We are at the point in this move where I keep getting startled by empty spaces. The bathroom closet still has the whole stack of towels, but the other shelves have nothing on them except a package of incense, a box of matches, a bottle of NyQuil, a box of bandaids, and a container of nailpolish remover. We have a big piece of furniture with drawers and shelves and a fold-down desk, and it is empty except for some miscellaneous trash (dust, scraps of paper, old empty water balloon, clump of staples, old Webkinz collector card, plastic wrapper, broken colored pencil, single wrinkled envelope) I have for some reason not been able to summon the morale to dispose of. There are empty bookshelves all over the house, or bookshelves with just a few books left on them.

Something I hadn’t realized is that having the new house’s floors refinished would result in DUST LITERALLY COVERING EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE HOUSE. It’s all in the woodwork. It’s on every cupboard/drawer handle. It’s on the curtain rods and the curtains. Paul did one of his things I am grateful for, which is that he kept pushing forward on hiring housecleaners to handle it, even though I kept panicking and despairing and pushing back and giving up about the cost and the difficulty in finding/choosing someone. We now have cleaners booked for the first week of December, and they are going to get rid of all the dust and also they are going to clean the bathrooms and the kitchen and the refrigerator and the stove, and then they are going to come back every two weeks after that and we will see if I can handle that without freaking out all the time (the expense! people in my house!) and can instead feel happy and life-changed and appreciative. I am thinking I will tie this in to my social life: if I give the cleaners their own key, I can plan to be out having coffee with a friend whenever they’re due to be there.

FURTHERMORE, now that we Have Cleaners, we can also have them clean our OLD house after we move out! So I will not have to do it! I can just write a big check and say “Okay, we’re out and you can get in there now!”

We’re not REALLY turning our minds to it until we’re moved out, but we have to consult a realtor about what to do with our old house. It’s zoned residential/commercial and it’s in a busy/commercial area without a lot of other houses around, so it’s very possible that we could spend a ton of money having it painted and having the floors refinished and having it cleaned—and then a business would come along, buy it, and bulldoze it, wasting all the money/effort. But if we DON’T do the painting/refinishing/cleaning, perhaps that DOOMS the house to be interesting only to a business. Well. We’re hoping the realtor will be surer about what we should do. And at least now we know to have the floors refinished BEFORE hiring cleaners.

Please tell me I am remembering correctly that, when packing, there is a long period of time where it feels as if one will continue to pack box after box throughout the remainder of eternity, never actually making any difference in the amount of stuff that remains to be packed, like some sort of ancient mythological participant whose liver is pecked out and restored daily, or who rolls a stone up a hill daily, or who sands away a mountain with her beak until the mountain is gone—but that then one day, ONE DAY IN THE ACTUAL EXISTING FUTURE, there comes a point when suddenly it will feel as if rapid progress is being made. Please tell me that is an accurate memory. Right now I am sanding down the mountain and the mountain is still apparently completely there, whereas my beak is starting to get worn down and discouraged.

We have discussed already that I am doing the absolute easiest of all possible moves. It is in the same town. We have flexibility with selling our old house, so we can take the transition slowly. My kids are all in school, not under my feet. And still, STILL, I feel as if this is the most monstrous, consuming, gigantic, nearly-impossible task. So I wondered if those of you who had to do this same task but under far more challenging circumstances would like to take this opportunity to vent about how that went. You will have a very sympathetic ear.

A quick count shows me that of the last dozen posts, ten have been at least partially about the new house. Well. It’s understandable. Which doesn’t mean it’s not a little boring.

So today I will talk about the OLD house. Ha ha! A little joke there. Except I really am going to go on to say something about our old/current house, which is that the bathroom fan stopped working, and then the dishwasher started making a weird buzzing noise, and then the box fan we were using as a stand-in for the bathroom fan ALSO broke, and then the kitchen sink started dripping, and now the OTHER bathroom fan is getting loud, and what in tarnation is going on here? Does the old house know we’re leaving? Is there a house ghost, and is it displeased? Listen, you can come with us to the new house, house ghost. In fact, we’d love it if you would. Please let us know your transportation container of choice. My first thought was cat carrier, but that seems a little too well-ventilated for someone of a vaporeal nature. Mason jar? Those are very hip right now, and nicely sealed.

Today’s plan is nothing to look forward to: grocery shopping, dentist appointment, and three phone calls to health insurance and doctors’ offices to straighten out several issues. We have new health insurance because we always seem to have new health insurance. We currently pay twice as much per month for our health insurance as we paid for our two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment (with balcony, and walk-in closet, and free cable, and access to pool and exercise center; safe quiet neighborhood but easy walking distance to grocery store, drug store, pizza place, frozen-yogurt place, video rental store, Subway, Goodwill, and bus stop) (why oh why did we ever leave) back when Rob was born. I know better than to compare old money to new money, but it seems to happen automatically as I age. And anyway I just used an inflation calculator, and putting everything in 2018 dollars we are paying approximately two hundred 2018 dollars more per month for our current health insurance than we paid for that apartment.

Anyway, our current policy is a nice one, as it jolly well should be for this price, and the customer service representatives are just lovely: so friendly and helpful and so good at fixing things. And the reason I know they are so lovely and so good at fixing things is that I already have extensive experience calling them and asking them to fix things. More than once a month, I get an explanation of benefits in which our insurance company explains that we didn’t acquire the necessary referral, or else I get a bill from a doctor saying our insurance wouldn’t pay for something they absolutely ought to be paying for. Most recently, I got a bill saying we didn’t obtain a necessary referral—even though I had a carbon copy of that referral in my hand, AND when I called the billing-doctor’s office (thinking maybe they accidentally failed to submit it) they said they could see on their computer a scan of it submitted along with the claim, and also they had a confirmation number from the insurance company for the submission of that referral, and they were unable to take my suggested solution of “can it be resubmitted?” because the system will not let them re-submit a duplicate of something that has already been successfully received and confirmed by the insurance company. So I had to call the insurance company BACK and say the doctor says she can’t submit something she has already submitted, and would this confirmation number be useful? And OH, they were so friendly and helpful and they fixed it all up.

Today I have to call about a co-pay charged to me twice; a bill for the scoliosis brace that is almost exactly twice the amount they told us ahead of time it would be; and a check from the insurance company that arrived, apparently for us to use for the brace. (This has never happened before; the insurance has always paid the provider directly.) With the check is a form, and on the form there is the FAQ “Why am I receiving this?” The answer to this question is: “This is not a bill. If you owe money, your provider will bill you directly.” Good talk.

The flooring guys finally called me back, and they came the very next morning to give an estimate, and they started work the next day after that; their briskness in these matters has mollified me about the days I waited for them to call. Paul went over to snoop the progress and says it looks odd and awesome: before, the floors looked quite different from room to room, but now that they’re sanded they look the same or nearly the same. The flooring guy told me ahead of time that would be the case: he said they only looked different because of different finishes and different ages and different layers of wear, but they were actually all white oak or red oak with only one room different (fir). This is an outcome that makes me a little sad and makes Paul very happy: I liked the assorted-looking floors, but he loves that they’ll all match. Well. I AM glad they’ll all be in good shape and well-protected now.

I asked about treating the floors for dogs, and the floor guy is a lifelong dog owner and said that refinishing the floors is the very treatment that needs to be done before getting a dog. He recommended waiting awhile after the finishing was done (six months, I think?) before adding the dog. I asked if there was any way we could level-up the floor-refinishing to make it EVEN MORE PROTECTED and he said no. He also gave me the valuable information that it is not uncommon for a new dog to poop in every room of the house, just to settle in. Well. Good to know ahead of time.

The floor-refinishing was the main thing preventing us from moving over to the new house or knowing when we could plan to do so. Now that they’re in there working on it, we can schedule the move. We have the flexibility to wait to allow the floors to completely cure after refinishing, which takes three weeks; so we think we’ll have one more Thanksgiving in this house (at least a few of the children are glad about that: there has been some lamenting along the lines of “I didn’t even KNOW that last Christmas would be our last Christmas in this house!!”) and then move between Thanksgiving and Christmas. As one of my friends put it, “It isn’t as if there’s anything else going on then.”

I am planning, however, to seriously dial back the Thanksgiving. I will not get out my grandma’s china: we will use our regular dishes or possibly even disposable ones. I will not fool around with interesting vegetable dishes: I will get a bag of frozen peas and another of frozen corn. I will probably still make two desserts because I love the desserts and they’re my favorite things to make, but I will not make THREE desserts. And my parents always bring the turkey and stuffing, so I don’t have to think about those.

Some time ago I read part of an article that said you can’t trust any thoughts you have between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.; I apparently didn’t retain what the reason was for this, but I think it was something about your brain being in the wrong mode for rational thought.

I find that information is sometimes helpful and sometimes not. Sometimes if I am awake at 2:30 in the morning and my brain wants to do a circuit loop of How We’d Escape in a Fire, or What If One of the Children is a Sociopath, I can say to my brain firmly: “No no, now, it is 2:30 in the morning and we know very well that we don’t have rational conversations at that time of the night, so let’s just go to sleep and not think about that right this minute,” and sometimes I do indeed then stop thinking about it and go to sleep.

Other times, like last night and this morning, it doesn’t work: first I lay awake late with stressy thoughts; then I woke up early with stressy thoughts. I doubt you will be surprised to hear that they were primarily house/move-related. So many of the things I’m stressed about will get worked out naturally and in good time, but there I was at 4:30 in the morning wondering where we were going to put the seldom-used bathroom items now that we wouldn’t have a closet in the bathroom. My god. Who cares. We will find a place at a time when we are not supposed to be SLEEPING.

On another topic, I would like to recommend a wig:

(image from Amazon.com)

Elizabeth and I were invited to a Halloween party, and I didn’t really want to buy a costume for it, but I knew from previous years that all the other adults would be wearing not just costumes but FULL-ON costumes, so I wanted to do SOMETHING. And since “jaw-length cotton-candy-pink with bangs” is one of my restless mid-life ideas for my own actual hair, this seemed like a low-pressure way to try out that look. It cost $16 and the reviews were not only good but SURPRISED-good, like “I didn’t think this could be any good for $16, but now it’s one of my best/favorite wigs” and so on. Also, lots of reviewers posted photos of themselves in the wigs—unfortunately not in the pink one, but in other colors, and that was useful for getting an idea of what it looked like in real life.

It was a little itchy and warm as I understand most wigs are, but I too was surprised by how good it was. It took some study to figure out how to put it on the first time, but then it wasn’t hard. I startled Paul very severely by just strolling into the kitchen wearing it. He said it looked exactly as if I’d had my hair cut and dyed, and he just couldn’t figure out how I’d done so in the twenty minutes since he’d last seen me. Then he couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten all of my hair under it: I have below-the-shoulders, fairly thick hair. (It gets tucked under the wig at the top of the neck, which gives the back of the wig more apparent volume.)

I wore it to the party and it was fine for the whole several-hours of driving and being there. I was glad to take it off at the end of the evening, but I didn’t suffer while it was on. I am now considering buying it in blue, violet, and/or dark brown. I am also considering various colors as holiday/birthday gifts for other people: I have several people on my list I like to give fun/unusual gifts to. I am no longer considering dyeing my own actual hair pink: it was nice to be able to go back to normal, and I felt as if the pink would have looked better with more make-up than I like to wear.

One of the many reasons I hate phone calls is that “making the phone call” doesn’t typically mean I get to cross “make the phone call” off my list, and there are few things more discouraging. Recent examples:

1. I called a hardwood-floor-refinishing place on Monday morning. “Great!,” they said. “One of our workman will give you a call back to set it up!” Nothing Monday. Nothing Tuesday. Nothing Wednesday. Nothing yet this morning. How long am I supposed to wait before I MAKE THE SAME PHONE CALL AGAIN?

2. A doctor says they want to set something up; the office will call us to do so. Then they say “But if you don’t hear from us in a week, CALL!” Why is it that SO EXTREMELY OFTEN I do in fact need to call? Why is it up to the PATIENT to track that the doctor’s staff is doing as they’re supposed to do? How about THIS: how about the DOCTOR do that, or else HIRE someone to do that, instead of asking PATIENTS to do that?

3. Or right now I’m waiting because the only way to get an appointment at the big city hospital is for THEM to call YOU, and we have TWICE heard from other medical people that Elizabeth needs a follow-up and that the hospital will call us—but they have not called us. Now what? I’ll have to call the people who assured us that the hospital would call us. Then we’ll have TWO entities wasting their time because someone isn’t doing what they’re supposed to do.

As long as I am venting, I will tell you I am frustrated because we are trying to have propane delivered, and the propane company needs someone to meet them at the house so they can handle the pilot light, but they cannot give me any estimate of when they will be there, no estimate at all, not even a four-hour window. The woman I talked to on the phone acted as if this had never been a problem for anyone before. Like, she was surprised I was even asking.

But in happier news: although it was surprisingly difficult to find a number for a locksmith (as opposed to a number for a locksmith referral service masquerading as a locksmith to take a commission off emergency calls), I did find one and it happened the locksmith had availability that very day and so he came out and changed all our locks and I now feel much happier. (Our house was rented to tenants for a few years and I was picturing keys scattered all over town.) If you have a child looking ahead toward a job that makes a good living, may I suggest locksmithery? The locksmith I called says all the older locksmiths are retiring and he has to keep expanding his territory wider and wider to cover the need, and now he makes enough that someone in his family quit their job and came to work for him, and actually he’d like it if he could talk a second family member into doing the same.

Another happy and stress-relieving thing is that Paul called someone to come look at the furnace and give an opinion about converting to gas, and the person said that actually our oil furnace was one of the most efficient of all oil furnaces, and that with such a big house we might be happier if we take a year to notice how the current system heats/cools before we change anything, so that when we DO change things we can address specific issues. So now we don’t have to deal with that yet.

And my dad figured out how to turn down the way-way-way-too-high heat on the water heater, even though two realtors, an inspector, the seller, and the seller’s property manager were all unable to do so, and so now the water heater is not as pressing an issue and can wait awhile. The guy who came out to look at the furnace pooh-poohed the idea that it even WOULD be an issue: “If you have to, just get a cheap electric one to bridge the gap!,” he said, casually. So we don’t have to worry about that yet, either.

If only the flooring guys would call me back.