I understand Allison’s need to post in all caps. When you get to the point where you’re looking at your to do list and it’s longer than there are minutes in the day, all you know how to do anymore is emphasize just how busy you are. Like Jack talking to Wendy when she interrupts him working. It’s distracting.

This will be somewhere around my twenty-fifth move. That number almost makes no sense at all. Here’s another way to put it. Other than the four years I lived with my parents when I was in high school, the house I’m sitting in right now is the longest I’ve ever lived somewhere. Before that it was either my last Austin apartment when I lived with Eric, or it was the time I lived with Ray for over a year. When we move into this house, this house we’re buying and will be our house and nobody can tell us they’ve decided to sell it and there’s an open house next weekend and could I hide the cats, there’s a good chance it will become the house I’ll live in the longest. I only have to live there for more than four years.

They’re still trying to sell the house we’re living in, which has made it seventeen kinds of frustrating. I mentioned the flood that happened in the beginning of the book drive. This forced us to evacuate our downstairs room so they could replace the carpeting and paint the walls that had suffered damage in the four previous bathroom floods. This means we had to turn our bedroom into our office, because we have to work more than we have to sleep. Our garage right now is a glorified storage unit, with half of it filled with items we plan on selling in this mythical garage sale we’ve been planning on attempting. The other half is taken up by office furniture, weight equipment and cat shit. The cats, in fact, have started treating it as their bizarre apartment, and find it rude whenever we go in there to do laundry. This might be due to the fact that several times a week the cats are locked in that room so that strangers can walk through this house and decide if they’d like to buy it. This means that we’ve had to keep the house at “Mom’s Coming To Visit” clean for almost two months. It’s work. I know for some people that’s considered “clean.” For us it’s just more clean than we can handle.

We tossed out our mattress, which had been unaffectionately called the “Bed of Forks.” That’s what it feels like when you’re trying to sleep. We’re now sleeping on our guest futon which used to be in the guest room which is now an empty space. We’re basically living and working out of a one-bedroom. With three cats. You can see why the cats have decided to annex the garage as their own.

This week we have to get our change of address forms, deliver paperwork to the escrow people, call the current homeowners of our new place and ask if we can come in and measure things, call the homeowners of the place we live in now and ask for a letter saying we’re good tenants. We need to go to the wedding location, sign paperwork, decide on a few more things. I have a pitch tomorrow for a number of people on a project that we’ve been working on for a very long time. All of this, and I have a flight on Friday to visit my mom because she moved across the country this month, and bought a new home back where she grew up. I may outnumber Mom on moves now, but she’s still making huge ones in her life, unafraid to change things, to move forward, to do what feels right and what makes her happy. She’s so brave.

Everybody’s moving forward and making changes during this time of the year that we’re supposed to slow down, take it easy. If this is what we do in our down time, imagine what we’ll do when we kick things into gear.