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.

Main house fears/stressors keeping me awake late and waking me up early:

1. The heating/cooling bills will be so high, they will be a monthly source of heart-sink as well as a daily source of environmental guilt and physical discomfort as we try to reduce them.

2. In fact, they will be so high that I will have to get an additional job, and I will end up working not for any of the other reasons I might want/need to, but only to support this house.

3. We will get used to how large the house is, and when we do inevitably downsize one day, anything else will feel cramped.

4. Furthermore, we will have expanded to fit the house, so downsizing will involve painful sacrifices of possessions.

5. After the children leave, but before they start coming home to visit with their families, we will feel a creepy abundance of space and will rattle around like two seeds in a dried gourd. (This is my dad’s visual, provided after I said “like two peas…in a squash…”.)

6. We will never figure out a satisfactory way to arrange the bedrooms so that it’s relatively fair and makes a relative amount of sense; everyone will end up unhappy with their room, and there will be no room available to be what we appear to be referring to as my Office, even though it is more my Recliner and Mini-Fridge Room.

7. It won’t matter, because it will turn out to be too late to have a room of my own: it will turn out we’ve left the stage of life where that would be a lovely sanctuary, and we are now close to the stage of life when I will be hoping for MORE time with the kids.

8. In fact, all of life is the sad pursuit of things it is too late to have. Now we will have the barn where the kids could have used their riding toys, but no one is using riding toys. Now we will have room for a good system for the million boxes of handmedowns, but we need fewer and fewer of those.

9. Meanwhile we have acquired the things that will make our middle-age difficult: the steep driveway, the chilly air, the narrow stairs.

10. The home insurance people want to send someone to look at the inside of the house. The agent I’d talked to said they almost certainly wouldn’t need to do that, so something must have triggered a more intensive evaluation. I said on the form that the electricity was a certain way, because we have an electrician coming the first week of November to make it that way—but it’s not that way YET.

11. I will try to make this problem brief, because it is very stressful but also very boring. In short, we have an oil furnace and an oil water heater. The water heater is TOAST: we got credit at closing for replacement. The furnace is fine (though expensive) while we decide what heating system to put in instead, but the water heater may or may not be safe/able to coast for any time at all. But we don’t want to replace the water heater with another oil one, when it may be only a matter of months before we replace the whole system. Nor do we want to use hot water that is a funny color and can’t be turned down below 170 degrees. But one of the replacement-system places can’t even come out to talk to us until the first week of November. And we don’t know when the replacement could be done, even once we’ve decided.

12. I haven’t called a flooring place yet, though that’s on today’s Wishful Thinking Agenda. Someone else said her floor-refinishing place is booking six weeks out. That might not happen with the place(s) we call, but that conversation put it on my stress list.

13. Several people told me that if we get a dog, we need to get the floors “sealed.” Instead of asking what that meant, I for some reason went into “nodding wisely and pretending I knew what that meant” mode, and now it feels awkward to ask what that means, and besides I forget who said it, and what if I say to the flooring place that we need the floors sealed before we get a dog and they don’t know what I’m talking about? Or what if they say, “Uh, you mean…varnished?” and I don’t know whether to say yes or no and they have no other ideas?

14. The previous owners put marble floors in the bathrooms. I realize that’s supposed to be a selling point, because various people kept pointing it out to us in wow-selling-it tones of voice. But I associate marble floors, perhaps incorrectly, with FREEZING COLD and also SLIPPING and DEATH.

15. Really, I am going to have to get Paul to sketch a floor plan of the bedrooms so you can see what a challenging puzzle it is. It feels like those problems where you have a wolf and a goat and a head of lettuce. And unfortunately what would make it all a lot easier is if I gave up my idea of having my Recliner and Mini-Fridge and Probably Space-Heater Room. But that is the room that is supposed to partially compensate for the fact that this move is something Paul wanted and not something I wanted.

16. On the tour we took with the seller, she gestured to some water pipes and said that if we turned on the water to those, we should probably make sure we left them on a drip so they wouldn’t freeze. This remark has come to epitomize everything I hate about moving to a new house. I don’t have that “What fun to get to know a new house!!” feeling; I have a “Oh god, what unpleasant surprises lurk within your charming facade?” feeling. (This is how I am about dating, too.) Also: how would we turn on the water to those pipes, and why would we want to do so? Is the water maybe already on to those pipes and how would we know? Why are those pipes even there? Why did we think it was a good idea to become homeowners of ANY house when we are so inept?

Isn’t it odd to think that only seven weeks ago I would write about feeling nervous about possibly putting an offer on a house, and today I would be writing that the house is ours and in fact we now own two houses, which is its own new source of anxiety?

We were able to have a tour of the new house with the previous owner, who had lived there almost fifty years. She showed us which room she’d used as a nursery, told us it had taken her forever to choose the paint color for the kitchen (she left us a baggie containing labeled paint chips for walls/cabinets and a labeled sample of the countertop), mentioned that if we take the curtains down to clean them we should pin numbers on the backs so they can be hung back up in the right order (the floors are uneven, so the curtains are all hemmed to different lengths to look the same length). She was happy that the house would be lived in by a large family, and that we were probably getting a dog; she’d had one child and a varying cast of in-laws and a series of golden retrievers.

We took the kids over there last night, and we picked up pizzas on the way and had our first dinner in the new house. Then we walked around and looked at the house, which Paul and I agreed already seems different (in a good way) now that it’s Ours, and the kids had a lot of fun looking at each other and yelling things through the floor/ceiling vents (big open vents you can see through, from the days when the fireplaces were downstairs and there needed to be a way to get the heat upstairs; we’re going to have to keep those vents in mind when having private conversations).

We also found a place on the floor that looks like a hedgehog:

It is really too bad, really very too bad, that neither of the people in this marriage is a matter-of-fact, pick-up-the-phone, just-get-things-done person, or else by now we would have various workers ready to get in there and do their thing. Instead we have not yet called a place to come look at the floors, and the floors need to be refinished before we move in, and I was just yesterday chatting with someone who said she was having her floors refinished and the place was booking six weeks out. So. Well. We will get through this time in our lives, and also maybe the place WE call will only be booking THREE weeks out.

You know how some people refer to the lottery as a tax on people who are bad at math? I think of this delay (and its accompanying expenses) as a tax on people who are bad at making phone calls and getting things lined up ahead of time. That is in fact a soothing thought to me: it turns it from “How could I be so dumb?”/”What’s wrong with me that I can’t handle these things?” into merely a fairly-assigned fee. Everyone has their own areas where they are weak on a life skill, and each of those places has its own tax. You don’t need to beat yourself up about it, you can just pay the fine and move on with life as a perfectly-normal imperfect person.

And furthermore, we all have stuff we’re extra-good at, and those things can help compensate for the fines. Like, maybe you’re good at paying down debt early, or maybe you’re good at doing repairs around the house, or maybe you can sew, or maybe you’re a good sale/clearance shopper, or maybe you’re good at keeping/sorting handmedowns, or maybe you’re good at maintaining social connections, or WHATEVER. It makes sense that we would all have areas that result in savings/earnings, and other areas that result in taxes/fees/fines.

I am so consumed by a mental loop of HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE you would not even know that there are other elements to my life. I am looking forward to this part being over and the next part being well under way. There is no way to get to the next part without doing this part.

Today’s plan was watch episodes of The West Wing while playing the three (3) versions of Candy Crush I have on my phone, and pack two boxes between each episode. This should have resulted in a 2/1 ratio of boxes to episodes. Would you like to guess what the actual ratio is? In my partial defense, I allowed one substitution: making a scary phone call instead of packing two boxes. Counting the call as two boxes, I am at a ratio of 2/3, which makes me glad I converted the call into boxes before telling you.

What is my problem? What IS my problem?? I am stressed about packing and about all the packing that still needs to be done! Doing some packing would help with that! Also my hands and feet are freezing and the best way to fix that is to move around a little, maybe lift something heavy like a box. Instead I watched a third episode of West Wing and then walked across the house and sat down at my computer.

It’s discouraging how MANY boxes it takes. I packed the bedding and I used the largest boxes and it took three of those large boxes and I haven’t yet even packed all the bedding. Why do we have so much bedding? Are we USING all this bedding? Maybe I should open those boxes back up and get rid of more of the bedding.

I can’t even tell how much progress I’m making. The box pile is certainly getting large. But the house looks discouragingly the same. Am I a tenth of the way done? A hundredth? WHO CAN TELL.

I find I am no longer particularly stressed about the idea of living in a different house, or the idea of giving up this house. I can still get myself worked up about either thing if I try, but I can’t sustain it. I’m looking forward to living in the new house. I don’t need anymore the fiction that we will hang onto this house in case we want to move back. But I am not looking forward to all the calls and strangers involved in a new house.

One of my least favorite parts is not knowing who to call for what. Like, just for an example, the home inspector said that there is a place where a plumber removed too much of a support beam in order to make room for a pipe, and that situation needs to be remedied. Who do I call for that? What verb is it I’m even asking them for, other than “to remedy”? How do I figure out what kind of worker to hire when I don’t even know what kind of work needs to be done? Is there someone I could call and just hand them the inspection report and have them take care of it all without me having to make a whole bunch of calls? And if not, WHY NOT?? This seems like an opportunity just waving itself around in the air! “Hand me the inspection report and I will take care of it.” Or maybe there already are such people, but they are called contractors and they cost the same as buying an additional house, and that is why I am not hearing so much about them as the obvious answer to this problem. WHY ARE WE EVEN BUYING A HOUSE, WHAT A STUPID IDEA TO OWN A HOUSE.

Basically that is where I have put my stress about moving: into freaking out about fixing problems that have evidently been coasting along just fine for a couple of decades. I did search online for “handyman” with our city name, and I have found someone in a larger city about 40 minutes away who not only does general handyman work of a “no task too small” variety but also helps with moves and furniture assembly. So probably I have already solved my own problem and can get back to watching episodes of The West Wing now.