Tap, tap, tap...is this thing on?

Um, hi there. This has been an insane couple of weeks, and it would probably take a couple of weeks to tell all about it, if I had the strength and my back didn't hurt. This will be long enough:

I'm safely and happily relocated to Asheville. The drive up looked like this:



It took a long time to pack Baby, and she had room only for me and two very small dogs.

Sophie had a nest on the front seat - her crate pad layered on top of a down throw. It looks curved like a hotdog bun because it was - the floor space in front of her had another box and a cooler and my purse and their dishes and...I forget. She declared this down and fleece nest a most worthy travel option. She fell asleeps as soon as we got moving and slept until the car stopped, when she got out to pee and stretch her legs a bit. Back in the car, back to sleep.



Murphy was in his carseat behind her (if he can't see out the window he gets carsick). He too slept most of the way, though he did sit up and see where we were at times.



We arrived on Monday afternoon, got the keys, I unloaded the car while the dogs freaked out ("Where the hell ARE we?") and we spent two lovely nights on an air mattress. I kept telling the dogs that this was harder on me than on them, because they can and do get comfortable on the floor, while my middle-aged human ass whined for furniture. They were still freaked out, and I had two small, hairy appendages following me everywhere. I could not pee alone.

My stuff arrived on Wednesday. The dogs watched the movers with rapt attention, and when it was done and they were released from the crate they were so obviously joyful, dancing and sniffing OUR STUFF and rolling on the floor in ecstasy! That was OUR STUFF!! OUR STUFF WAS HERE!!!

So the moving guys (two cute, funny French guys - who'd have expected that in the mountains of NC?) left around noon yesterday, and I have already unpacked most of the boxes, except for the many boxes of books and yarn and such.I cannot stand living in a sea of boxes, and whenever I move I turn into a crazed unpacking maniac. Living with boxes is stress - I lose stuff just putting it down, forgetting where I put it, and then I lose my mind. Hence, the backache, but it's so worth it. It'll stop hurting in a day or so, and it beats living in search of my keys, phone and mind.

I'm far from Done. A lot of stuff is still sitting around waiting for its new location, and I'm about four rolls of shelf paper from a finished kitchen. I ran out at noon today, and decided this was the Universe telling me to stop work on the kitchen until tomorrow. (I did continue to compulsively open boxes and put things away and break down boxes and haul them to the trash compactor, but other boxes in other rooms.) Am I homesick? Sort of, a little. I do miss "my" kitchen - I'm living with apartment-basic cabinets and seriously tiny drawer space - but I'm 5 minutes from the Blue Ridge Parkway, 15 from Boy and family, and 10 from Yarn Paradise, in my favorite city ever, so I will suck it up.

The apartment is spacious, sunny, clean and quiet. I don't feel like I'm in an apartment, it's a quiet community and feels like my old neighborhood. There are lots of kids and dogs and seniors and young families - I met my neighbors across the breezeway already, and they are really sweet. My furniture fit just as I hoped/imagined it would. The maintenance guy needs to come move some shelving in the master bedroom closet - the previous tenant must have been seven feet tall and living with a dwarf - but that's minor.

I have four broken fingernails, one cut finger, and a backache (curiously, in the exact same spot as my "possum feeding repetitive stress" pain), but I can look around and see how nice this will be when it's really and truly done. Living near my son has its privileges - he came over yesterday afternoon to hook up my washer and dryer. The story behind this: Girlchild has a track record of buying dryers on Craigslist that have the wrong plug for the place she lives. She buys a 4 prong plug dryer, and the outlet in the new place is a 3, and vice versa. So: I moved here with my 3-prong plug dryer, and found a 4 hole plug outlet. She moved into my 3 hole plug outlet house with a 4-prong dryer. It was a merry week of dryer wiring indeed - but I got Boy to do mine for me.

We did have a moving casualty - the Target dresser I'd assembled for the spare room a few years ago is no more. It appears to have been dropped while transitioning from the pick-up team to the delivery team. One of the delivery guys found the damage when they picked it up yesterday. A leg is broken off in an irreparable way, and the back right corner of the top, um, isn't there anymore. But my mother's hope chest and my old china cabinet and my uncle's equally ancient glass front bookcase and everything else came through just fine. If the moving gods demanded a sacrifice, I'm glad they took the Target dresser. Okay, not glad, because I'm now down quite a bit of storage space until I can replace it, but you know what I mean. If something had to go, I'm glad it wasn't my mother's hope chest. That would have been bad ju-ju indeed. Otherwise, all of the stuff I packed arrived intact, and we are all surviving, adjusting, and glad to be here. (Well, perhaps I can't speak for Sophie. She isn't happy about the cold.)