Because it's time I told you I'm alive.

So. Moving. I never ever ever ever want to move again . . . but we won't be staying here forever so it is inevitable. The good news is that our house is in a charming, fabulous location and it is really nice and spacious inside. We are slowly but surely digging out from under all of our boxes and feeling more at home.

However.

Our first few days here felt much like moving to a foreign country: charming but terribly inconvenient until you work out the kinks and get comfortable.

The first couple days we were here, we had a series of unfortunate events. First of all, our cell phones basically don't work unless we sit on the front steps, and even then it's a little spotty. Also, Verizon hadn't come to hook up our internet service or home phone line yet. Also, in a rare moment of my cell phone syncing with the network, all of my phone contacts disappeared. To say I felt cut off from the world is an understatement. Then we gave the girls a bath, not knowing that the drain stopper was broken and would subsequently get stuck in the tub, forcing us to actually bail ourselves out with a trash can in order to take a shower. Which we were doing with a shower curtain that Dave rigged from a plastic mattress bag and some bag clips since we couldn't find the real shower curtain. (Quite ingenious, actually.)

Then as the laundry pile in the basement grew ever larger and we had absolutely no clean towels or blankets (or anything else) in the house since everything gets dirty when you move, I washed a load of sheets only to discover that the drain was stopped up and it was impossible to wash anything else without flooding the basement. Oh, and our mattress fit up the stairs but our box spring would not, so our mattress was on the floor and we were looking at a $100-200 purchase to remedy the situation, plus the frustrating knowledge that we had used valuable space in the trailer to ship a nice box spring that we would have to sell for pennies.

But here's the good news! Sprint shipped us a device for free that we can hook up to our internet and use to get good cell phone reception in the house. It arrived yesterday and works like a charm. We have internet service now, and even a home phone. Mostly because it was cheaper to get internet + phone, but the home line is a nice benefit. My phone contacts came back after about ten minutes on being on the lam. And then Dave's two uncles showed up and saved the rest of the day.

His Uncle Jim is an amazing carpenter, and the two of them took our box spring apart and put it back together in our bedroom. It was such a miracle to watch them work and to see our box spring looking exactly the same in our bedroom a couple of hours later. Uncle Lenny managed to pry up the drain stopper in the tub, and he also unclogged the washing machine drain so I'm in business with the laundry. (Very slow business because the washer is tiny tiny and the dryer TAKE 120 MINUTES TO DRY A LOAD OF LAUNDRY!!, but business nonetheless.)

So we are here, things are now going well, and I miss my old life like crazy but I'll make a new one and get over it. As soon as the rest of these boxes disappear.