Today we took the kids over to the new house and we set up the Christmas tree there and decorated it. In an empty house, which felt a little odd. But it was a nice bright day, and most of us were in good moods, and the house looked pretty even though it was empty, and William set up his phone to play us Christmas music. And later when we DO move in, the tree will be all set up and we’ll have pretty Christmas lights the very first night.
This task was part of our effort to do for the kids something we’ve noticed working for us: the more we go over to the new house to do little tasks there, the more it feels familiar and comfortable and Ours. It’s like getting a newborn, and every time you do a quick wash of that baby’s hair under the faucet, the baby is more Yours. So we decorated the tree at the new house as a little acclimating activity. And Paul has been sending the kids on little errands whenever they’re there: “Oh, can you go around and open the back door for me?” “Hey, can you bring this over to the barn?” They’re starting to feel comfortable finding their way around.
Also, having the tree up and decorated reduced my Moving Stress and Christmas Prep Stress by one notch. This morning (“morning”) I woke up after less than four hours of sleep, wide awake and absolutely STEEPED in queasy adrenaline, and one of the things I was panicking about was getting the tree up. Now the tree is up. I wonder what will wake me up tomorrow morning (“morning”).
(I have not been sleeping well. I keep dropping things: as I was loading the dishwasher I dropped a bowl, which didn’t break; then I tried to add another bowl, dropped that one, and it hit the first bowl and broke it. Then I was making pasta and dropped the whole salt-shaker into the pasta water. I am as touchy and weepy as if I were first-trimester pregnant. I get weepy if anyone is nice to me. I get weepy if I THINK about getting weepy.)
The seller mailed us a house-related bill that was sent to her but is ours to pay, and it was postmarked from her address on Tuesday, and we received it yesterday (Saturday), and it is due tomorrow (Monday) or else there will be 12% interest. The bill was sent to her in October. This means my plans for tomorrow have to be 100% re-prioritized: the most important thing is seeing if I can handle this in person since her last-minute mailing of the bill to us means there is no time to handle it by mail. “Maybe her mail took six weeks to be forwarded, and then she sent it on to us right away?,” suggested Paul tentatively into the storm roiling darkly around my borders. I am trying very hard to come up with better Coping Thoughts than that one, to tell myself a story about how this situation does NOT mean our seller is deliberately being terrible to us. Maybe she was injured, or ill, and her mail sat waiting for her for six weeks while she recovered, and the MINUTE she was back home she saw the bill and was HORRIFIED and got it into the mail to us THAT VERY DAY. Maybe she sent it way back in October to her financial person, thinking it was her own bill to pay, and the financial person is the one who held it up; or maybe the financial person bounced it back to her immediately but she didn’t realize she was supposed to send it on to us. Maybe one of her kids handles her bills and that kid had a life crisis of their own and couldn’t get around to it as promptly this month, and we’d be so sympathetic if we knew the whole story. Maybe the problem was with the bill-sender: maybe they were supposed to send it to us to begin with, and that was the mistake that caused all the confusion. Maybe there is some other way in which the seller did the right, good, well-intentioned thing and it was purely accidental that we were hit with this stress grenade in our mailbox.
(I remember this feeling from the post-partum stage. Everything can be fine one minute, and irredeemable the next minute. My baseline stress level is set so high that a SMALL stressful thing knocks me out of the park. My skin feels sunburned. I snap at everybody for nothing. Paul tries to pet down the worry wrinkles on my face. I am getting a glimpse of what I’ll look like in ten years.)
The movers have been successfully booked for this coming week. We reserved three guys and one truck. It’s not a chain; it’s a private company. From Yelp reviews, we know to expect one guy (the owner) and two slouchy, young, but relatively competent assistants. Beyond that, we have no idea what to expect in terms of anything. We are not having them move boxes, just furniture. But the furniture includes a washer, a dryer, a stand-alone freezer, a treadmill, some workshop things. We’re having them take the new oven from our old house and swap it with the old oven from the new house. How long will all of that take? Three hours? Eleven hours? One hour? WHO CAN SAY. (By any chance, can YOU say? Like how long approximately does it take three guys to move all of a family’s furniture-but-not-boxes to a house five minutes away, plus move one oven back to the original house?)
Paul was over at the new house today and said he absolutely heard mice. For sure, heard mice. We already knew mice were HIGHLY LIKELY (and in fact it has been a thrill to contemplate getting a Barn Cat), but it feels a little different to know for SURE that the house has mice, and to suspect that the house could in fact be BRISTLING with mice. Mice who EVEN AS WE SPEAK could be turning all my beautifully-packed boxes into mouse-nest fodder. The seller far away, thinking brightly about how glad she is to be rid of this DISASTROUS MOUSE-INFESTED HOUSE.
(When I do sleep I have stress-dreams. Here I am, back in high school and I can’t find my locker. Here I am in public, and I am not wearing pants. I am driving and I can’t find my route and there are no brakes and the road is icy. I am trying to get to another floor of this building, and the only way is to haul myself through this awkward system of hatches. I am in an elevator and it keeps lurching and sinking nauseatingly, and I can’t remember what floor I want.)
The last time we dealt with mice was in THIS house, when we had an indoor/outdoor cat who liked to bring us LIVE gifts, which resulted in a brisk reconfiguring of the various species population levels of our house. First I bought Mice Cubes: humane traps which very successfully caught mouse after mouse—but I kept releasing the mice into our yard and I suspect they were coming right back into the house (and/or being escorted back in by our cat), because we weren’t noticing a decrease in Signs of Mouse.
Then I acquired three Victor Electronic mouse traps. It’s been awhile, but what I remember is that for the first week or so I had to check the traps several times a day, and I performed multiple mouse funerals per day. Then I only had to check every few days. Then we stopped having Mouse Signs.
With a larger house, including a barn, and with indoor-only cats now, we are not sure which techniques we’ll use. Electronic mouse traps. Cat flaps, so that our cats can get into the unheated areas of the house/barn; perhaps one or more of our cats will turn out to be skilled mousers. Or maybe NO cat flaps, plus a barn cat, so that the Mouse Remains will not be brought into the house proper. Or maybe TWO barn cats, for company and teamwork.
