Two major moving milestones: (1) Yesterday I packed the first box. (2) Today I ordered new return-address labels.

Both of these are still a little risky, because the closing (when the house officially becomes ours) isn’t until later next month. But this week has marked the end of the uncertainty period for us as buyers. There were things we had to have evaluated/inspected as part of our offer, and then the seller had to accept/decline what we asked them for as a result of those evaluations/inspections, and so things could easily have fallen through on either side: we could have found something we weren’t willing to deal with at all (“We’re sorry to back out but the inspector said the walls are at least 80% termite at this point”); or we could have asked the seller to handle something and the seller could have declined to do so, and that too could have ended the deal. (I have heard from friends who live elsewhere that it is not common in those places to ask sellers to fix things. Where I live, it’s assumed that the asking price of the house reflects a house that is safe and usable; if anything in the house is not safe or not usable, and that thing hasn’t been disclosed ahead of time as something already taken into account when setting the asking price, it’s common for the seller to agree to handle/fix it or else give a credit or partial-credit at closing for the cost of handling/fixing it. But it would not be common for sellers to fix anything cosmetic or relatively minor: broken fence, painting, broken interior doorknob. We are talking more along the lines of fixing faulty electricity, a broken water heater, a dangerous furnace, etc.)

But we said what we wanted handled/fixed/credited, and the seller agreed to those things, and we all signed our names. It looks to me as if our part is now pretty much over, except for all the packing and cleaning and moving and paper-signing and address-changing and utilities and insurance and everything else. But we don’t seem to have very many pre-closing things to do, if any. The seller has to work on the fixes they’ve agreed to do, and as long as they DO do those fixes, I don’t see any particular reason to think things would fall through at this point. Our hope is that the fixes will be done briskly: both parties agreed informally ahead of time that if possible we’d all enjoy closing earlier than originally scheduled.

And so that seemed to be my cue to pack a box or two. I geared up for it: I had coffee and scrambled eggs, and I told myself I could watch ONE episode of West Wing while I ate, and then when that was over I had to pack a box. It was a good first box-packing, too: I packed up quite a bit of a closet. It’s the closet where I keep things such as gift bags, tissue paper, gifts I bought for a specific someone and then forgot about, gifts I bought for an unspecified someone and then never found the right person, gifts I bought to have on hand if one of the kids suddenly got invited to a party, etc. While I did pack a lot of it, I got rid of more than I packed. It was a little painful, yet satisfying and refreshing. Like peeling surgical tape off the skin when it’s been there a couple of days. I donated:

• every gift bag I didn’t like

• any specific-someone gift that no longer seemed like a good idea

• any unspecified-someone gift that had been there more than a couple of years

• every kid-birthday-party gift that was for an age group younger than my youngest kid

• two Target bags of fabric ribbon, bought on clearance long ago when I thought I might be someone who would wrap gifts in hemmed fabrics and reusable cloth ribbons

• a dozen decorative reusable gift boxes purchased on clearance during that same deluded stage

• two Target bags of disposable gift bows and ribbons I hardly ever use because our cats try to eat them; I kept one spool because I do very occasionally use it for a craft or for a gift I’m giving outside our household, and so if I don’t keep some I’ll have to go out and buy more and that would be galling

Long ago I read a book on hoarding, and the one thing I remember about it (other than my rapidly-reached conclusion that I may be someone who likes to save things but in no way do I qualify as an actual hoarder) is that the most painful moment of getting rid of something is RIGHT BEFORE your hand lets go of it. That is, they asked hoarders to throw something away, and they would have the person evaluate their level of stress and pain as they held the item over the trash or donation barrel, and the person would be right up there at 9 or 10—weeping with reluctance to get rid of the thing, thinking they couldn’t bear to get rid of it. Then they asked the person again about five minutes after the item had been disposed of, and the person would rate their stress and pain at around a 1 or 2, or even a 0. I found this very useful when getting rid of those gorgeous and totally unused gift boxes. They’re so pretty! They’re so sturdy! But I’m not using them for ANYTHING. I’ve kept them for years in case I could think of a use! But I have not thought of a use! Let’s set those pretty things free in the world for someone else who CAN find a use for them!

…Where was I? Oh, yes: I packed a box. Just the one box.

Today I have packed two more boxes. I keep getting stuck, is one problem. Like, I start to pack up the books, and realize a lot of the books aren’t mine to decide if we’re keeping them or not. Or I realize I don’t have enough smallish boxes for packing books, and need to get more from the liquor store (my friend Morgan got me two huge batches of moving boxes from people in her neighborhood, so Small Boxes for Heavy Things is the only gap I need to fill). Or I wonder can we possibly get rid of Paul’s dozen box sets of DVDs, now that it’s been nearly a decade since we had a DVD player?—but I guess I should ask him and not assume. Or I think, “Can I pack the winter coats, or does that guarantee an early cold snap?” And so on. But I did pack two more boxes.

And I ordered the address labels. That’s a practical thing (it’s nice to have them for one million change-of-address purposes) but also a celebratory one: I remember when we moved to this house, it was a very exciting stage of the process. If the sale were to fall through, I would be out a little bit of money, but it’s not enough of a risk to be worth waiting. And it was a lot of fun to choose. Go on and guess how many of the four sets I entered our CURRENT address on, before realizing it. (It was all four.)

Smallish things I wish:

1. That my microwave, which beeps three times every thirty seconds or so when it is done microwaving, would do that ONLY on a special Coffee Re-Heating setting. I DO need to be reminded that my coffee mug is in there. I DON’T need to be reminded about ANYTHING ELSE.

2. That our realtor would EMAIL us updates instead of always CALLING us. We ALWAYS contact her by email. We have TOLD her we prefer email, more than once. We even made an accidental passive-aggressive point about it by praising the home inspector for emailing us back, saying how annoying it was to us when we email someone and then they call us or email back a phone number—and then realizing that with the realtor standing right there it was kind of an awkward thing to be discussing in front of her. But apparently there was no need for us to cringe, because she still calls us.

3. That I had more than two things for this list. It seemed like a good idea for a post when I’d thought of two, but I’ve been sitting here half an hour and nothing else is occurring to me. Perhaps you could add some smallish things YOU wish, so it seems more like a discussion-starter and less like a stunted topic.

May I recommend taking leftover Chinese food and adding it to scrambled eggs? SO GOOD. The best egg-addition so far, I think, is leftover Kung Pao Chicken: the chicken, the celery, the peppers, even the peanuts—plus don’t forget to put in the sauce. It coats the eggs just perfectly. And put in a spoonful of leftover rice too. Then eat until you feel sick because it is so delicious you can’t stop.

I have for whatever reason stopped being super-anxious about the new house and also stopped being super-sad about leaving this house. It took about two weeks—and also I had to say to Suddenly-Cold-Footed Paul that we could think seriously one more time about backing out, but after that we needed to stop thinking of it as an option or I was going to lose my mind.

Now I am regular anxious (“So much to do!” “What if the utilities at the new house are so high it makes us cry?” “We are going to have to figure out what to do about X and Y…and W and B and Q”) and regular sad (“All the things we had done to this house thinking we’d be here maybe forever!” “I remember washing this wall when I was 32 weeks pregnant with William” “The next person is not going to love this weird Frankenkitchen the way I do”), plus a nice amount of excited and enthusiastic. I am planning multiple New House events: having my wine-and-appetizers group over to drink a toast in every room; having extended family over for pizza and a tour and a game of Sardines; maybe a more general housewarming where we invite everybody we know for cocktails and snacks (do people still do housewarmings?). It’s going to be fun. It’s good to do new things. I am going to say it until I believe it. It’s already working a little!

Let me tell you a story: This afternoon my four remaining housechildren came home from school, and a short time later the eldest of those children drove the younger three to an afternoon activity on his way to work, and I am alone in the house once again, having exerted no childcare effort since they left for school this morning. I am looking back over my shoulder at the days when my days were so full of childcare I would daydream about getting sent to a hospital or maybe prison, and now here I am getting another cup of coffee and queuing up another episode of West Wing. (I’m re-watching it from the beginning.)

I have been watching a lot of TV while playing phone games. I’m not watching new things: I’m re-watching, because I need more distraction than playing phone games, and I need more distraction than watching new TV, but playing phone games while watching new TV is too much. Phone games plus re-runs is perfect. This is to distract me from the stress of the maybe-house and maybe-move, which grow increasingly less “maybe.”

You might wonder if my time might be better spent packing or at least cleaning and organizing and de-cluttering, and I too wonder that. Why am I not doing that, when packing/cleaning/organizing/de-cluttering would make me feel better by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done, rather than by distracting me from it? Psychology is such a rich tapestry.

I have also been re-watching Northern Exposure. Joel Fleischman is extremely my type. I remember arguments among peers: who is cuter, Ed or Chris? It’s interesting how much younger Holling and Maurice look to me now, twenty-plus years after I first watched the series. I’m not sure if that makes me MORE or LESS squicked now by the “two men in their 60s fighting over an 18-year-old girl plotline”; I think it’s a draw. Maggie continues to be as hopelessly aspirational to me as was/is the French girl in the movie Better Off Dead, and I love Marilyn and Ruth-Anne as much as ever. Anyway it’s not too late to ditch this Big Old House in Town life option and switch to a Cabin in Alaska life option.

Update on the Possible Move is this: AFTER Paul pushed for this house and this move, to the point where I thought “I would need to Really Hate this house in order to stand in his way on this,” and AFTER we made an offer, THAT’S when Paul joined me on Anxiety Island. Suddenly he was all “Do we really want to do this???” and “Is this really how we want to spend our money???” and “Do we even WANT to move???” Oh good.

I am trying to think about it like this: I BADLY WANTED each pregnancy/baby—but there were times during each pregnancy that I had misgivings or even panic about the pregnancy/baby/decision. A wanted baby is still a huge life-changing upheaval, and there are so many unknowns about the particular child, and there can be fears such as “What if I don’t love this child as much as my first child?” and “What if later we wish we’d stopped one baby sooner?,” and there can be stressful feelings about the upcoming delivery, and so on and so on. I would not at those times have wanted someone to say to me “YOU are the one who wanted this!!”

I continue to have my own panicky feelings about the house and the move and all the million stressful things that go along with a move. I can swing wildly between “THIS IS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE AND WE NEED TO GET OUT OF IT” and “This is fine and it’s a fun adventure and it’s a great opportunity to go through all our stuff!” in, like, a five-minute period of time. I’m using a lot of lavender-vanilla-scented stuff—it’s supposed to be calming. I’m also using a fair amount of gin.

It helps me to think about things such as these:

1. When I play computer games, I have a tendency to hoard the boosters or money or whatever, and/or I play the game on the most efficient mode, even when neither of those things are the FUN-maximizing way to play the game. Sometimes I will spend real actual money to buy coins/tickets/whatever for the game, so that I can get the cooler stuff—and then I hoard those forever and never use them on the cooler stuff because I can’t figure out what I most want to spend them on. Later I lose interest in the game and stop playing it, leaving all those boosters and coins/tickets/whatever behind. That is not what I want to do with ACTUAL LIFE. I don’t want to stay in our current house forever just because it’s not efficient to move, or just because it will cost some boosters/coins. Eventually I will no longer be playing this game, and I’d rather not abandon it with all those boosters/coins unused.

2. This house represents a Fun Different Life Mode to Try: it’s “Living in a Big Old Historical House in Town” mode. There are a number of things that will be quite different about our life, including being able to walk to a bunch of places we currently drive to. I think it’s possible/likely that this will result in us participating in more town events, since we’ll be Right There and can just stroll over, instead of having to think about it and make plans and find parking and so forth. If we do get a dog, that too will be an interesting new life mode. And we might get chickens. And Paul is doing a lot of research on the new house and finding out interesting historical stuff; owning an old house might make us both more interested in town history and give us a new hobby. And if we try this new life mode and it’s not for us, we can change it again: it’s still fun/interesting to have tried a few different ways of living over the course of a lifetime.

3. We’ve moved before and it always seems unbelievably overwhelming but it always gets done and then everything calms down and gets normal again.

4. Lots of people change houses a lot more frequently than us, and it’s no big deal. Like, they just move! It’s a normal life thing! They don’t get THIS STRESSED about it! Perhaps I too could dial it back a bit!

5. My friend Morgan LOVES so many aspects of moving, and her enthusiasm is very bolstering. She says things like, “I want to come over and help you pack!!” and “I want to see the new house and talk about FURNITURE!!” She sees the whole things as an Interesting Project, and that helps me to see it that way too.

6. My friend Surely is in love with the house, and her enthusiasm is also very bolstering. She looks at the photos and says things like, “I am OBSESSED with x!!” and “Ooo, what is that door across from the sink??” It makes me love the house more.

7. My friend Melissa is a calmer, more sensible version of me: we have enough personality overlap to empathize strongly with each other, but she doesn’t get as FREAKED by things. So she can say things that make total sense to my brain, but with her own steadier spin on it. Plus, she and her family have lived in several old houses. She says things like, “Your current house is great, but it’s in a bad location. The new house is in a much nicer location and will be easier to sell—either in a few years if you don’t end up liking it, or when you get old and have to sell it” and “We’ve lived in old houses that haven’t been anywhere near as updated as this one; this one will be way easier to deal with.”

8. This could be a fun adventure for Paul and me to do together. We don’t have many shared interests, but we’re both riveted by this house and the possibilities. We’ve talked to each other more in the last two weeks than in the last year, I think. And we’re already making plans to walk to each newly-walkable-to restaurant in turn.

9. A LOT of the current stress is based purely on dealing with the realtor and the seller and the various evaluators and all the other unfamiliar people and processes and decisions involved in transferring a house from one owner to another, and all of that is going to go away soon.

10. As moves go, this is a nice easy one. We are not even moving to a different town. It’s the SAME town, the SAME school system. We don’t have to figure out new school, new doctors, new dentist, new grocery store, new friends, new library; we don’t have to have records transferred or figure out new utilities.

11. This is all very stressful but it’s not Really Bad Life Thing stress. It’s just CHANGE stress.

I have had to call our insurance company four times in the past two weeks about three separate issues. All ended up getting fixed, and I must say our insurance company has very nice customer service representatives, but this is new insurance for us as of six months ago and this is a nervous-making number of mistakes to have to catch and deal with.

Today Henry was supposed to have his allergy testing, and tomorrow an appointment with the doctor to decide what to do next. Instead the office called 90 minutes before the appointment to reschedule those two appointments for (1) a week from now and (2) MORE THAN TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, respectively. This is a significant and demoralizing setback. I am trying to see it big-picture-style as the blip it is, but I don’t mind telling you I had Cry Voice on the phone as she gave me the new dates.

A possible move update is that we decided to try to buy the house. We put in an offer contingent on something being fixed, so we thought we might very well lose the house to another buyer who would make an offer without the accompanying demand. But the seller accepted our offer. Our agent told us the seller can still start the process of fixing that thing, discover it is more expensive/involved than expected, and dissolve the contract without penalty. Also we are getting the house inspected, and we may find things during that process that we don’t like, in which case we too are allowed to dissolve the contract without penalty. This is why I say we decided to TRY to buy the house: I don’t want to feel as if it’s a done deal when there are still a lot of places where this could fall through.

I am almost entirely consumed now by house-related stress. Right now I am mostly coping by Not Thinking About It Too Much, which is also good in case it falls through (or in case it doesn’t fall through). I’m getting each thing done one at a time. Here I am, writing the escrow check, that’s all, nothing to do with any ENORMOUS HOUSE PURCHASE or anything. Here I am, writing the inspection appointment on the calendar, no big deal, nothing to do with anything that might happen next.

Here is what I would like to discuss in a distracting-from-home-purchase way: dog breeds. I have grown up with ONLY cats, and in fact none of my childhood FRIENDS even had dogs. (This was not on purpose.) I realize that dogs are individuals, but also I am given to understand that breed plays a big role, so that certain breeds are certain ways and you shouldn’t get a dog of that breed if those are traits you don’t like, even though each individual dog of that breed might have those characteristics to a lesser or greater extent. But, like, certain breeds Tend To Be more energetic and certain breeds Tend To Be less energetic, and so on. Am I getting this approximately right so far?

What I think might be fun/useful would be for me to say what basic variety of dog I am hoping to find, and have people yell out breeds that seem like a good match for some/all of the traits. Or say anything else about dogs. Let’s just talk about dogs in general for awhile. Like, don’t feel you have to have relevant advice in order to join the talking about dogs.

Paul says he doesn’t want a dog that, if he (Paul) were to strike a dignified pose near a forest, would make him look ridiculous. By this he means Corgis, Dachshunds, Basset Hounds, and anything small and fancy. His own preference is for a dog the size and basic dog-look (possibly not temperament—he doesn’t know anything about dogs either) of a Labrador Retriever or Golden Retriever or German Shepherd. (Do we capitalize dog breed names? I don’t even know that. It looks wrong either way I do it.)

But I don’t think we care very much what Paul wants. He technically has veto power but I’m planning to ignore even that, unless he gets very vigorous about it. This is MY dog. And I very much like the sort of dog that would make Paul look ridiculous if he tried to strike a dignified pose next to one. Dachshunds, Corgis, Basset Hounds. I will agree that I am disinclined toward the Small and Fancy category (Small But Not Fancy is fine), even though in many ways those seem like they’d be a good starter dog: it seems like they’re more cat-like, plus they’re small which seems more manageable. But they don’t appeal so far. Don’t let that stop you from recommending them: I am keeping all the possibilities open at this point.

The type of dog I have said over the years is my favorite, the type I would choose if I knew for a fact that it was something I could handle on all the levels a dog will need to be handled, is a Great Dane. But…I mean, they’re huge. HUGE. Does a person go from “no dogs at all” to “100-150 pounds of dog” like that? And how much would a person end up spending on dog food?? LOTS, I’m guessing. And what if I were walking the dog and it decided to take off suddenly? I very much doubt I could stop it from dragging me through the fields. It just seems like SO MUCH DOG. It might be better to start with something more medium-sized. I guess it turns out I’m PICTURING something more medium-sized, when I picture My Dog.

It is my impression that it is better to get a mixed-breed dog, is that right? Not only because of the cost (I have seen purebred puppies selling for multiple thousands of United States dollars EACH), but also I have heard that purebreds are more likely to have breed-specific health issues, whereas a mixed-breed dog is a sturdier creature—but I’m not sure how true that is. Also I’m not sure if there might be a difference between “purebred” (as in, a very expensive dog that is 100% a certain breed) and a dog that is, say, just Labrador Retriever but NOT a purebred (like, it might have some other dogs in its ancestry and you wouldn’t use it as a show dog, but if someone asked you what it was you’d just say Labrador Retriever).

Well. Okay, let me get to the part where I tell you what I would like. For my very first dog I would like an EASY dog. I want an adult dog, not a puppy. I would like a LAZY dog that is willing to go on walks or maybe play outside a little with the kids, but isn’t super-active otherwise. Do they ALL stop every few seconds to sniff things on walks, or is that something some dogs do a lot more than others? I would prefer LESS stopping, if there’s a choice. I would prefer a dog on the low end of drooling. I would like a QUIET dog, disinclined to bark; it’s okay if they bark when someone comes up the driveway, or if they bark a little while playing. I would like a dog on the LOW end of destructive. I would like a pleasant-companion dog who would like to hang out near me but doesn’t need a ton of attention. …I realize it sounds like I am describing a cat, but I feel as if there MUST be dogs like this.

Elizabeth had her scoliosis appointment with the big-city-hospital doctor. It took us over three-and-a-half hours to get there, with traffic and delays. We then waited TWO HOURS in the waiting room past her appointment time. We then waited forty minutes in the exam room. The doctor came in for FIVE MINUTES: he said yes, she needs a Boston brace, but she will only have to wear it twelve hours a day, so she can avoid wearing it to school if she prefers. He sent us over to the department that measures for braces, but they did not have time to see her. So we went home. The entire trip took eleven hours from leaving our house to coming back in the door.

If I were you, I would be suspecting all those numbers of being exaggerations. Like, probably Swistle is just venting frustration and it wasn’t literally a full two hours in the waiting room, and it was probably more like twenty minutes with the doctor. BUT NO. I assure you I am faithfully reporting. Then we had to wait almost ten minutes at the check-out desk, because the one task the doctor was supposed to have done in those five minutes we had with him (write a prescription for the brace) was something he had not done, so the receptionist had to go find him, wait for him to finish with a patient, and get him to write it.

Well. At least we got that one task done in the end.

I also brought Henry in for an appointment with an ENT doctor to see about his relentless sniffing. She said it looked like allergies to her, and now we have an appointment for him to get allergy testing. I’d thought it COULDN’T be allergies, because we’d tried Zyrtec, Claritin, Allegra, Flonase, and nothing helped. She said sometimes allergies manifest more in congestion than in itchiness/sneezing, and that Zyrtec/Claritin/Allegra don’t really help with that; there are decongestant versions of those medications, but she doesn’t generally recommend them (I don’t know if she meant for anyone, or just for kids).

Instead she recommends allergy testing, followed by allergy shots if the testing is as expected. So! Henry is about as pleased as you’d expect. He’s in the Bargaining stage: “If between now and the allergy testing I SUDDENLY stopped sniffing—would I STILL have to get the shots?” He is also nervous about the allergy testing itself. I had that done as a child, and what I remember about it is that the part where they put small amounts of substances under your skin was not so terrible, but the itching afterward was pretty maddening. Still, it’s temporary and endurable—and if the problem is NOT allergies, we’ve ruled out a whole big possibility.

I can tell the doctor is almost certain it IS allergies, though, and that furthermore she’s narrowed down what she thinks is the primary source. She said, “Do you have pets?” and I said we had three cats. She said, “…Do you like them?” It reminded me of one of my favorite family stories about my mom. My brother and I were both diagnosed as children with cat allergies, and my brother also with asthma. The allergy/asthma doctor said to my mother, “You will need to rehome the cats.” She did not argue with him, and she nodded, wide-eyed and compliant. Nevertheless catching something subtle in her manner, he repeated even more firmly, one finger held out warningly: “The cats MUST go.” Again she nodded. He said some third emphatic thing about the cats; she nodded again; he sighed. We did not get rid of the cats.

It seems odd to me that we’ve had cats for Henry’s entire life but he’s only started having trouble the last year or so. Apparently that can happen—but, for example, Elizabeth had allergy testing awhile back, and it showed she was quite allergic to cats, but she doesn’t have any trouble with them. The allergist said that by being around cats since birth, she got the equivalent of allergy shots: her immune system got trained to deal with them. But I guess that is not the way it happened with Henry, if indeed he turns out to be allergic to cats.

Well. The immune system is a neverending mystery.

My brain is almost fully occupied with frets and excitements about the the possible new house. It is such a consuming topic/situation. I find it helpful to use Coping Thoughts such as “People move ALL THE TIME” and “We would not be the first people to make a real estate mistake” and “This is a NORMAL LIFE EVENT.” Also right now we are in the delicate situation of wanting to be excited about the house (if we do buy it) but not wanting to get TOO excited (in case we don’t/can’t buy it), so I am adding “It happens A LOT that people want a particular house but it just doesn’t work out” and “There would in fact be some RELIEF involved if that happened.”

Paul meanwhile is NOT fretting. He has entered Full Love Phase about the potential new house. He is almost frantic at my reluctance to make fast giant decisions. I think at this point I could say “In addition to the housecleaner and the dog I want a ‘pool boy’ and maybe even also a pool,” and he would say “Yes yes yes yes fine can we call the agent now??”

It has made me think a bit about Couple Dynamics. In our marriage, it seems to me that I get my way about almost everything, because those are the things Paul doesn’t care about; but then when he DOES care about something, he always gets his way. I am trying to think of a time when he wanted his way about something and didn’t get it, and nothing is coming to mind, though I guess I would have to ask him about that.

Another issue at play here is that I am the Sensible Financial One in our relationship, even though you might not know it from all the stuff I don’t need from Target. But I’m the one who handles the bills; I’m the one who tries to shop carefully and find good prices to save us money over the long run; I’m the one who pushed hard for vigorous early payment of student loans; I’m the one who had us make financial decisions based on one income even when we had two incomes (because the plan was to go to one income once we had kids); I’m the one who said we should send tax refunds and other windfalls directly off to the mortgage company. It’s one of my major contributions to the shared work of our household. But Paul is the one who earns the bulk of the money.

You can probably see how these two dynamics together can make things a little tricky in situations where a decision is heavily financial but it’s something Paul cares about. I don’t want to give the impression that Paul is pressuring me or trying to force me into something I don’t want to do, and I am all set on discussions of shared finances with an at-home parent and so forth. It is more that it is something interesting to think about, along with how weird it is to make most of the major decisions of one’s life (whether to have children and how many to have, where to live and how) WITH another person.

We just watched Isle of Dogs and it was one of the most Wes Andersony things I’ve ever seen. Not appropriate for little kids, but good for older ones. There were some scenes we all went “URRRGGGG” about, like cutting up still-alive seafood, and pulling out something stuck in someone’s head (the person in question was okay) (both times) (and all animated, not real-life). Dear heaven. But really good, especially if you like Wes Anderson films, which I mostly do.

Also a good movie for warming hearts toward dogs, which brings me to my next topic. A lot has been happening here. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but Paul and I have been casually house-hunting for a couple of years. Nothing formal. Nothing decided. More like, let’s just scope out the sitch, just for fun. Just going to Open Houses or whatever, and then saying, “It’s nice, but not enough to motivate me to want to move” and/or “Sure, it’s good, but I don’t feel like I WANT it.” Subscribing to emails that let us know about new properties listed in our town. Etc.

We have lived in our current house for 17 years, and we bought it because in five months of searching, with me increasingly pregnant with our second child, it was the third of three houses in our area our agent could show us in our one-income range, and one of the others had water damage and only two bedrooms, and the other one had three bedrooms but an open concept (toddler access to EVERYTHING) and a terrible rickety add-on and the kind of stairs where a child could slip between steps and no real yard. So we bought this one, which had a terrible kitchen and an appalling bathroom and was so smoke-damaged by improper woodstove ventilation that you could see the outlines of what used to be on the walls—but it wasn’t about loving the house, it was about choosing the only sensible/possible thing that came along, and this one had three bedrooms and a good yard and potential for building stuff into the unfinished basement. And good thing we did, because I think we were the actual literal last people in our area to buy a house before the housing market went WHOOSHING up, and then soon after that there were condos selling for what we paid for our house, and then there were condos selling for half-again more than what we paid for our house.

Anyway, this house has served us well, thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of my Handy Supreme dad who, when we got Surprise Twins, added two small bedrooms and a multi-purpose room and a bathroom to the unfinished basement, and replaced a bunch of the squirrel-gnawed 1960’s windows that used to get a thick layer of ice on the INSIDE of them every winter, and knew how to replace the outlets that started SHOOTING SPARKS (!!!) shortly after we moved in, and quietly transferred over from his house to our house a bunch of shelves he’d built, and so forth.

And the thing is, now I DO love the house. But I didn’t mind Just Looking at other houses, because I felt like we didn’t get our fair share of Looking back when we WERE looking, and looking is fun. Here is the problem: Looking eventually led to Finding. But now that it has been Found, I have had multiple panicky weepy fits about Not Wanting To Move, Why Would We Want To Move, I Love This House, I Planned To Die in This House or Else in a Nursing Home Directly From This House, etc., combined with Wanting The Other House and daydreaming about the other house and so forth.

It is an OLD house. It has horsehair plaster walls, which I had never heard of. It has a barn; Paul says there will not be mice, because the barn does not store food, but Twitter confirmed what I thought, which is that old barns Have Mice. It has a loft so large I would never have to throw anything out; I could easily store a fully-decorated-and-assembled fake Christmas tree if I wanted to. I could store a Toyota if I wanted to. TWO Toyotas. THREE.

The house is big. The house is old. The house has a steep driveway, when we specifically did not want a steep driveway. The house has weird bedrooms, where two of them can only be accessed by walking through other bedrooms. The house has some of those weird old-house closets that aren’t even wide enough for a hanger; they would basically fit a broom and dustpan, nothing else. The house has two or three (I lost count) Weird Old Little Rooms of Uncertain Usage (to be converted to SWISTLE LAIR((S))??). It is the kind of house where you open a door and there is another room, and another room, and two more rooms, and a little staircase off that room, and a loft off that staircase, and a barn off that loft, and another room off the barn, and you lose track of what is what and what is where. (This is what I have claimed to love/want.) There are not really enough bathrooms for the number of bedrooms, but we are used to that and it’s a half-bath more than what we have now; and the electricity has been updated so there are lots of outlets. Also there is central a/c, and a kitchen island that could double as a guest bed. It is within walking distance of many things it would be nice to be in walking distance of, such as a park and a library and a charming shop I never go to because the parking is impossible.

Here are my biggest concerns, which are two sides of the same concern:

1. We will move, and we will hugely regret it. We will THINK we will know what we are getting into, but we are accustomed to 1960 House Problems, and this will be 1820 House Problems, and we will be so sorry. Any new house comes with a batch of Unpleasant Surprises, but this will be more like The Money Pit, with hysterical laughter and a bathtub falling through a floor and us basically being in way over our heads and now we can’t get out and we can’t sell it to anyone else because no one else is as foolish as us.

2. We will move, and we will hugely regret it. We will THINK we don’t want to live in this house anymore, but it will turn out it was the perfect house for us, and we will miss it SO MUCH. We will PINE for it! But it will be too late! Someone else will own our dear little house!! We cannot have it back!! They can do anything they want to it!! I had a literal nightmare about this.

We talked about it many times and I cried four times and then we got pre-approved for a mortgage in case we decided we wanted to buy it. Paul, who has been my boyfriend for 23 years, does not try to talk me out of Fret Fits. Instead he tells me Stories. In this case, here is the Story he told me: “We will not sell our old house right away. We will keep it for several months to get it ready to sell. And if we hate the new house and wish we hadn’t bought it, we can move back. It would be an expensive lesson—but we would NOT be stuck forever in a house we hated, and at least it would let us get all the floors refinished and walls/ceilings painted.” (The floors have needed refinishing for a decade. The walls/ceilings have needed repainting for about as long. But how do you get that done when you live in the house?)

There is virtually no chance we would actually move back; that would be a story like when people get divorced and then remarry a few months later. But this is just a Story. It is for comfort. The purpose is to Soothe, not to Solve. It is a Story I can tell myself when I am panicking. It works. A fear of Not Getting the House has creeped in, and is nudging aside the Fear of Getting the House.

But he wants to move more than I do. And he wants this house more than I do. And so I have made two Bargains. First bargain: if we move (to ANY house), we get a housecleaner every other week, so that the house stays clean and does not descend into the grubby clutter that makes me feel as if it’s too late to hire a housecleaner. Second bargain: if we move (to THIS house, which has an invisible fence and a dog run), I get a Dog Option. We don’t necessarily get a dog—but I get the OPTION to get a dog, with limited veto power on his part in regards to breed and/or particular dog. I have wanted a dog for years, and he has said no to a dog for years—but it’s possible that I only say I want a dog because I know he’ll say no. My new friend Morgan ran into this with begging for a cat: it was safe to do so, because she knew her husband would say no, so she begged and wheedled for years in comfort. But then one day he said yes, and she didn’t know WHAT to do. So I didn’t bargain for a dog; I bargained for a dog OPTION. I get a dog if I want a dog.

My terms have been accepted. We’re looking at the house again tomorrow.

I have returned from taking Rob back to college. More on that later. But right now: road-trip snacks. I’ve taken several road trips this summer, which has given me extensive opportunity to test road-trip snacks. Here are the ones I find I am most interested in eating, while other items I might THINK I would want sit unopened and unloved.

Cookie category:
Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies
Nilla wafers

Chip/cracker category:
Better Cheddars
Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips
regular Pringles

Snack-cake category:
Entenmann’s Little Brownie Bites
Entenmann’s Brownie Chocolate-Chip Minis
Little Debbie Strawberry Shortcake rolls

Candy category:
Caramel M&Ms
Almond M&Ms
Mike & Ikes (10-flavor box + 4-flavor box + Jolly Joes, mixed together)
Haribo Gummi Fruit Salad

This is of course in addition to food at stops: doughnuts, pizza-by-the-slice, frozen mocha coffees, ice cream in all its delightful forms.

I am very interested to know what your favorites are.