got a great tip from the guys at the Goodwill that kept me on the straight and narrow: Egg boxes make great packing boxes.  The only trick is that you have to call the grocery store at 7 AM when they are stocking the dairy case and ask them to save you the egg boxes.

It was at about this point that I lost it.

I was having photos of the house done on Friday, I wasn’t eating or sleeping (or cooking—just ask my family).  I was a packing and stacking fool.  Then one day I was checking out the progress in the new house.  I *hated* the way the light fixtures I had chosen for the breakfast area and family room looked together.  I walked into a son’s bedroom and realized that we had somehow managed to get the light switches  behind the door as it opened.

I snapped.

There was no need for a padded room; I had a nice soft pile of dirty laundry to collapse into back home.

My loving and supporting family jumped into action.  One boy who knows the way to my heart is to sweep the floor grabbed the broom and dustpan.  My better half retrieved the hard drive from the dead but not yet buried computer and set me up on an old laptop.

So, now that the real estate photos are done and the caravan has happened, I have gotten all my files back within reach. I am trying to catch up on the blog.

Stay tuned.  A lot has happened.