zola | The magic word... done!

We are here. Everything is out of the old house. Now all that's left is the unpacking. Of course, that's going to take a while...

Ben and I sat down and talked and today we are going to tend to kitchen things. We'll decide where to put the dishes and where to store the food and all that stuff. We have a tiny refrigerator and a small hot plate for the moment, which is plenty for he and I. When we know what's going on as far as the work the house needs and so forth, we can better decide what we're going to get.

It's hard to believe that we would be all moved saved for some odds and ends in a storage unit and still have stuff so much up in the air, but I suppose that's pretty normal, really. A lot of things couldn't be done until we were actually here, like having someone around for a repair person.

We don't know what we are going to do with the addition. We may just remove it, depending on what the contractor thinks insofar as the security and stability of the unit.

If we want to remove it, we can take the bay window out of it as a replacement for the front window and the neighbors will gladly take the shell, as they need a storage shed, so we may well do it that way. So I guess it's more hurry up and wait, and start figuring out where to put stuff. Ben's going to be looking for work starting tomorrow, anything he can get will be a help, but I'm already seeing a difference in the cost of living just by going to the grocery store. Twenty cents cheaper here, fifty cents there... I can see it adds up rapidly.

We didn't buy too much food on this trip because we haven't really gotten a good inventory of what we have since it's in boxes and everywhere, but once we do that, we'll be able to shop better. We got enough perishables for a few days, that will hold us as we continue to put things away.

Now, I just want a few days to rest and regroup so we can start building our new life. We're already friends with our younger neighbors, they are over at least a couple of times a day, and we're already discussing stuff we want to do. I think I'm going to let J.R.'s mom graze her horse on one of my hillsides, it seems like a friendly animal. Certainly, it was very interested in the moving procedures--I was putting stuff away from one trip and saw the horse down in the field watching me curiously.

We have a couple of "must" tend to chores that we'll take care of promptly. We have to pull down the porch, it's just not safe. We're going to put a simple set of stairs in its place for now, JR has already promised to help with that. We have to direct the water from the front gutter so it isn't undermining the pilings on the house or soaking the unfinished wall, and we need to get the plumber in to fix the water. Then we need to see how bad one of the bathroom floors is--it feels spongy, but it's hard to say if it just needs underflooring replaced or if the problem goes all the way into the floor joists.

There's a lot to do, but now at least we're here to do it!

The cats seem to be doing much better now. While we were on the last trip, JR and Amanda popped by once or twice a day just to "visit" with them. Binky still seems to be having a tough time handling it, but is coming around, and now we won't be just taking off on him again. We have let Zarozinia, Godzilla, and Charcoal outside, they very much wanted to go and we were in and out where they could see us. The first time Zara went out, she went right back in again, and Godzilla did the same. Charcoal was happy to poke around with Ben in sight, but was glad to come back in after about a half an hour.

Today Zara is running around outside quite happily as Ben and I go in and out, she will probably be the first to be allowed to come and go at will, and we will slowly introduce the other kitties to the new area.

We have a stray hanging around already, a pretty black Manx female. She seems very friendly, so I don't know if she belongs to someone around here and just visits or if she belonged to the previous owners. She seems to like Ben... we just managed to reduce our kitty population by two, since Mark took Gabby and Rydia, and I would really like it to stay that way, but if she keeps hanging around, I'm at least going to get her spayed... and if I do that, you know perfectly well we'll have eleven cats again... I guess I'll be that crazy old mountain cat lady, but maybe the local humane society has some kind of spay assistance like the MA one did.