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?

We’ve been in the new house four nights, and this morning our dimmest cat is alerting me that SOMETHING IS AMISS!! He’s walking rapidly from room to room, making the mer-SQUEAK sound he makes instead of a normal meow. Then he comes back to me and looks at me urgently: SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT HERE!! He can’t quite put a paw-pad on it, but something is DEFINITELY NOT QUITE AS IT WAS BEFORE!! Poor sweet little dummy.

Yesterday Paul and I made progress on one of our New House Plans. The center of our town has a whole bunch of restaurants, but downtown parking is a colossal pain so we’ve only been to two of them. Now that we can walk to downtown, our plan is to start on one end and go all the way to the other end, eating in each restaurant once. (Er, over a period of months. Not, like, in a row on the same day.) Yesterday we had lunch at Restaurant One–or rather, at Restaurant Two, because it turned out Restaurant One is closed on Sundays. Good to build in a little flexibility right from the start.

Restaurant Two was perfect for us. I love to eat breakfast out and Paul doesn’t, and Paul is not what I’d call an Adventurous Eater (neither am I, but compared to him I am). Restaurant Two is the kind that has breakfast all day, with tons of sides options (including a side of French toast, which is exactly as much French toast as I want to have), so you can have the huge some-of-everything sort of breakfast I like to have at a restaurant, but/and they also had good and interesting hamburgers for Paul. They had good coffee and nice servers who kept refilling the coffee, and I liked their sturdy colorful dishware, and they had a big board listing all the local places they get their ingredients/supplies from. Clearly a lot of the customers were regulars, because they and the servers were catching up before ordering: “How’s your daughter doing at college?” “Is your mom settling in at the home?” etc. I kept making enthusiastic remarks about everything until Paul said, “Remember we are going to eat at ALL the restaurants; we are not going to fall in love with this one and never go to any of the others.” Okay but what about the side of French toast.

I took the three littler kids back to the old house yesterday. They’re supposed to be going through the detritus remaining in their rooms, boxing up what they actually want to keep so that we can bulldoze out what’s left. Yesterday I said idly to Paul that perhaps we should arrange to donate our old house to the fire department for one of their practice planned-burn exercises, so that we don’t have to deal with what’s left. I hate going over there now: it makes me sad, and also it’s overwhelming how much still needs to be done. We’re chipping away at it, but UG this is taking forever. I stand there and I have no idea what to start with. Yesterday I cleaned out under the fridge, which seemed…low-priority. But it ALL needs to be done, and sometimes the best thing is to just DO ANYTHING rather than standing there trying to rank everything in order of importance.

I am wondering how weird this is going to be for Rob. He was home for Thanksgiving in the old house, and when he comes home in a week and a half for winter break it’ll be to the new house. I wondered briefly if it would have been better to wait for him to come home to do the main part of the move, since the other six of us are doing a lot of Adjustment Rituals (special dinners; treats on the coffee table in the evenings; deciding where to put things) that are helping us settle in and get used to this together, and Rob is missing out on all that. Then I imagined trying to do the worst part of the move five days before Christmas, and Rob coming home to a lot of physical labor and two parents at the ends of their ropes (one parent weeping and saying “I know it’s temporary but I am SO MISERABLE!!”), and it seems like it was probably better to do it the way we did it.

So this was not the IDEAL time for WordPress to do an update and make EVERYTHING LOOK COMPLETELY DIFFERENT back in this blog-post-writing area. As if I do not have enough new things to get used to right now, WORDPRESS!

Well. We soldier on. I will say that this morning is significantly less bleak than yesterday morning. There are many factors:

1. I temporarily ditched my keto diet. I was feeling physically terrible (queasy, awash in spent and fresh adrenaline, exhausted, sore) as well as emotionally terrible (overwhelmed, stressed, sad, angry, endlessly reliving the confrontation with the movers), and I took the advice I remember seeing about how in times of crisis you should EAT and not worry so much about WHAT. Almost immediately I felt much, much better. Plus, we could eat dinner without having to have the kitchen settled yet: we ordered pizza and fries and ate at the table and it was a NICE time instead of a huge stressful ordeal of trying to cook, or else ordering pizza for everyone except me, and then having me eating cheese sticks and hard-boiled eggs while everyone else had delicious hot food; and then I put out on the coffee table a selection of my day-off treats and we all sat in the living room and had treats and looked at the Christmas tree. And then the next morning when I was starting to panic about having not ordered a Christmas gift for Paul’s sister yet, I got out a pack of Entenmann’s Little Bites and a fresh cup of coffee, and Elizabeth and I went on the computer and got that done.

2. We got the kitchen mostly settled. It’s not DONE, but I took an assortment of advice from the comments section and we tried to just Make Decisions, with the idea that we can later switch around anything we find we keep going to the wrong drawer/cabinet for. Paul made dinner in the kitchen last night, and it was definitely a situation of “we have not formed these neural pathways yet”–but we were THINKING “we have not formed these neural pathways yet,” which helped.

3. I got a lot of my bathroom stuff put away. The cabinet is still scraping the lightbulbs, but my moisturizer and lip balm and deodorant are where I expect to find them.

4. I am taking my mild sedatives. I’m taking a half-dose during the day, when I need to be able to keep moving; I take a full dose a couple of hours before bed. This has also made an immediate difference in me being able to sleep all the way through the night, which has GOT to be a big improvement over waking up at 3:00 in the morning to hyperventilate about all the things that won’t seem so bad in the morning.

5. A new neighbor (already an acquaintance, but now we live near her) stopped by with a plate of banana muffins and a welcome to the neighborhood, and told us what a great neighborhood this was, especially for taking walks. She listed a bunch of other acquaintances of ours who live around here, too. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but I can say for myself that if you are ever thinking “Should I stop by the new neighbors’ house with a plate of muffins/cookies or is that weird?,” it was not only NOT WEIRD but also I have been getting damp-eyed every time I think of it, and also I have eaten two banana muffins and they have been extremely heartening.

6. We walked to the library, and it took six or seven minutes, which is how long it used to take us to drive there.

7. Just WRITING about it yesterday helped, and then the comments section helped even more. Right now I am typing fast while Paul works, feeling as if I need to stop sitting here and start helping, so I don’t feel like I can go look for the quotes and transfer them—but there were many, many comments that have been bolstering me at bad moments. And just hearing how other people have been through this same thing and are now fine/happy/settled has been very, very bolstering.

I am trying not to wear you out on this topic, but I believe it to be unavoidable: as with a life change such as a new baby, there is no way even a rapt audience is going to want to hear as much as the new parents want to say. But these things can be nice to have as resources, later, when trying to remember how messed-up things were for awhile after the baby/move/surgery/whatever.

We have moved, and everyone is so happy for us, and I am so miserable. I know from previous experience that it is temporary misery. Do you remember the story about when Paul and I moved to a new state long ago in our youth, and I was 100% on board and happy with that move and in fact it was my idea, and I had no sad feelings about leaving my previous apartment, and the traveling was surprisingly fun, and then we got to the new city, and we were having dinner out and I realized I had left my toothbrush at the last hotel. And, good news: there was a drug store visible through the restaurant window, we could just stop there and get a new one! And then in the store I had a weepy meltdown because I couldn’t find the toothbrush aisle in this strange new store in this strange new city in this strange new state.

And anyway, without further revisiting that whole stressful time (the BUTTER STICKS were A DIFFERENT SIZE), I will say that my misery was intense, and I recognize it again now, and last time it was not a very long time before the misery was gone and could be turned into family language (“not knowing where the toothbrushes are” is used to describe any situation where temporary disorientation is leading to out-of-proportion misery).

BUT I AM SO MISERABLE. I hate everything about this. I don’t want to live here. I want my old house back. The movers were over three hours late and then tried to overcharge us, and it led to an emotional confrontation I can’t stop replaying in my mind even though it is over and settled (he wanted us to feel BAD for him because moving is “such hard work!!”—and that was his argument for why we should pay him for 9.5 hours instead of the 7.5 hours they actually worked). It feels impossible to figure out meals. One of the showers doesn’t yet have a shower curtain so we keep having to figure out how to get everyone showered in the other shower, which has a crummy weak showerhead, and the over-the-showerhead rack we have for shampoo and stuff doesn’t fit over it.

I am reminded of some of the things I’ve seen here and there and have found helpful in previous miseries. Things like “Eat some food, and don’t worry about what kind of food”—like, get pizza if getting pizza is what you can manage, don’t be all “No, it also has to be PURE RIGHTEOUS BEST-BITE food.” Things like “Take your vitamins/medicines.” Why does that seem too hard? I don’t know, but sometimes it does. I have a prescription for a mild sedative, given to me by my doctor for this exact kind of anxiety-misery; why am I still hoarding them as if there will be a better time to use them? “Drink a glass of water.” It seems like it won’t help so why bother, but it’s quick and simple and sometimes it’s the only manageable step. Unless the cups are all still packed. Maybe have bottles of water on hand for this.

I am also reminded of postpartum, when everything feels impossible and unmanageable, and even though everyone says “Don’t worry about it, just take care of you and the baby,” it just feels IMPOSSIBLE to do that. The dishes can’t just SIT THERE!! The baby’s clothes need LAUNDERING, or at least stain-treating. What about the thank-you notes? And there are half a dozen appointments I’m supposed to be making. There are SO MANY THINGS THAT NEED DOING AND I CAN’T DO ANY OF THEM. It seems like “Just take care of you and the baby” was better advice for the times when a household had a cook and several maids and also a night-nanny.

Anyway I am trying to remember how that time too was a time that passed. Eventually there was plenty of time to handle the dishes and the laundry. Eventually it was not a mind-strengthening logic puzzle to figure out how on earth I was going to take a shower. Eventually I wasn’t crying multiple times a day. I am finding huge comfort in commenter Corinne’s comment about her move:

I just saw a “one year ago” memory for myself on Facebook that said “I only cried twice today and I slept nearly all night” which was a big improvement and probably shined up for Facebook; that that was a week after our move. And now a year later I rarely think of it and am genuinely glad we moved.

Okay, so then I am still on-course for the move at this point. It doesn’t necessarily mean this was a terrible mistake and I will be miserable forever. Also we all have fresh colds. Even at my old house, it was pretty grim to have a fresh cold.

Today I am attempting to redirect thoughts such as “I hate it here” and “I don’t want to live here” and “I want my old house back” by keeping a camera with me and taking pictures of things that seem Good, or things I DO like. This morning Elizabeth took her breakfast to the dining room table (in our old house, the dining room table was not accessible or inviting), and I took my laptop (another recent change I am adjusting to) to the dining room table and sat across from her, and I had a nice view out the windows behind her. That was nice. And I am so glad I got the Christmas tree set up before we moved, and I took a picture of the three littler kids all on chairs in that room; I’d put out a bunch of treaty snacks on the coffee table after dinner. That was nice.

But the lock broke off our bathroom door the first time we used it. And the light fixture above the bathroom cabinet is positioned so that the cabinet doors scrape the lightbulbs every time we open the doors. And there’s a door that closes but then will suddenly and startlingly swing wide open for no apparent reason—probably when a different door in the house opens or closes. The downstairs toilet glugs repeatedly when an upstairs toilet flushes. Several locks have been installed weirdly so that you twist “the wrong way” to lock or unlock them. It’s quirky! It’s quirky! We love quirky! And we will gradually either solve all these problems or get accustomed to them.

But this kitchen is configured totally, totally different than my old kitchen, so there are no equivalent spaces. I can’t say “Oh, I put the cups in the cupboard next to the fridge,” because there is no cupboard next to the fridge. I know we’ll figure all this out, but right now it’s resulting in me standing in the kitchen, surrounded by a hundred cardboard boxes, holding a cheese grater, frozen with indecision.

I went out right away this morning to solve the little billing issue in person, and it could not have gone more smoothly. The woman I talked to was cheerful and reassuring and said these things happen all the time, and that we were lucky the seller sent us the bill at all: she says a lot of times the seller doesn’t realize they’re supposed to, or else doesn’t care, or else forgets, and so the first anyone hears of it is when she’s sending out overdue notices. I gave a little whimper at the thought and she waved it off with cheerful dismissiveness: “And then you’d just panic and call me and we’d figure it all out, no big deal!”

I fretted that since the seller’s name was on the bill, the seller would get credit for paying it. She said that is just never going to come up—and that if it DID come up, it’s all very clear and easy to see how things happened: the house closed on this date; the bill was issued too shortly thereafter to have the new info; the buyer paid the bill. “No one is going to ask you to prove it—and even if they did, you HAVE the proof! It’s your house! It’s your check!” She showed me her screen: “There’s your name!” “So my fretting is all for naught?,” I said. “For NAUGHT,” she said; “It’s kind of cute, though,” she added. I nearly asked her on the spot if she were by any chance in the market for a fretful middle-aged assistant. The key to living a good life as a fretful, anxious person, I think, is finding the people who find it cute—or, at worst, find it charmingly exasperating.

My next task is a much more fun one. Every year we give gift cards to our bus drivers. To make it clear to the drivers what the situation is (like, why are we giving one driver $10 and the other driver $40), I have each child hand over a greeting card with a $10 gift card in it. Not that I think the bus driver is keeping such careful track, but anyway that is my fret-reducing way of doing it: $10 per kid, handed over by that kid. All four remaining housechildren are on the same bus now, and this has been one of our drivers for a number of years, so I don’t want to skip his holiday gift card just because we’re leaving this house before Christmas. But this time I think I can skip the whole fussy element of one per kid and so forth: I’m just going to make one from all of us, thanking the driver and putting in the last gift card.