… yet.

But, things have continued apace. Much to my amazement, the landscaping is down to “manageable” in what we have left to do. The heavy lifting (20 yards of bark-dust) is up to the landscapers. It’s just money at this point. Our realtor will love it. We hope. We’re on acreage so we have to make about 2 (of seven) look like civilized people could live here.

We’ve been faking it for fifteen+ years. Having kids will do that.

Goodwill and the local women’s shelter love us. That’s important.

It’s snowing outside on April 14. It snowed yesterday too. It never snows this late. The TeeVee will blame global warming but we all know it’s Putin’s fault. He probably didn’t burn enough mammoth fat after digging it up for spite in Siberia. We told the grass shoots; they agreed not to die and we agreed not to mow them prematurely.

Our paint collection needed to be trimmed, so I found two huge sheets of cardboard, poured old, drunk paint onto them, and let ’em all out to dry. Don’t worry. The paint drank because it could legally buy the alcohol. Some of the cans dried out years ago because they secretly attended AA meetings and their lids were never properly hammered. Back on, I mean.

Packing… is a process. Apparently my strategy of “Here. It’s a box. Fill it.” isn’t good enough. We have to organize, coalesce, combine, sort, and put everything into a ‘hierarchy’. I blame the approximately 1000 hours of DEI training Codex has attended in the last 12 months. All the boxes need to be equal or we’ll suffer even more intolerable YouTube adds.

Speaking of Codex: she is job hunting. We have several leads, so we’re praying that we’ll be led someplace besides here. Did you know both Redfin and Zillow will let you scroll across the map and will automagically fill in real estate needs according to your whims? Amazing! Both Blade Runner and Robocop were terrible at prophesying the future. I’m still a firm believer in Mad Max. The second movie, not the first. We’re welding propane tanks to our bumpers in prep.

Dramatic explosions don’t make themselves, people.

Now, someone type something pithy in the comments explaining to our dogs how two weeks of “Dog Camp” is awesome and they want to go on doggy vacation because otherwise… we’re looking at 30k+ of rental hell. There are no rentals, and what there are want a twelve-month lease at prices higher than our mortgage and approximately $2300 per dog. We. Live. In. Freaking. Insanity.

We’ll get through it.

–> Q