It has been a draining week, in awful ways and in good ones.
I have spent time every day, sometimes twice in a day, at the new house, bagging leaves in the front yard in order to be polite to our neighbors, and washing down wood-dusty post-floor-refinishing floors and baseboards and shelves in order that we might have a clean house for our belongings on Sunday. Caitlin joined me last night and we wiped down walls and rolled our eyes at the millions of tacks and nails the previous owners left.
On Tuesday night, we got a call from our Realtor, letting us know that the buyer is backing out of the contract. There is a remote chance that with luck and pressure from her Realtor and ours, the sale might still go through, but it is very unlikely at this time. For about a day it looked like we would need to postpone the actual move, and during that day I realized how much looking forward to the move has mattered to our collective sanity. For all of our emotional health, we're going forward. I can worry about selling an empty house another week. This week, we are moving.
Everything will be OK. It always is.
Our 360 number will be disconnected next Monday. If you need to call us, please use our cell numbers!
Our TV is gone, given to my sister. We're going to go TV-free* until at least late January. Of course, we'll still have DVDs on the laptop and plenty of internet media, once we get hooked up next Tuesday. We will probably be absent from the interwebs from Saturday until Tues/Wed.
The antique dressers were delivered yesterday and stand alone in our bedroom, waiting for the rest of us to join them. They are beautiful, the house is beautiful, and I nearly cried a couple of days ago while looking through a perfect little old-fashioned keyhole. How amazing to live in a place where the very elements of the house inspire me every day. I cannot wait.
*addendum 12/29/08: during our move we discovered a 13" set in the attic which both of us had previously thought we had donated, so we are not technically TV-free. The television is living in our bedroom and gets turned on maybe twice a week. We're extremely low-screen-time at the moment, and it's very nice!