Surprise, Surprise

We have a definite date of April 19th for our possession of our Pennsylvania house but a more slippery date for the sale of our current house, even though the buyers are both physicians with a pre-approval for their purchase. What we didn't have until today was a clear date on the moving van and the movers coming. The company that we picked is one that moves military families all the time and all over the place which is one reason their bid was half the cost of the national moving company.

Because they bid based on where they ended up last, they only wanted to give an estimated day of pickup which ends up being this coming Monday, a few days earlier than we had expected. While that was a shock, it clears up some of the questions I had as to when we clean out the refrigerator and when we clean up the house--broom clean is the standard here as in most states.

So we will have an empty house, or nearly empty since there are some pieces that we plan to take to the dump--the couch that the hound destroyed early in his time with us that we fluffed up with pillows and blankets to use just as a pet bed as an example. We will also have a time lag between how long we expect the trip to take and when we need to be in Wallingford or where we need to go to sign the papers and get the keys.

We have been dumping and cleaning for a while even though we completely downsized 12 years ago when we sold the big house so I would like to say that it is easier this time. The problem is that my husband and I are both not hoarders but savers. We don't live wandering through piles of newspaper or books but we do cling. It's probably a human trait but both of us grew up under parents who lived through the Depression and WWII, one who spent those years in Tokyo, so our view of using and reusing is probably colored by that.

Then there is also the fact that when we moved in to this house we brought boxes of goods from the previous house that at least one of us never completely investigated. I love my husband truly and sincerely. He is probably the only man in the world who would put up with me. But besides the fact that his hearing has been impaired at least as long as I have known him, probably from playing banjo in a bluegrass band back in the day, he never really listens to anyone. So when I asked him after we moved in here to go through the boxes he had stacked so neatly behind his workstation, he nodded but did not react.

Today he tells me that he has found X Y Z , you name it, all the things I asked him to look for previously in the items that he had packed, I was happy that the items had turned up since my investigation into the boxes that I had packed and stored during the last move had not turned up any of them. But, naturally, as the long suffering wife, I pointed out that if he had done what I asked him to do, his life today would be easier. It won't change him and it certainly won't change how I feel about him but it is another symptom of the difference between men and women--at least in my house.