A couple of years ago, I got into a planning/time management program that’s really helped me with staying on top of things and being realistic about what I can accomplish. It starts with the big picture of your vision for your ideal life, then drills down from there to specific goals that will lead you in the direction you want to go, and then you figure out the projects you can do in the time you have available that get you to those goals. And then you break the projects down into tasks and schedule them.
It’s a quarterly process. My second quarter of this year was pretty much taken up by the move, so I didn’t even try to plan. Now I’m going through the whole process for the next quarter and revisiting the initial vision work I did, since my life has changed a lot. And I realized that I’ve pretty much got the ideal life I outlined when I started doing all this, before I moved from Texas.
Of course, I’d like to earn more money, and I need to improve the way I use my time so I’m devoting real time to both work and fun, but I’m in a position to have the kind of daily life I said I wanted.
I’ve got my little old house with a big deck and a yard full of plants and trees, so I almost feel like I’m living in a forest. I have congenial neighbors of the sort who gather on the front porch for a glass of wine in the evenings and who stop in the street to chat (our street is so quiet that you can stand in the street to chat). I live within easy walking distance of a downtown area full of restaurants and shops and venues for concerts and theater. I’m surrounded by mountains and places to go hiking and exploring. This was all stuff I dreamed of when I started imagining the life I wanted to work toward, before I was seriously considering moving.
Which means now I need to focus on getting my work life in order and actually taking advantage of my living situation to do the things I want to do. I’m trying to be more diligent about prioritizing and scheduling work, getting it done, and then moving on to do the other things I want to spend time on.
Summer is my usual time to really focus on work because it’s too hot to spend much time outdoors. It’s not as bad here as it was in Texas, but summer is still not my favorite time of year or a time when I manage to go out and do a lot. It’s a good time to sit indoors and write during the day, and then evenings are relatively comfortable (and late!) here, so that’s when I can go to things like concerts in the park or I can work in my yard.
I’ve planned my major projects for the quarter, and now I need to schedule the tasks and then actually get stuff done.
I’ve realized that the two main things I’m focusing on right now, gardening and revising a book, are actually somewhat similar. Both involve nurturing good things to make them better and killing and getting rid of bad things.
Or, as I’ve joked, gardening is satisfying because you get the joy of nurturing the life of beautiful things and the catharsis of killing things you don’t like.
In dealing with my crazy yard, I’m digging through all the mess to find the good things hidden among the weeds and invasive plants. Removing or killing the bad plants reveals the good, pretty plants and makes them healthier. It opens up the space and makes the flowers “pop.”
Sometimes, a plant that needs to be removed isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just excessive or in the wrong place. I have raspberry plants all over the yard. They may produce fruit, which would be nice, but in the flowerbeds they’re ugly and thorny. Meanwhile, all the trees in the yard have been allowed to seed offspring. I love redbuds and maples, but I don’t want that many of them, and I don’t want them in places where they’d cast shade on all the flowers. There are plenty of trees on this lot, enough to make me feel like I live in the woods. I can do “forest bathing” in my backyard. I’ve joked that I’m one of the missing Entwives from The Lord of the Rings, I love trees so much. The trees were one of the reasons I wanted this house. But I need to kill some of them and remove them so all the other plants can thrive and so that the trees themselves can be healthy.
Revising a book works the same way. You have to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t belong so that the good parts can shine. There are parts that keep the good bits from standing out or making sense. Sometimes meaning can be distorted or clouded by not using exactly the right word or by using too many words.
And there may be stuff that’s good — fun details, vivid writing, beautiful prose — that doesn’t belong. It’s good on its own, but it’s in the wrong place, where it slows down the pacing or changes the tone of the scene. It needs to be moved to a better place or even eliminated.
I’m not sure whether it’s good for me to be doing similar kinds of work in the two main areas I’m working on right now because it keeps me in the same mindset or if I need to maybe mix it up and not be having to make the same kinds of decisions all day. But this is the work that needs to be done now, so maybe I should just add some other kind of work that’s different.
I may have vastly underestimated what a garden that had been abandoned for years would be like when I wrote Tea and Empathy. I’m facing the same thing, and it’s absolutely crazy.
From what I understand, the person who used to live in this house had done a lot of work on the yard, planting a lot of trees and flowers. Then he had some kind of mental health issues and stopped maintaining the house and yard, becoming a hoarder, so the house and yard were full of junk. Then he abandoned the house entirely. A few years later, the people I bought it from bought it, cleared out the junk and restored and remodeled the house. They took down some trees that were too close to the house and must have cut down everything in the lawn because it was just about bare when I looked at the place, with only a few daffodils coming up around the shrubs and trees that were left.
The yard the day I looked at the house and decided to buy it.
I first saw the house in late March, then started moving in early April. And then the lawn exploded. So much stuff sprang up. A lot of it was weeds, but a lot of it was good plants, and the trick has been telling the difference. I figure that any of the good stuff that’s survived on its own all this time is a good plant to keep around because it means I won’t have to baby it. I’ve tried using the identification feature on my phone, with mixed results. There are some things I know it’s right about, some things I know it’s wrong about, and different photos of the same plant will be identified as different things. Then there are things I thought it was wrong about that it turns out to be right about.
There are masses of daylilies all over the front, side, and back yard, in huge clumps. I understand they need to be divided and spread out more at the end of the growing season. These have been on their own for a long time and seem to be doing okay, so I don’t know if I’ll bother doing anything to them.
The yard this morning. It’s a bit overwhelming.
There are hostas everywhere, a number of varieties, up under trees and in flowerbeds. There’s a big lilac bush, a couple of dogwood trees of a variety that keeps blooms for a long time, and a huge redbud tree. There’s a mass of spirea that the bees and butterflies are loving. There’s a bunch of plants that may be milkweed. Whatever it is, the bees and butterflies are all over it. I’m generally keeping anything the bees and butterflies like.
One thing the phone may have been right about, after all, is this ugly, thorny thing I was sure was a weed but that the phone said was raspberry plants. I found some back against the fence that may not have been cut down that are producing berries. I met someone who knew the man who used to live here, and she said he did grow raspberries. But they’ve spread. They’re all over both the front and back yards. I’d pondered leaving them alone until the fall and then transplanting them to a better place, but there’s a whole thicket farther up the hill, and that should be enough raspberries. I don’t want them all over the yard because they’re thorny and ugly. And, to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of raspberries. They have gritty little seeds and not a lot of flavor (though that may be because I’ve only had supermarket raspberries. I don’t know what these will be like). I doubt I’ll get enough for jam, but we’ll see.
There are some plants that I know are invasive. They’re the first things local gardeners warn me about. One is a plant called garlic mustard, and it’s all over the yard. Pulling it up is a massive undertaking. I got the plants from last year that were going to seed, and now I have to get this year’s plants before they can go to seed. The trick is that they look similar to other plants that are growing in the yard, so I have to be careful what I pull, and there’s so much of it that it leaves the ground bare when I dig them all up. I’m throwing wildflower seeds into the bare spots.
Then there’s something called tree of heaven, which is apparently very invasive, very aggressive, and even spreads a substance that’s toxic to other plants, plus it’s the host plant for the spotted lanternfly, another invasive species that’s a threat to the local grape growers at the wineries. There must have been a big one growing here that got cut down because another was trying to grow from the stump. I normally try to avoid much use of chemicals in gardening, but this is one where you cut it down and then poison the heck out of it. I’ve been cutting these down and pulling up seedlings when I find them.
I’ve got a lot of something that’s either catalpa or an invasive called princess tree. Either way, they’re very fast-growing because there was nothing there in late March and now they’re taller than I am. I’m killing the ones close to the house because I don’t want trees right against the house.
The previous owner didn’t leave any herbs that I’ve found. The raspberries seem to be the only edible plants (well, supposedly you can cook and eat the garlic mustard, but I’m not going to try, and there are some wild strawberries, but apparently they’re not edible). So that’s different from Elwyn’s garden.
Unfortunately for me, the garden isn’t at all related to my work and earns me no money, unlike Elwyn, so I’m fitting in that work around my writing work. I’m spending about an hour a day pulling weeds and cutting things back. Right now, I’m just trying to keep it from being an eyesore. I may have to wait until next spring to actually plan what I want to do with the lot. I’m hoping to keep it mostly natural with ground cover and flowers instead of grass. And preferably fewer weeds.
I’ve mentioned before that my life seems to be reflecting my books. After creating my idealized small town in my mystery series, I ended up moving to a town that has a lot in common with the one I created. After writing about a woman stumbling into a hidden village, I moved to a town tucked into a valley.
The trend has continued. I wrote about Elwyn moving into an abandoned cottage with an overgrown abandoned garden. Well, the house I bought (which is somewhat cottage-like) had been abandoned for years before the person I bought it from bought it at auction and restored it. The yard had been very carefully landscaped by the former resident, but it’s been allowed to run wild, so I’m having to gradually dig out all the weeds to find the good plants. I don’t think I wrote nearly enough work to get the garden back under control in the books. In my case, it mostly seems to be flowering plants and trees, not herbs. I haven’t run across any herbs. I have one tree that might be a fruit tree, but I’m not sure, and there are some plants my phone’s photo identification software tells me are raspberries, but I’m really doubtful.
And then there’s the fact that I seem to have moved next door to one of my characters. I’ve been re-reading a book I’ve been working on off and on for years, preparing to do another round of revisions. And then I realized that one of the secondary characters who appears later in the book, a character I created when I still lived in Texas, has the same rather unusual name as my next-door neighbor for the house I just moved into. Then the other evening when I ran into this neighbor and was chatting, I realized that the neighbor actually looks a lot like I imagine this character to look. She even has a similar personality. It’s eerie. I’m going to have to rename the character. The description on its own is common enough that I don’t think anyone would read the book and think I was writing about my neighbor (she’s well-known in town), but with the name, it would make it a bit creepy.
With the town, it’s clear in my writing that this was something I was looking for, even if it was unconscious at the time, and I found what I wanted. I had no idea how crazy the yard was going to be because the person who restored the house had cut everything back, and it was late winter when I looked at the house. The yard didn’t explode until after I moved in. But moving next door to a character I wrote years ago, with the same name, is a little unsettling. Now I’m going to have to try not to think about the character when I see my neighbor. Changing the name should help.
I have decided that June will be back to “normal” routine and establishing a new normal routine that works for my current situation. I’ve been living kind of like in vacation mode during the move, and now that I’m mostly settled in, I need to figure out what normal life will be like here. I can’t spend the days mostly goofing off and occasionally putting something away and call it “moving” anymore. I have been doing some writing work this week, but I need some structure and routine.
That means the weekend will be spent doing the last arranging and organizing. I won’t be entirely done, and there will be some fine tuning, but I want to be where it doesn’t look so much like I’m moving. No boxes or stacks in my main living space. Things I use regularly unpacked and put away.
I also need to get back into an exercise habit. While I was actively moving and hauling boxes around, that sufficed, but now I need to be more deliberate about it. I’m more active in the house than I was in the apartment, since there are stairs and I have work to do in the yard, but I’ve been a bit of a slug in between. I have been walking to church on Sundays, but I need to walk more regularly than that. I can easily walk downtown, and I rather enjoy that on weekday mornings when it’s quiet. There’s also a huge historic cemetery a couple of streets away (that’s the view from one of my office windows when the tree in my front yard isn’t fully leafed out) that’s like a park. It has walking paths and hills. Once I get the last of the boxes cleared out from my spare room, I want to be able to use that as exercise space. I’ll be able to spread out my yoga mat.
I got out of the habit of working in an office while I was in the apartment, so I’m trying to get back to that. I’m typing this at my desk. But this week, my main work has been re-reading a book prior to doing a round of revisions, and I find that my posture gets weird at a desk when I’m just reading, so my back and shoulders hurt. I finally got my den set up this week when my sofa was delivered, and it’s been rainy, so I’ve spent the rainy days sitting on my sofa, reading my book, and looking up to watch it rain. One of the big reasons I decided to buy this house was a vivid mental image of sitting on a sofa in the den and watching it rain, so I decided I needed to do that.
My den, now mostly set up and ready for a day of drinking tea, reading, and watching the rain.
The other routine I need to develop is housework. I’ve been so busy setting up and organizing that I’ve neglected the maintenance work, and I need to figure out what to do and when to do it. I need to also factor in lawn and garden work and schedule time for that. And I need to do more menu planning and get back to cooking. I relied pretty heavily on frozen meals and convenience food during the move. I’ve done some cooking, but I need to plan enough to make sure I have the ingredients, since I tried to use up as much as possible before I moved and now I need to start from scratch in stocking my pantry, especially since I now have a lot more storage space around the kitchen.
I often resist scheduling, but I find it really helps me because it not only means I get stuff done, but it also means I’m more likely to do fun stuff. If I don’t plan and schedule, the whole day can go by, and then I realize that not only did I not do anything productive, but I also didn’t use the time to enjoy myself.
I’m not even the newest person on the street anymore, so I have to get out of “I just moved” mode. While I was moving in, the house on one side of me was being remodeled to sell, and the new buyers closed on it this week. I haven’t met them yet, but I hope they fit into our quirky little street full of artsy and creative types. The neighbor on the other side is a fashion designer/textile artist, and there’s a radio DJ at the end of the street. The person across from me is very counter-culture (in a fun way), and then there’s me, the novelist. Supposedly there’s another writer around the corner, but I haven’t met him yet.
Now I need to unpack a few boxes and set up a couple more bookcases.
My adventure this week was a road trip to buy things for my house. One downside to the place I’m living now is that it’s a smallish, fairly remote town without a lot of the big stores. And one downside to my house is that the rooms are small and the doors are narrow, which limits the furniture I can get. I haven’t been able to find a loveseat or chair for my den that I can get through the door, whether the sliding door from the deck or the interior door (and the interior stairs are narrow). So I had to resort to something like Ikea, where you can assemble the furniture inside the house. I didn’t want to buy a loveseat without trying it out, which meant a road trip to the nearest Ikea, which is in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., more than two hours away (more or less depending on traffic). There were also decorative items that I wanted from another store they don’t have here but that’s near the Ikea.
The weather yesterday was good for a trip, so I loaded up with road snacks and headed out to drive across northern Virginia. It was actually a lovely drive, following the Blue Ridge Mountains much of the way, then crossing the mountains. I was surprised by how little traffic I ran into. The route my phone sent me on had me mostly driving through the woods, even after I got off the freeway, and suddenly I was at the mall where Ikea was. The traffic was a little worse on the way home because it was the beginning of rush hour, but it still wasn’t as bad as I feared for the D.C. area. The drive from my house in Texas to the Ikea there was shorter, but this longer drive was much less stressful.
I have a loveseat on order — the one I liked was the one people seemed to gravitate toward to sit on while the people they were with were shopping, which is a good sign — and after a break to have a Swedish meatball lunch I bought a bunch of organizational things. After that (and picking up some cinnamon rolls), I headed to the other store to get throw pillows, kitchen canisters, and a footstool. Now I have just about everything I need to set up my house, and it’ll be a lot more homey once the loveseat is delivered (I could have fit it in my car, but even if I opened the boxes and moved pieces one at a time, I didn’t think I could get the main piece up the stairs by myself, and I didn’t want to count on drafting a neighbor to help without checking with him first, so I had it delivered).
My living room color scheme is navy and ivory. I’ve already got a navy and ivory patterned rug. The sofa is a sort of ivory color, and I’ve got navy velvet throw pillows, footstool, and curtains. With all that velvet, it should be nice and cozy.
But today I’m giving myself permission to not do any work on the house (unless I really want to). I’m doing some writing work and putting my feet up because yesterday was a long, tiring day, not just the driving, but also pushing a very full cart through an Ikea, then loading and later unloading the car. I am looking forward to having it all done so I don’t have to think about the house, though then it will be time to focus on the yard. Today it’s a month since I started living in the house, so I figure I’ve done pretty well. I’m the sort of person who likes to be settled within a week or so, but I had to get so much furniture and organizational stuff, and I had to figure out where things would go, which took me longer.
I was rather overly optimistic to think I could have my office set up by Monday. I spent all day Friday putting together the new office furniture. Saturday I shelved some books but mostly took it easy because I had a dinner party to go to that night, and I was really tired from the previous day’s work. Sunday I painted my filing cabinet. It was that dull beige government office color, and I painted it to fit better with my new office decor, in an “oil-rubbed brass” color that matches the door hardware in my house. I’ve spent the past couple of days arranging my office stuff. The new bookcase I bought has drawers, so I’ve been moving things out of the plastic drawers I used with my old desk and into the bookcase drawers.
I thought I purged about six years ago when I reorganized my office in my old house and then again before I moved away from Texas, but I still had more stuff than I realized. I seem to be hoarding memo pads and paperclips. Memo pads are a standard writer gift, so they tend to come in the goodie bags I get when I speak to writing groups or libraries. Then there are the promo giveaway pads from conventions and conferences. I also can’t seem to resist hotel memo pads. When I have a meeting at a hotel and they have a memo pad at each place, I can’t just leave it behind when I’ve written on one page. I should never again need to buy a notepad for making grocery lists.
I’m not sure where all the paperclips came from. I don’t even use them anymore. I might have bought one small box, but I practically have a crate. They must be reproducing. I wonder if I can put some of them in metal recycling. Or I could string them together to decorate an office Christmas tree.
I also have a surprising amount of stationery. When I was in junior high and high school, I had some long-distance friends I corresponded with (pre-email), so I have a few sets of notepaper from that, and I know I got some stationery sets as gifts. For some odd reason, I have two sets of Garfield stationery, and I was never a big fan of that comic strip. I don’t remember the last time I wrote a snail mail letter (probably when my grandmother died. I used to send cards and letters to her when she was in a nursing home). I have used some notecards for thank-you notes, but that’s about it. I have a few sets of notecards with frog princes and high-heeled shoes that were gifts from people who associated that with my Enchanted, Inc. books (some of these may have been speaker gifts). I guess I need to find someone to write letters to, or else I’ve got even more stuff for making grocery lists. I’ll roll into the store with my Garfield note paper.
My old office had an entire wall of closets, and this one doesn’t really have a closet. There’s an alcove for a closet, but they removed the door and clothes rod when remodeling the house, so it’s just an alcove with a shelf. One of my bookcases slotted into the alcove. A lot of the stuff I used to store in the office closet will go in the basement, but I still have office stuff with no home. I may pick up some bankers boxes and put them on that upper closet shelf.
I have got all the office furniture and equipment in the office, and I put up the last set of blinds in that room so I’m not visible from the street while walking between my bedroom and the bathroom (not a huge concern, as there’s nobody directly across the street and there are trees in front of that window, but still it’s nice to have total privacy). I mostly need to finish shelving books and then sort out the other stuff. Then I may have a more or less functional office. I may need a couple of smaller bookcases, one to hold my CD player and some CDs for my working background music, and it’s possible I’ll need one more place to store copies of my books.
After the office is done, I need to finish setting up the den and deal with the clothes, which will help me know what I need to do in the spare room, which is going to be mostly storage, with what I hope will be enough open space in the middle for a yoga mat or an inflatable bed if I have guests. I still need a sofa/loveseat for the den. I’ve been sitting in my patio lounger to watch TV. I’m hoping to make a trip to Ikea next week to round out what I need. I’m looking forward to having everything all set up so I can just live and work without spending my days unpacking and setting up.
My project for the day is getting my office set up, and that means assembling furniture. I’ve been wrestling with a large bookcase, and later today I’ll get to work on my desk. My office is really small. It’s the smallest room in the house (other than the bathroom), but it’s the room with the best views (mountains!) and the most electrical outlets, so it makes sense as an office. I had to get creative with furniture. The desk is like a hospital tray table and it’s on wheels so it can move around. It’s not very big, so all the usual stuff that would go on top of a desk, other than the computer and maybe a pen and notebook, will have to go on the bookcase behind the desk.
I think I’m actually going to have shelf space for all my books — until I stumble across another box I forgot about. The spare room is gradually gaining floor space as I get books on the shelves. I put off dealing with the books because I didn’t need them for daily life, but getting them on shelves clears out so much space and makes room to do other things, so it was worth taking care of that.
I hope to have the office totally set up before Monday so I can maybe get back into a regular working routine. I’ve fallen into some bad habits during the move, and I’ll have to get back on track. I’m hoping that if my office is all set up, I’ll be able to focus instead of getting distracted by all the things I need to do.
Sunday it’ll be a year since I arrived in this town, so it’s been more than a year since I’ve had a dedicated office instead of a combined living room/dining room/office/kitchen. I still managed to write a book and revise a couple more, but it’ll be nice to have a real working space again.
Then I’ll have to avoid getting distracted by staring at the mountains.
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.
It looks like I’ll be closing on the house either Thursday evening or Friday morning, and I’ll start moving soon after that, with the furniture going on April 21, so I think I’m going to take a break from posting for a week or so. That’s just one more thing to deal with when I’m already pretty overwhelmed.
Yesterday morning I had the final walkthrough to make sure they’d done the repairs I asked for. That also meant I got to see the backyard redbud trees in full bloom. I hope they’re still pretty when I get there. Today has been the Getting Stuff Done day. I’ve set up electricity, water, and Internet at the new place. Now I just need to finalize the insurance and the wire transfer for the purchase.
I’ve already boxed up a lot of books, probably at least a carload. As soon as I close, I’m going to try to get a load over. I don’t want to get a bunch of new boxes, so the plan is to fill up all the boxes I’ve got, take them to the house (it’s about a 5-minute drive), unload the boxes in the spare room that won’t have any furniture in it yet, then bring the empty boxes back and fill them for another trip. Almost all the fiction is boxed up. I just have the reference books and other nonfiction and the “brag bookcase” of the books I wrote. That’s still a lot of books. Since the earliest I could get movers was the 21st, I hope to have just about everything but the furniture and the daily life essentials (the bedding, some clothes, enough dishes to eat breakfast that morning) at the new place by then. And then I’ll just need to clean the old place and get the new place properly set up.
When I was getting ready to move about this time last year, I was doing a massive purge, so I had to make a lot of decisions about what to keep, and then I had to take things to the various donation places, and that took a lot of time. For this move, I don’t have to make decisions and I probably won’t be getting rid of things (I may pare the wardrobe a bit further now that I know what I haven’t worn in the past year, but I may not worry about running things around to thrift shops before I move). It’ll be a lot easier to just throw things in boxes.
While I was out yesterday, I stopped by a couple of furniture stores, and I think I may have found the sofa (loveseat) I want. I’m going to wait until I get my furniture in the house before I make any decisions, though. I also need to get a washer and dryer, some blinds, and lots of storage stuff. I will be breaking my personal record for most money spent in a single month, given that I’m buying a house, plus getting all this stuff.
But this will be the view from my living room. It’s glorious at this time of year, and the redbuds will also have lovely fall color. Which reminds me, I’ll also be getting more plants for the yard and deck while I’m shopping. But that will wait. I never put out plants until after Easter. We’re still getting freezes at night. I’ll be planting morning glories as soon as the weather is right.
Now to tick the last few tasks off today’s epic to-do list.
