I’m back from my moving break. That doesn’t mean I’m through with moving. I have finished physically relocating from one home to the other. I turned over the keys to my apartment yesterday, and all of my belongings are in my house. But I am far from being truly moved in. There’s still a lot of unpacking and arranging to do. Everything is in piles or boxes.

I more or less have the bathroom and kitchen set up, though the kitchen is still somewhat cluttered. It’s downstairs and near the front door, so it’s where a lot of things got dropped before I tried to take them any farther. I have things in the cabinets, but I need to get a few organizational items to really finish setting up. The bedroom is set up to be able to sleep. My clothes are in various suitcases and bins in different rooms. The closets are tiny, so I’m figuring out other things I can do. I’m putting hooks on the closet walls for some things. My knit clothes are all getting folded and put in cubes that go on shelves. I’m probably going to get a couple of zip-up wardrobes at Ikea to go in the basement for out-of-season clothes. In the meantime, getting dressed in the morning can be a bit of a hunting expedition.

The living room (or I guess it would be considered a den) is mostly set up, though I still need to shelve all the books. I also need to get a rug and a sofa, but it will have to be a small sofa and something that you can take apart so it will fit through the door. I was looking at one at a furniture store here, but the door would have to be six inches wider to get it into the room (it’s not even all that narrow a door. It’s a modern sliding glass door, so I don’t know who could buy this small sofa and get it into their house). So I may end up doing Ikea for that, too. In the meantime, I’m using my patio lounger as a recliner for watching TV.

My office is pretty much a lost cause for now. I’m going to get all new furniture for that room, so the books will be mostly unshelved for the time being. I’m trying to get back into a writing schedule, but I’m using a laptop desk and migrating around the house until I get the office figured out. I think I’ve found a desk that will work, and if I key off that, the office will end up being kind of steampunky.

Then there’s the yard. I learned from a neighbor that this house had been abandoned for years until the people I bought it from got it at auction and remodeled it. I guess they got it early in the year and were working during the winter, so there wasn’t much going on in the yard. Now it’s exploded as spring has hit. It’s been allowed to run wild. They took out a few trees that were dangerously close to the house, but they didn’t get rid of any plants. There are a lot of flowers out there. But there are also a lot of weeds. I’ve discovered some poison ivy, and I’m trying to identify what else is out there so I’ll know what to dig up or kill and what to encourage. In the meantime, it looks kind of wild. My neighbor has offered to let me use some of his power tools, but I’m not sure you could get a mower through the yard because it’s a pretty steep hill. I’m planning to get rid of what grass there is and replace it with ground cover.

I know I have a few redbud trees, a plum tree or two (but I don’t know if they’re ornamental or if they bear fruit), and a maple, but I’m not sure of the other trees. There’s a huge bush that turned out to be a lilac. There are a lot of plants that seem to be various kinds of lilies, but they haven’t bloomed yet. I discovered the “identify” feature on my phone that looks up what you’ve taken pictures of, and that’s helped me figure out some of the plants, but I know some of their identifications are wrong, so I’m not sure how much I trust it. I may have to take my phone to a garden center and play “kill or keep” before I decide what plants to buy.

I’ve been living on frozen dinners for a couple of weeks since the kitchen has been too disorganized for cooking. I think I’m going to graduate myself to convenience meals this week. The stove has a glass top, so I’m going to have to learn how to use that at least enough to boil pasta. Then maybe next week I’ll move back to real cooking, of the sort that requires chopping and measuring. Right now, things are too chaotic for that.

I do love the house, though. It’s much quieter than the apartment. I’m near the end of a dead-end street, so there’s next to no traffic, and I don’t have an upstairs neighbor’s kid jumping up and down and screaming. Supposedly, shaking up routines and doing things in different ways is good for creativity. If so, then I should become wildly creative because the house is so different from anywhere I’ve ever lived that I can’t just put things in the obvious places that correspond with where they’ve gone before. I’m having to come up with entirely different organizational schemes that involve entirely different routines.

I’m trying to get back to writing instead of spending all day unpacking and organizing. I’m alternating a little work with a little housework. We’ll see if I can focus enough to get anything done.