Life Interrupted
3 February 2007Life is my game, disruption is my name.
It’s a sad time right now. We’ve been packing away most of our belongings in order to “declutter” the house. That’s the lingo used for putting away your crap no one wants to see and “opening the space” because “space sells”. For us that meant breaking down our elliptical and universal machines and putting them in storage. Taking the TV off the wall in the workout room and packing it away. Buying 2 sets of twin mattresses for the old maple beds used by my sister and I to make our old workout/music rooms back into bedrooms. Moving clothes our of our closet and into the drawers to make it seem more spacious. Packing away our bedroom TV and breaking down our stereo system. It’s been a lot of work - and none of that includes the maintenance we’ve done to get everything else up to speed… re-caulking, re-grouting, repainting, steam cleaning the grout, refinishing the deck chairs, pressure washing the patio… It’s been a bit crazy, especially considering I had unexpected surgery in the middle of it, along with nasty cases of the flu. But it’s what you do when you have to sell a house… you have to set yourself up for success even in the best of markets, which this is not.
We’ve hired a stager to come in and spice up the house. It’s a bit pricy, but it’s a bad market and we need our house to stand out. Prices have dropped 25% in our area since this time last year, and we need to make a certain amount of money to make the new house work. If the staging can get the house sold before a price drop is necessary it will pay for itself 10 times over. We’re hoping to list next week. Once we list we’ll be walking on eggshells around here trying to make sure everything is clean and neat, and keeping the staging setup looking nice.
I think it’s fair to say I’m pretty tired of packing and moving… and we’ve probably only done about a quarter of the house. Which makes it all the more difficult with the turmoil at work. We moved offices and the majority of my co-workers were laid off or moved to another company office. It wouldn’t be so bad to only pack my cube. Heck, I had it done in an hour. But there are only two members of the QA team left, which left it to us to pack the entire QA lab. Luckily my partner in crime stepped up to the plate and did way more than his share of the work. Post-surgery I’m not supposed to be lifting for another few weeks, which makes my contribution feel a bit inadequate.
The new office is an 85 mile round trip which takes me about 2.25 hours a day in traffic. I’ve only been doing it for two weeks, but already it is wearing on me. So far all we’ve been able to do is unpack and start setting up the new lab. We left a lot of stuff behind, but we still brought about 50 desktop and rack mount computers that need to be configured. It’s going to take weeks to get everything up and functional.
Everything has been so crazy lately. I can’t handle any more drama. Knocking on wood that things settle down for a while.