Category Archives: Castle Willett

I forgot that when I get into Hissy, her and my phone start sharing secrets.

She has her pride (she’s small and zippy) and there was no way Hissy was going to put up with that particular little slight.

As I’m loading a bit of stuff, Hissy starts taunting me, begging for more.

“I can handle it! I’m not even close to capacity! Bring it on!!”

“Is that all you’ve got? Is that the best that you can do? Hit me! Fill me up! Show me an actual freakin’ challenge!”

“Even with all of that I’m STILL small and zippy! Get that damn van out of here!”

She is Hissy.

Bit by bit, step by step, normalcy returns. But it’s a long road.

Tonight I made the next big step in getting my office back online. The cable company had come by earlier and gotten the wi-fi and internet connections back up and I knew that the next bottleneck for me was getting my desktop back online. Which first meant getting that really big desk (which I do love) through that narrow door, down that narrow hallway, around the corner through that next narrow door, and into the spare bedroom that will be my office.

The only way to do that was to disassemble the desk. I knew that it could be done – years and years ago I assembled it when we got it for my office at my previous job. (When they sold everything off and closed up I got to keep some items such as my desk and some other office furniture.) So it was time to attack with screwdriver and pliers at the ready.

Now it’s done, the computer is back online – and the office looks like an explosion in a cable factory. Coax, power, CAT-5, all tangled all over the place. I’ll worry about the niceties of cleaning it up when I get the time later. For now, I’m back online, doing my normal evening routine and writing, and it makes a big difference.

Tomorrow it’s back to getting stuff out of the old house. The clock is ticking.

Barring some drastic change in plans, such as a 9.0 earthquake or the movers not showing up tomorrow morning (and even that might not be enough to do it), this will be our last night in this house after over 27 years.

Fortunately, I’m too freaking busy and panicked and intensely focused on getting out to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think it will be something I think about after the fact, when I have a few minutes to think and sleep and reflect.

In the meantime, after getting up way too early on a Saturday in order to get to our work event, then spending way too many hours doing things that the Director of Finance doesn’t do on a regular basis (i.e., strenuous physical labor), I came home exhausted about 17:00 and from there I’ve spent almost seven hours packing and prepping.

The infrastructure is coming down. The televisions, DVD players, audio systems, all are in the process of being dismantled and shut down. First thing in the morning I’ll pull the plug on the last of the TVs and internet and start preparing all of that hardware to get shipped up the hill to the new place. Then, of course, I’ll (I hope) spend most of tomorrow night putting it all back together again.

Tomorrow we move.

So, while I was cryptic (i.e., trying to be clever, and probably failing) last night:

1. We’re not going to be homeless. Now, understand that “homeless” is way, way too strong of a term, since it generally signifies someone living on the street or in their car with nowhere else to go, often impoverished. We would be a long way from impoverished, but if things hadn’t worked out in our search for a new place, the plan was to move into an extended stay hotel for a couple of weeks to a couple of months. It was not something I was looking forward to.
2. Something mentioned in the song has to do with the street name that our new house is on. It’s a mnemonic if you’re me – it’s just a “huh?” moment if you’re not me.

Bottom line is that we have at last found a house to rent and we’ll start moving in tomorrow. This will be a “fun” weekend, if by “fun” you mean 20 hour days and more strenuous physical labor than I usually have in a year.

But we’ve now removed most of the uncertainty and we can start moving full speed ahead. Before I was trying to prioritize hauling stuff to storage and juggling scenarios like a demon.

“What if we get a house? What if we get a big apartment? What if we get a small apartment? What if it’s a townhouse and we have stairs? What if we end up in that extended stay hotel? What goes where and when does it have to happen for each of these scenarios?”

Now we know, so it’s time to get ‘er done.

I’ll send pictures. Assuming I have internet access. (If you get one quick thing from my cell phone or iPad, you’ll know we didn’t get the computers re-assembled or the internet services turned on yet.)

See you on the other side!

The “adventure” continues.

We’re about 35 days into our 60 day escrow, with the goal of only needing about 45 of those 60 days. That goal is getting harder to hit every day. But there has been massive progress.

Aside from the weekend in Toronto, pretty much every waking moment of every weekend has been spent packing and moving stuff to storage. There’s also been a lot of stuff put into the trash – the bins are full to overflowing every Friday morning. And even more stuff has been schlepped off to Goodwill and various other charities that accept such donations.

At this point, probably 2/3 or more of what obviously needs to get to storage has gotten there. When this weekend is done, I hope that percentage is closer to 90%+.

We have a growing stack of defunct electronics and computers and monitors and televisions that will all get picked up by an e-waste recycling place here at some point. We have a growing list of furniture (shelves, an armoire, a bed, several desks, a couch) which will get donated to just about anyone who will pick them up. And at some point we’ll probably just have to get one of those big trash bins to fill.

Once all of that is done, there will be a relatively short list of things that will remain, with the hope that they’ll be going to “the next home.”

And there’s the rub at this point. We have absolutely zero clue where we’ll be moving to, even though that move will be in 26 days at the most, with 14 days or so being preferred.

Z-E-R-O.

Not that we’re not looking, mind you. But the options boil down to a classic “three-body” problem, trying to balance Location, Quality, and Price. You get two of the three. You can have something in this area with a reasonable commute to work and a low crime rate and you can have it reasonably priced, but it will be a piece of shit that’s falling apart and small. You can have a place that’s nice and decent sized while still being reasonably priced, but it will be 40 miles away with an hour (or longer) commute to work. Or you can have a place nearby that’s nice and decent sized, but you’ll pay about 50% more than we were hoping to.

It’s that final combo where push will probably come to shove.

We’re now finding there’s another factor – getting approved and accepted as the renter. We had found a house last weekend which really was ideal and we immediately filled out an application with high hopes that we would get it quickly and start to finalize the moving process. Today we got our hopes dashed when we got turned down for someone else.

So it’s back to scouring Zillow for listings, going to see three more this evening. The one with the decent price and decent size has multiple things in need of immediate repair despite their claim that it’s ready to move into. The one that’s a very good price is tiny, smaller than most two-bedroom apartments, and not in very good shape either. The one that’s really nice and actually only about two blocks from the current house is expensive – but we’ll grab it if we can. More calls in on more listings to see this weekend.

And it’s time to start thinking about apartments instead of houses. Lots more of them available and while really, REALLY  not my first choice, at this point reality is rearing it’s ugly head and reminding me that the other choice might be an “extended stay” hotel and moving twice, once into storage and then back out to a house a month (or two, or three) later after living in a freakin’ glorified Holiday Inn…

Now I know why I didn’t move in the last twenty-seven years!

We will prevail. I just reserve the right to be cranky while prevailing.