Something odd was going on at our McDonald’s this morning. (I warn you this does not turn out to be an interesting story.) Normally there is a steady line for the drive-through plus plenty of cars in the parking lot; this morning the parking lot was empty except for a few cars in the employee area, and I was the only one in the drive-through. Hash browns were listed as $2.00 but rang up at $2.19. The clerk didn’t give me my change, which I decided not to discuss as (1) it was a matter of a few cents, (2) she had already closed the drawer and walked off, and I was not sure we could successfully recreate the transaction without more time and hassle than those cents were worth, (3) there was room to believe it was a misunderstanding and/or my fault (I was digging for payment in the change compartment in dim light, and may have given her different coins than I thought I did; she may in fact have received too few coins but decided not to pursue it), and (4) when she returned to the window, she coughed in a way that made me think it was probably best not to receive coins from her hand. There was egg on the Sausage McMuffin Without Egg, and a half-inch stack of napkins in the bag when normally they give me one single napkin. It was all a little odd.

Last night I dreamed that I had a job at a coffee/doughnut place (I did work at such a place for awhile in high school), and that it was discovered that a male employee had doodled the first name of a female employee along with his own last name. This was seen by all as completely charming, and the woman in question was sought out so we could share the news. But she was not into him. She was nice about it, but she just didn’t feel that way about him, and in fact had a boyfriend. It was sad for us all. Until the guy started ramping it up. You know the way guys sometimes do when they think THEY are following the romantic script precisely and so you ought to be saying YOUR lines. He started getting agitated and mentioning the Friend Zone, and talking about how women SAY they like nice guys but they don’t, and asking her for reasons WHY she didn’t like him (my dude, why do YOU not like EVERY person who gets a crush on YOU?), and comparing himself favorably to the guy she DID like—all signs that things are getting potentially dangerous. I was glad to wake up.

Part of the reason for this dream, I think, is that before I went to bed I overheard William explaining to Rob why he’d decided not to apply to one of the colleges he’d planned to apply to. He (William) had looked the school up in a couple of those guides that tell you what the culture at that school is like, as reported by students. In general he already didn’t like the sound of it: it said that everyone there is into computers or engineering, and everyone studies a lot and then plays video games and not much else, and everything’s very competitive. But then it added that because there are so many more male students than female students, there is a particular term used for women to indicate that they (the women) get very full of themselves because of so much male attention, and that they (the women) start thinking they’re too good for anyone.

Hm. I was immediately pretty clear that this was the male spin on what is happening, and not an accurate one, and furthermore the whole thing sets off multiple red lights for me. Happily for me (I was comfy in my chair and about to head for bed and not in the mood to Explain It to a Man), William was also of this view, and also had an immediate negative reaction to it. He started looking around on other websites (such as a message board for students at that college) to see if there was much backlash about this. For example, was anyone saying “Listen, do the women have any choice here other than (1) accept all male attention indiscriminately or else (2) get labeled this gross term? Are female students allowed to want to study and not date (or to date, but not date these male students)? Is a female student allowed to see differences among people and to have preferences among them and to be attracted to some of them but not others of them (just as men can be attracted to one person but not another), without those personal preferences being considered evidence of how terrible women are in general?”

William could not find evidence of such a view. Rob argued that probably people WERE saying that, or at least thinking it, even if it wasn’t displayed. William felt that if it wasn’t clearly evident wherever the topic was being discussed, that wasn’t a good sign. He also felt it was a bad sign that there didn’t seem to be many women participating in the online groups. I felt like it was a good sign that he was seeing these things as bad signs.

Paul has plenty of things, big and small, that allow me to comfortably participate in any Husbands Are The Worst discussion that might break out in my vicinity. Here is an example of something that is small, and yet it feels to me that it represents something bigger: when he discovered that I had accidentally put a pair of someone else’s clean underwear in his underwear drawer (I don’t fold Paul’s underwear, so I didn’t notice it was the wrong size), he just threw it back into our dirty laundry basket. So then it happened a second time, because I do laundry mostly by room (mine and Paul’s together, Edward and Henry’s together) for easier sorting, so the only sorting/evaluating I’m doing of underwear in my room is “Is this mine or is this Paul’s?,” and that’s mostly an issue of dividing by color and texture. A pair of boys’ underwear is the same color and texture as Paul’s, so into Paul’s drawer it goes. Why would Paul not take the clean pair of underwear and put it into the boys’ drawer? Or even leave it out for me to put into the boys’ drawer? Why PUT IT BACK INTO THE SYSTEM THAT LED TO THE MALFUNCTION?? Why put CLEAN laundry into the DIRTY laundry?

Anyway, marriage is stupid. BUT. I will say this: we have been in this new house for one month now, and I have been basically the worst (moody, moony, dramatic, cranky, sad, slumped, despairing, snapping, and not reaching anywhere near my capacity for unpacking), and he has been consistently and persistently the best. He has gone to work and then come home and worked on fixing things that make me sad: the non-working lock on the bathroom door, the wimpy shower head, the chair that is in the wrong room. On weekends he works on solving larger problems: this weekend he researched salt, sand, salt/sand mixes, salt/sand spreaders, whether my minivan is front-wheel drive, what kind of vehicle we might buy next that would do better with a steep driveway, and what kind of tires might help in the meantime; he also went to the old house, disassembled most of the storage shelves, transported them to the new house, and reassembled them. He has done all of this while remaining cheery, and patting me sympathetically as I mope, and suggesting things such as maybe I would like to go sit in my sunporch for awhile.

When I measured under the wide sill on my sunporch and discovered we had only one set of bookshelves that would tuck beautifully under there, and the set of shelves in question were ones he had just finished filling with books, he took all the books off and moved the shelf—and then it did NOT fit under the sill, because our floors are charmingly uneven, so the sill was 36 inches off the ground where I measured, but 35 inches off the ground at the other end, so then Paul moved the shelf back out and put all the books back on, and he did one (1) sigh about that whole thing and it did not feel like it was aimed in my direction. It was a “welp” sigh.

All of this is to say that Paul has his upsides and strong points, hard as they may be to see when he is, say, reacting to each and every idea I have by saying “Yeah, I thought of that,” or when he is loudly vocalizing his sneezes.

Another thing in his favor is that he fetches my library books every week (I mostly use the online-request system) and also brings me other books that catch his eye that he thinks I might like. This week he brought me Unladylike by Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, which, with its strong smash-the-patriarchy theme, feels very supportive and validating coming from a man spouse:

I sat on my sunporch and read 97 pages of it yesterday, and I think it’s just great, and it is PACKED with great illustrations, and I think I am going to have to buy my own copy and also pressure others to read/buy it.

I have had two gins, and while I am soberly aware that alcohol is not a long-term solution to anything, I will say that it can take me from panic to non-panic in a pleasingly efficient way. I wanted to find a Dorothy Parker quote I remembered about how people may say many bad things about alcohol but no one denies how effective it is at relieving anxiety, but when I tried to look it up all I found were articles about her unfortunate relationship with alcohol, and that is not quite the note I wanted to strike, so let’s move on. Unless you know the quote, in which case sing out. Perhaps it was not Dorothy Parker? But I was pretty sure it was.

Paul is walking on the treadmill, which is right next to my computer desk, so there is a steady THUMP-THUMP-THUMP sound affecting the composition of this post. We had intended to put the treadmill in another room, but it turned out the charming old ceilings were charmingly low in the intended room, and anyone over 5’10” walking on the treadmill in that room would bonk their head charmingly with every step. Paul is in sock-feet for some reason and he keeps scuffing his socks with a scrape-squeak noise against the treadmill belt; and also he is stepping unnecessarily heavily/loudly, the way it seems to me that men are socialized to feel free to do and women are socialized NOT to feel free to do, and right now it seems to me that this whole situation is an excellent argument against marriage/society in general and men in particular, so perhaps I should revisit my claims about the calming benefits of gin.

Where was I? Oh yes. So, while I am Tipsy Swistle, a lovely version of myself who thinks “Well, why not give the kitchen floor a quick mopping after I do the dishes? It’ll only take a few minutes and it’ll look so much better!” and “Let’s get the coffee pot set up for tomorrow morning so when we wake up we can just press start!” (and also while I am feeling so bolstered by your extremely bolstering variety of comments on the last post), I feel able to make a list of some of the things I like about the new house, to help balance earlier posts. The main downside of doing this is that I don’t see how you will be so patient with my whining/complaining/lamenting/mourning after seeing the list.

• Paul and I now have our own bathroom/shower. In the old house, we and the three littler kids mostly shared one bathroom, and the two older kids mostly shared the other bathroom. It didn’t feel fair (especially when one of the older kids left for college), but that was the way the house was arranged and that was what mostly made sense. Now Paul and I have our own bathroom off our bedroom, and so we never have to deal with kid clothing left on the floor, and the whole sink-counter is for OUR stuff. And in the old house, there was an unsolvable (APPARENTLY) problem of everyone using my bath towel as a hand towel because it was more convenient than using the actual hand towel, so my bath towel was always damp, and that was super annoying as well as exasperating (WHY?? WHY WOULD THEY ALL DO THAT?? Why would they even WANT to dry their hands on SOMEONE’S BATH TOWEL??) and caused me to simmer in resentment, and now that no longer happens and my towel is dry and crisp every morning.

• Also, we have an extra half-bath in this house. Our old house had a full bath and a three-quarters bath; this one has a full bath, a three-quarters bath, and a half-bath. The half-bath is right off the kitchen, which is not ideal, but it is fine—and I’m grateful to the previous owners for adding it (even though there seems to be a weird plumbing issue that makes the downstairs toilet gurgle and drain whenever the upstairs toilet flushes) because otherwise we would always have to go upstairs to use the bathroom.

• I enjoy the feeling of walking from one place to another in this house. It is a big weird house, and it was hard to figure out at first but now I get it, and I like the feeling of knowing how best to get from one part of it to another part of it—and even the feeling of very occasionally going the wrong way, because it reminds me that the house is big and weird, and theoretically I love big weird houses, even though right now the bigness is one of my primary stressors. I like when I need to bring something from one place to another place and I have to sort of LAUNCH OUT on that journey.

• White trim. Home fashions come and go with the phases of the moon, but my old house had medium-dark wood trim everywhere, and medium-dark wood trim is currently out of style, and all the in-style wall colors look right with WHITE trim.

• Many of the kitchen cabinets have shelves that slide out like drawers, and that is indeed very handy and nice. There are also some large shallow drawers perfect for things like plastic wrap and tin foil and baggies. For 17 years I have had my plastic wrap and tin foil and baggies in a narrow deep drawer, and it has resulted in a mild but steady discontent: nearly always needing to dig the roll I want out from under other rolls, and scraping my hand on the sharp cutting-edge of the boxes, and then a roll ends up just sliiightly angled so that it catches the lip of the drawer and prevents me from opening the drawer until I sneak a hand painfully into the drawer and push the roll down. Now everything is in a tidy single-layer row of well-behaved little soldiers.

• We have a view of a portion of river—or at least, we do when it’s winter and the deciduous trees have shed their view-blocking bounty. I am anticipating how interested and invested I will be in my daily view of this river: how happy I might be each winter when I can see it again, how I’ll monitor on a daily basis whether it is frozen/thawed yet, what birds are on it, etc.

• I have mentioned having my own little sunporch room (it was part of the bargain I made with Paul, who wanted so badly to move to this big weird house), and it is a very nice little room and I very much enjoy it. It is a four-season heated sunporch, a little cooler than the rest of the house in cold weather but not MUCH cooler. It is not large, but the smallness makes it feel cozy and manageable. It is big enough for a recliner and a side-table and a bookshelf and a mini-fridge. And it has built-in cabinets, which I use to store snacks and other things that are only mine. And it has a wide sill under all the windows, which I use for plants and decorative items. I put an electric throw blanket in this room, for when it is not quite warm enough, and a regular non-electric throw blanket too, and a framed photo of my wine-and-appetizers friend group, and a set of three little Hello Kitty items I have from childhood, and I am still working on it but in short it’s shaping up very nicely in there.

• The floors are gorgeous. Hardwood, and we had them refinished, and they are just beautiful, and I notice them all the time. They are not the wide-plank kind you sometimes find in old houses (the seller told us they refinished and flipped the wide-plank boards as long as they could, but finally had to replace them), but they’re very pretty.

• Excellent Christmas-decoration potential. The retro big-bulb Christmas lights that looked kind of tacky in our 1959 development house look super awesome and charmingly vintage/retro in this house. And I think colonial-style houses (as this one is) (you probably understood that from context, without that clarification) look especially gorgeous with a candle or wreath in each window, so there’s that to think about for future years.

• HUGE kitchen island. The kitchen design is actually inferior in many ways to our old kludged-together kitchen (we get in each other’s way more in this new kitchen, and the sink/stove/refrigerator are not set up well in relation to each other), but there is a GIANT kitchen island and it is lovely. It collects allllll the clutter, of course. But it is still lovely for all sorts of things. We had the kids’ friends over to decorate gingerbread houses (i.e., graham cracker houses), and there was room for eleven people around it, no problem, we weren’t even bumping elbows. It was also PERFECT for my wine-and-appetizers group: we had room for ALL THE APPETIZERS and ALL THE WINE, and room for all of us to stand around the appetizers and wine!

• I don’t know if it will last, but being in a new house has led to some new chore routines. I had the kids helping me before, but moving to a new house was like hitting a reset button for chore-assigning. I feel less like I’m The Kitchen Drudge, and more like part of a Clean-Up Team. Okay, the main part of the Clean-Up Team. But still.

• I don’t know if it will last, but we eat more often around the table, and that has been nice for change/variety, even though I don’t see it as a Required Family Ideal. Plus, it helps make sure the table is regularly cleared.

• In exercise news, I go up and down stairs so many more times per day, and also I walk to more places, and I walk with the kids to and/or from school. Plus, just walking around the house in a normal way is much further than walking around our old house in a normal way. The move resulted in me finding my long-lost FitBit, so I can see the clear difference in steps.

• The previous homeowner left behind all the custom curtains, and I like almost all of them. One room has black-and-white toile. Another has gold-cord-trimmed green/gold/wine tapestry. Another has a plain beige you’d think would be boring, but they seem perfect for the room they’re in, and the fabric looks so cozy/nice/quality, and the shape of the curtains is pretty.

• There is a ton of storage space. I am overwhelmed right now with where to put things because few of the storage spaces correspond to what we used to have, and not all of the storage lines up with the kind of storage we need, and a lot of the storage is unheated space up a teetery flight of stairs—but there is still quite a bit of it. This past weekend I unloaded all our cocktail glasses and wine glasses and shot glasses and vases and out-of-season mugs into the cabinets in the bonus kitchenette, and there was still room left over.

• Have I mentioned the bonus kitchenette? In the room we’re currently using as a sort of sitting room / library, there is a little corner kitchenette/bar. There is just enough room for one person to stand in it. It has some cupboards, a small sink, a dishwasher, a small microwave, a little bit of countertop, and room for a mini fridge. It also has shelves for wine/liquor, and ceiling racks for suspending wine glasses upside-down over your head.

• Pretty views out most of the windows. We’d looked at another large old house we liked, but the land all around it had been sold off and used for condos, so the views out every window (including in a large gorgeous sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows) were Packed With Condo. Not the case at our house.

• A really nice amount of pretty sunlight. Let’s see how I feel about that in summer—but in winter, it is really nice, and heartening. Most of the day I can find a sunny place to sit.

• Our bedroom is nice and warm. The heat in the house is very irregular, but our room is toasty even when we close the heating vents. It gets a ton of sun during the day, which helps. (Again, let’s talk again in summertime.)

• We keep being pleasantly surprised by how many zones/areas there are in the house. When we had the kids’ friends over to decorate gingerbread (graham cracker) houses, kids broke off in groups after the decorating was over, and there were THREE groups of friends hanging out in three different parts of the house, but Paul and I still had a living room to sit in, and Rob could still sit at his laptop in the dining room, and we could barely even HEAR the friend groups.

• The ceilings may not all be of ideal height, and they may not be even, and they may be cracking fresh cracks with every passing day, but they are not popcorn ceilings. I didn’t know I was supposed to dislike popcorn ceilings until I watched HGTV in the waiting room three times a week while William got physical therapy on his knee a few years ago. But now that I have been taught to notice, I notice. Our old house was built in 1959 and had all popcorn ceilings.

• I may have to think twice before hanging up anything on the horsehair plaster walls, and they may be bristling with fresh cracks with every passing day, and the paint may already be peeling a little in the bathroom, making me nervous that it was painted quickly and not correctly—but at least they are all freshly-painted in colors I find pleasant! And all the trim and all the built-ins are painted in a pleasing vintage-looking white.

• Cool doorknobs throughout. Some of those cool old cut-glass ones, and some cool old ceramic ones. Wobbly, of course, but we won’t dwell on it.

• There’s a propane fireplace in the living room and I love it. I just love it. It is pretty, and it is easy, and it is cozy, and it is relaxing to gaze at, and it is warm, and it makes it possible to have one room extra-warm without having to increase the heat in the whole entire house. (The propane fireplace is one of the things Paul would like to remove. I will resist yea even unto death.)

• OUTLETS FOR MILES. Sure, it turns out some of them were wired backwards by an amateur who thought he could just do this for fun—but bygones. (I can say “bygones” in that peaceful way because we found out about the wiring/outlets at the inspection, and the seller agreed to give us a credit for them all to be fixed.) The point is that if I am in my personal sunporch room and I want to plug in an electric throw and also a phone charger and also a reading lamp and also a glitter lava lamp, I can. This was not typical of the old houses we toured, some of which had verrrrrry sketchy/sparse electrical situations.

• The cats, after an initial period of adjustment, seem to LOVE it here. They were having some territorial disputes at the old house; this house, with more square footage and more separate areas and lots of alternate/escape routes, seems to help with that quite a bit. And there are still more areas we can open up to them if we put cat-flaps in some of the doors. Plus there are so many sunny spots. Plus they can hear the mice in the ceiling and they find that mentally stimulating.

• Heat-lights in two of the bathrooms. I love them. Perhaps one bathroom fan makes unendurable squealing noises and both bathroom fans vent to the attic instead of to the outdoors (??? WHY ???), but at least there are heat-lights!

• There are Interesting Details EVERYWHERE. Our old house was the kind that gets mass-produced as part of a large neighborhood, and everything was standard and builder’s-grade. This new house has been around for two hundred years and has been altered a number of times, and there is a ton to look at and admire and wonder about. Ceiling height varies considerably. Window height and style varies considerably. Some doors have interesting old locks, and we have a big box of jumbled keys. A number of rooms are a step down or a step up from other rooms. There’s a back stairway. There’s an old room that used to be the kitchen but is now a laundry room with a bunch of very useful old kitchen cabinets. There are bricked-up fireplaces. There are a few old built-in cupboards around the corner from the recently-updated kitchen. There’s an ancient peeling cabinet in the mudroom, with an ancient herb-grinder in it and some more-recent herb-drying dowels over it. There’s a weird little hallway between two rooms, and in that hallway is a sink and mirror. There’s a door in our bedroom closet that leads to another room. More than one person, upon touring the house, has said some version of “Now my house feels so boring!” Boring is not something I have minded about our old house, but interesting is fun in its own way.

• Good neighborhood situation. We’re on a busy street, which is not ideal, but right behind our house is a whole network of interesting and not at all busy streets. Lots of people walking dogs, hardly any cars. Lots of hills and little deadend streets and pretty wooded areas and an interesting mix of older/newer houses to look at, and an official walking trail through one of the pretty wooded areas. Plus we’re within five minutes’ walk of the center of town, with restaurants and a bar and the library and the post office and the place William works and some interesting little shops. And if I need to be in two places at once, the kids can walk home from school by themselves (it still makes me Very Very Nervous because I am not used to it, but in time I hope to be completely blasé).

• The driveway is hellishly steep and, right now, in the wake of a new move and the aftermath of discovering that a dusting of fluffy snow keeps me from driving up it and that I can’t really use the garage either, feels like a personal rejection by the house of me and of my minivan—but the driveway is LARGE. You don’t have to worry about having a lot of friends over (as long as it’s not winter): there is enough space for the cars. And it doesn’t snow year-round. And one day I may not be driving a minivan. And I might be able to do something about the tires in the meantime.

• China cabinets, plural. Long have I wanted a china cabinet, and now I have TWO. One is a corner cabinet in the kitchen, which I will use to display pretty things such as my pink Pyrex bowls, and the mug I bought because it was so beautiful but it is so uncomfortable to hold. The other is a more practical cabinet tucked away where no one sees it—except someone coming and going from a personal little sunporch room. I have put my grandmother’s china in that cabinet, and so I see it every day instead of once a year when I take it out for Thanksgiving. And there is plenty of room for more pieces, if I want to add some.

Today’s mood: “No, seriously: let’s stop unpacking at this point; let’s get the old house thoroughly cleaned and get the floors refinished and the ceilings/walls painted, and then let’s move back.” (What if I never DO adjust to this move, because it WAS IN FACT the wrong decision and I ACTUALLY DON’T want to live here? WHAT THEN??)

Tell you what: let’s talk about something other than my house panic. … … … I can’t think of a single thing. I have been sitting here listening to the clock tick for five minutes and I’ve got nothing.

Paul loves the house. He’s happy with it and keeps comparing it favorably to the old house. I think he’s worried too about what if I never really want to live here. Meanwhile I am wondering things like could we just keep both houses and I’ll live in the old one and he could live in this one? Because right now it seems like one of us is going to be miserable wherever we try to live. Or maybe not! Maybe one year from now I’ll re-read this post and think, “Wow, I barely even remember this!” Or maybe he’ll spend a year here and say, “You know what, I’ve tried that now and I’m done with it.” And we’ll lose a lot of money buying our old house back from the buyers (assuming we ever find buyers), who will have changed things important to us, and painted it ugly colors, and probably cut down the tree my dad planted when Henry was born. And we’ll never be able to sell this house, because who other than us would be suckers enough to buy it?

I haven’t thrown away our old address labels yet.

I feel like we shouldn’t have moved the kids: now we’ve lost that feeling they could have had about coming back to their childhood home as adults. And we’ve nearly guaranteed ourselves another move in the future, because this house would not be a good one to grow old in. This house would be a good one to break a hip in, or to fall down the basement stairs in and not be found for several days. So then we’ll have another move, and a house the kids have never even lived in. Our old house would have been a pretty good one to grow old in.

And really the only reason I even started looking at real estate listings is that I wanted a garage, and our old house (a raised ranch) was not a design that works well or looks right with a garage, and it seemed like it might be cheaper/better to move to a house with a garage rather than try to force-add a garage. AND THEN THIS HOUSE DOESN’T EVEN REALLY HAVE A GARAGE. I mean, it does, but it’s a one-car, and it’s far from the kitchen so it’s not great for bringing in the shopping, and the minivan fits so snugly I have to turn sideways to walk past. And Paul bought a new upright freezer and it was too big to fit through the door of the house so it had to go into the garage—but if the minivan’s parked in there, we can’t really get to the freezer. And our driveway is so hellishly steep, when there was just a dusting of fluffy snow I couldn’t get the minivan up it. THIS WAS ALL A TERRIBLE MISTAKE AND I WANT A DETAILED DO-OVER.

After I wrote about anticipating a post-holiday crash, the crash occurred—or possibly it was not a post-holiday crash but only another house/move-related crash, happening by chance in the post-holiday time. I will summarize for posterity: lots of thoughts such as “If Paul were to die suddenly in a car accident [*performs superstitious ritual to keep words from suddenly/magically manifesting as reality*], I would IMMEDIATELY sell this house and move back to the other one”—and then sort of daydreaming about that, instead of recoiling in horror. Or, similarly, experiencing one of my sudden usual fearful feelings about dying in a car accident myself, and then thinking sort of optimistically that the upside would be that I wouldn’t have to deal with the house/move anymore.

People who say “Trust your gut!” aren’t dealing with the same gut a lot of us have, are they? Because MY gut says “OH MY GOD THIS IS A DISASTER, YOU HAVE RUINED YOUR LIFE, SELL AT A LOSS IF YOU HAVE TO AND GET BACK TO YOUR DEAR DEAR OLD HOUSE WHERE EVERYTHING IS FAMILIAR!!!” But my gut said something very, very similar when I sent Rob to kindergarten (“OH MY GOD THIS IS A DISASTER, YOU HAVE RUINED YOUR LIFE AND ALSO HIS, THIS IS NOT NATURAL, HOMESCHOOL HIM EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE AN IMPATIENT AND INCONSISTENT PERSON WHO HATES TEACHING AND SHOWS NEITHER GIFT NOR INCLINATION FOR IT!!!”) and when I dropped Rob off at college (“OH MY GOD THIS IS A DISASTER, YOU HAVE RUINED YOUR LIFE AND HIS, GO BACK AND GET HIM RIGHT NOW AND BRING HIM HOME OR HE WILL DIE OF STARVATION/COLD/LONELINESS!!!”), and has also done so basically every time I have encountered any major life change, including when I weaned each baby, and when I sent each baby to school, and when I got a new artificial Christmas tree, and when I got rid of our old recliner, and when I replaced our old quilt, and when I didn’t notice until I got home that the grocery store charged me $4.69/lb for fresh ginger instead of $1.99/lb for red grapes. Probably also when we bought our old house, though it’s hard to remember that now, looking back on it.

Today is back to normal. My gut is still panicking, but it’s at the usual levels instead of the spiked ones: I’m back to my “the jury is still out”/”either way it’s an interesting experiment!” panic-overriding feeling, rather than sitting morosely in a chair thinking about all the reasons this was a terrible mistake.

Also, Paul fixed the ice machine in the door of the fridge. The breaking of the ice machine may have been one of the things that pushed me off the cliff, since the ice machine was one of the few things I was feeling routinely happy about, and then it broke. Paul kept looking online and then trying things, and then looking online again and trying other things, and today the ice machine is making and crushing ice again. He also fixed two of the non-locking bathroom doors, so that now they lock. And he fixed a hinge that was threatening to let our entire bathroom door fall off. And he replaced a doorknob that kept not quite latching. If he keeps fixing things, I’m going to have to stop wailing “And neither of us is HANDY!!” when I tell the story of why my new house might be a terrible mistake.

Also, I went to Target with a couple of the kids to get some boring stuff, and Christmas candy was 70% off, so now I have a whole bunch of candy and cookies tucked into the cabinet in my own personal sunporch room.

Also, as I was doing some sullen packing/unpacking, I came across two new electric throw blankets, purchased on clearance last year and put aside in case they were needed to replace Edward’s electric throw blanket, which he loves and uses all the time so I like to have back-ups. I let one of the blankets continue on its lifepath as a back-up, but opened up the other one and put it in my own personal sunporch room. And some long-sleeved shirts and sweaters arrived, and I ordered some more. And I found my wool socks.

And tonight is New Year’s Eve, so we will have all the snacks including pizza rolls and Pringles and egg rolls and chocolate-covered pretzels, and one of us (me) will have champagne, and that’s a heartening thought.

Well! I don’t know about you, but I am bracing for the post-holiday crash. I can usually coast for a week with New Year’s Eve to look forward to, and the pretty Christmas lights still up, and choosing the new calendars, and some fun clearances, and feeling as if it’s still legit to use the Christmas dishes—but after that it’s anyone’s guess. I wonder if next year I should save an advent calendar and start opening the little doors AFTER Christmas.

We are still here in the new house. I changed the light bulbs in our bathroom so now the cabinet doors don’t scrape them. Paul discovered that the unenthusiastic shower heads had filters inside them that needed to be changed, and now the shower heads are great (but why are there filters in the shower heads at all?). It’s three times as far to the grocery store now. The new house is so much more expensive to heat, and I’m always cold. I’m getting used to where things are in the kitchen, and cooking isn’t so much mental effort. It’s pleasing to walk the kids to/from school, and William can walk to work now.

I try to avoid thinking about the change, because thinking about it makes me feel panicky and queasy; I’m hoping that the adjustment will happen automatically with time if I pretend not to notice. There are a lot of things to love about this house if I can stop pining for the old house and panicking about this one.

This is pretty late to be doing the calendar post. “Better late than never” is an iffy sort of claim when shipping deadlines are looming nigh and supplies are looming low. (To speed things up, let me just say one time that all images are from Amazon.com.)

 

A F*cking 2019 Calendar. I’m not saying this is a contender for my house, but I’d think it was funny if it was at your house.

 

Linnea Poster calendar. This is so pretty. I need boxes on my calendar, but this would be a contender if I didn’t.

 

Bob Ross calendar. I had this next to my desk in 2018 and I recommend it. Soothing.

 

Pusheen calendar. Our entire household loves Pusheen. If you give the calendar as a gift, I recommend including the book.

 

Sloth calendar. Sloths are having a moment, along with cactuses/succulents and alpacas/llamas.

 

Llama calendar.

 

Succulents calendar.

 

Fortnite calendar. Fortnite is, I gather, a popular game.

 

Farmer’s Market calendar. I mention this one almost every year, I think, but it’s just such a pleasing one.

 

Farmer’s Market calendar, option two. I really like the look of this one, too, and it avoids repeating a calendar.

 

SheSheds calendar. Get it, gurl.

 

Cooking with Love Provides Food for the Soul calendar. I dislike the title. But I really like the individual pages, which are prettily-done recipes, chalkboard-style.

 

Norman Rockwell calendar. I find Norman Rockwell persistently soothing.

 

We Rate Dogs calendar. I ordered the page-a-day version already.

 

National Parks calendar. Another one that would appeal to me if I didn’t need boxes to write in.

 

Unlikely Friendships calendar. If you don’t want to see a bull terrier snuggling with a baby cow, I don’t know WHAT would please you.

 

Victoriana calendar. I am in the mood this year for pretty things, and also I think this would look nice in our new old house.

 

Fractal Cosmos calendar. I can imagine getting kind of transfixed by these.

 

Nature’s Dick Pics calendar. Isn’t this just what we’ve come to expect?

 

Bubble Wrap calendar. One bubble to pop per day.

 

Fire Rescue Dogs calendar. Oh, dogs! I love dogs. What cute dogs. So many pages of lovely, lovely dogs.

 

Kilty Pleasures calendar. And kilts! I love kilts. So traditional. All those plaids.

 

Retro Pin-Ups calendar. Pin-ups: an historical screenshot of another time. Valuable and educational.

 

Retro calendar. Gumball machine, rotary-dial phone, jukebox, record player, etc.

 

Cats calendar. It’s rare for us not to have at least one cat calendar in the house. Note that if you are a fan of the Cats in Sweaters calendar, as we are, a reviewer mentions that some of the 2019 images are repeats. This is no big deal if you’ve skipped a year or two, but it’s the sort of thing I’d definitely want to check for.

 

Baby Animals in Sweaters calendar. I could just die. Baby animals. In sweaters.

 

Doughnuts calendar. There is a calendar designer out there who knows my heart.

 

BTS calendar. BTS fans, I gotcha. This appears to come with stickers and photo cards.

 

American Travel calendar. I think this is stunning. Plus it has extra-large pages with more writing room.

 

Pantone calendar. Strong contender for this year.

 

William Morris calendar. Twice I’ve had wallpaper-designs calendars and found them very pleasing. I searched for one this year, but this was the only thing that seemed close. It’s pretty good. I had a William Morris mug that got broken in the move.

 

Unicorn Yoga calendar. Presented without further comment.

 

Gudetama the Lazy Egg calendar. I don’t know what it is I am looking at.

 

Masha D’yans calendar. I had this one last year and I liked it. Very pretty.

 

Fiercely Female calendar. If this had squares to write in, it would be my kitchen calendar this year. It might be my desk calendar; I don’t need to write as many things on that.

 

The Future is Female calendar. Again: I need squares to write in. If I am going to note the place and time of the resistance march, I need SQUARES TO WRITE IN.

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg calendar. Does it have squares to write in? WE DO NOT KNOW. (Follow up: this listing shows that it does.) (The RGB Workout calendar also has squares.)

 

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls calendar. And what do we have here? SPACES TO WRITE IN. Into the cart!

 

Serenity calendar. Serenity, gosh, that sounds nice.

 

Her Majesty the Queen calendar. There is something soothing to me about the queen and her hats.

 

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle calendar. Of course we are all considering the Harry/Meghan calendar. (I feel upon proof-reading as if this sounds sarcastic, but I am in earnest. They make me feel happier, looking at them.)

 

Latte Art calendar. You should see me choke up when the barista puts a picture on the top of my coffee. It fills me with feelings about how human beings can be so GOOD and so CREATIVE, putting art everywhere for no practical reason at all except that we CAN and we LIKE TO.

 

Hedgehogs calendar. My niece loves hedgehogs, so now we all love hedgehogs.

 

As usual, if you still use paper calendars I would love to know which ones you’re using next year.

It has been one week since we moved. When Paul said last night that this would be the case as of the next day, at first I thought he had done the math wrong. We have slept here six/seven (last night / this morning) times? How can that be, when each night I still have to mentally steel myself for Bedtime In The New House, and also medicate? But it’s true it is not the same level of dread as it was. And when I wake up in the night, I don’t feel despair at having to find The New Bathroom. And when I get up in the morning to take a shower, I am starting to appreciate the heat lamp as something that is Better Than The Old House.

Because it was dumb to decide to move over the holidays, this weekend we have not one, not two, but THREE holiday events. Have I already told you this? I remember typing out that “not one, not two…” etc. format. Maybe I wrote it in one of my freaking-out emails to a friend.

Anyway, of the three events, I am looking forward to only one, and I am not saying that only because some of them read here: it’s my wine-and-appetizers group’s annual Christmas party with Yankee Swap, and I have acquired the gift for the swap, and I no longer feel nervous about appetizers, and one of the friends is bringing a CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN, and I’m going to have William drive me so I can have multiple glasses of wine, and anyway this is going to be fun and I’m looking forward to it.

The one I am most dreading is Paul’s office party. We have never been to one before (until this year, Paul was a contractor rather than a regular employee, and contractors don’t typically attend the holiday party). It’s at the house of his boss’s boss, which feels a lot higher-pressure to me than if it were at the office. Paul had a very difficult time acquiring information about WHAT WE WERE SUPPOSED TO WEAR, which was a shruggy subject to him and a subject of utmost importance to me. Finally he asked the secretaries, who said most people wear whatever they normally wear to work. “Or, like, Friday casual,” one said. UNHELPFUL. Well, a little helpful: I now know not to order a cocktail dress. But I have zero office clothes, Friday casual or otherwise. Anyway, with the help of Twitter, which said spouses are not expected to acquire khakis and blazers for office Christmas parties and are allowed to be sparklier than that, I am going in black flocked-velvet jeans, a matte-champagne-sequined tank top, a flowy dressy cardigan with fancy fluttery sleeves, velvet flats, and holiday jewelry. Plus lipstick, and maybe I can find a fancy/sparkly thing to put in my hair.

For the hostess gift, I consulted with family and friends and have decided on a box of chocolates from a local family-owned handmade-chocolates place. With one of their handmade (and charmingly handmade-looking) candy canes tied to the top of the box.

The next decision is what to BRING. The party is potluck-style. I have lots of yummy ideas from years of meetings of my wine-and-appetizers group, but the party is over an hour’s drive away, so hot things are not ideal, and also I’d rather not be trying to heat stuff up right before we leave, because I’m going to need that time to freak out about my outfit.

Ideally I’d like to bring something room-temperature, something I can make earlier in the day. I’d personally rather make a dessert, but I know from similar events that these events tend to have way too many desserts and not enough dinner food. Ideally I’d like it to be the kind of thing where no one would consider it fancy/competitive, but everyone would like it, and people who feel nervous about fancy food would be relieved to see it. Finger sandwiches of some sort? This is a downer of an example, but at my grandfather’s funeral one of the things served was little egg-salad finger sandwiches, and my mom and I commented to each other many times that we would not have thought to serve those and yet they were EXACTLY WHAT WE WANTED. But does that mean egg-salad sandwiches are the perfect funeral/grief food, not necessarily the perfect office-holiday-party food? I’m imagining that hard-boiled-egg smell permeating the room. I could make little turkey/ham finger sandwiches, plenty of mayo, fancy meadow greens or whatever instead of the iceberg lettuce we’d all probably prefer.

Or maybe a dip is the way to go? With a pretty cracker assortment? I don’t know, what would you bring if it were you?