It would probably be a lot more exciting if I wasn’t going to be spending the majority of my time packing. I’m determined to get a nap in there, at least.

The house that we liked has sold – with a condition that expires next week – so I’ve begun looking at other real estate listings. (It keeps me motivated to cram more stuff into boxes and email more people for landscaping quotes.) It took me about 30 seconds to find a place that I really like. It’s priced fairly high compared to others we’ve looked at – it has a few cool features, though, that other places don’t have.

At any rate, my hope (prayer? wish?) is that when our house is on the market, that place is still on the market and, while I’m hoping for things, maybe we’ll find that the price has dropped.

A girl can dream, right?

At any rate, we’re still making reasonable progress here and, with my days off, I’m hoping we’ll be even further ahead by the time the 5 days are over. Assuming I’m not buried under a mountain of cardboard boxes and that I’m still able to move my arms by then.

I have discovered that I am a little bit “meh” at doing a presentation when someone else is responsible for choosing the topic(s). This may sound like a strange lesson to learn because, really, all of my presentations are focused around specific topics as selected by other people – it’s not like I head off to an agency and announce, “Hey, I’m Violet and today I’m going to talk about.. SAILBOATS!” and then launch into aimless chattering for an hour or two. If I’m getting paid in some manner for talking, it’s usually focused on some very specific subjects.

Generally, too, I avoid powerpoint like the plague. Nothing distracts me more than clicking through slides and trying not to accidentally cover a topic too soon (thus rendering the later slide useless) and trying not to get distracted by someone’s questions (hello, ADD!). The natural flow of a presentation tends to differ from how a powerpoint flows.

And, as a general rule, I prefer to sit down for small groups (say, less than 10 people) and stand for larger groups. The dynamic shifts depending on positioning – and, in larger groups, the visual of a person standing and using their whole body (for lack of a better way to describe it) is more powerful than a blob in a chair. In smaller groups, standing just seems weird and intimidating and sitting is more intimate and comfortable.

Today, however, I broke all three of those preferences – and the dynamic of the presentation was different, too (because it was me, my usual coworker and someone that I’ve never worked with before and who was wildly nervous about the whole thing).

First, I sat during the presentation because one of my co-presenters was so nervous that her legs were shaking (from nerves) and she didn’t want to stand – but my other (usual) co-presenter stood. I sat in solidarity with the nervous one (because it sucks to be nervous AND feel like you’re singled out), but I was uncomfortable with it the whole time.

The topics we covered were things that I know inside-and-out, and that I regularly talk about, but we had a very short period of time and had to zip through all of the topics fairly quickly. With so many topics to cover, there was a lot of important stuff that we wanted to discuss but couldn’t. I am not used to doing ‘overviews’, I guess.

We used a powerpoint which meant that I had to stay fairly linear in the delivery of the content. I couldn’t just follow the audience’s lead (which is what we normally do) and emphasize the things that were particularly of interest to them – after covering the big points, of course. I also had to be cautious to not cover any of my co-presenter’s topics which is not normally a problem (with my usual co-presenter) because we often bounce back and forth and finish each other’s thoughts at this point.

Now, this is not to say that it was an awful presentation – I’ve had one of those this year and it was so uncomfortable that I verged on panic. In this case I was blessed to be with a coworker who I’m pretty sure could make a talk on lint seem interesting, we managed to all deliver the info we needed, and we weren’t expected to make everyone into an expert in the short time we had. But it wasn’t spicy and it wasn’t as much fun as most of the presentation we normally do.

I love presentations. I love workshops. I love speaking to, and with, people who are genuinely interested in “my” topics and I love meeting with people who know nothing about those topics, too. It kind of sucks to know that today wasn’t awesome – but I am grateful that it wasn’t awful.

I also believe that electricity is “magic” so maybe we’ll let Coffee be the logical one in the relationship.

This morning, bright and f’ing early, the landscaping guy came to give start the process of giving us a quote on fixing the neglect we’ve inflicted on our yard. He was still here measuring things when I left for work. Before I departed, however, he shook his head and said, “Y’know, I don’t want you to be shocked when you get my quote. This is a.. big job.”

Of course it is.

We had a quote done for painting (was it last week?) that was a lot higher than we had budgeted for the job. Our instructions to the painters are basically this: we don’t want to spend much money, we plan to move the hell out of here, and we know that fresh neutral paints make buyers happy. Please make that happen. The price we were quoted was a lot higher than I’d expect for that sort of instruction. A lot-lot.

This evening we had two more sets of people come to give us quotes and we hired one of them; they start close to the end of May. I was so relieved that I sort of wanted to hug them when they told us the amount. It didn’t hurt that they were lovely people, too. I like when people are nice. I also like when people hear our pleas from the paragraph above and, while walking through the place, start pointing out the ways they’ll help us save money on the job. Yes yes yes YES.

Coffee has been making daily trips to the storage unit to add boxes. I’ve been continuing to cram everything that I own into additional boxes so he won’t run out of things to take each day. Books are all boxed up and gone! Extra dishes are gone! Winter stuff is gone! Half of my craft supplies are gone! .. and on and on.

I’m cleared to take a few days off in the near future – we have a guy coming to do some drywall work for us and I want to get a bigger jump on packing things. Coffee is taking a different day off, too, so he can get a bunch of his stuff packed and ready.

I’m still determined to list at the beginning of June. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be able to do it, too.

Tomorrow we’re going to see it again with our realtor.

I am curious about what’s wrong with the place, quite frankly.

The only thing we could identify was that it’s on a one-way street that’s pretty high-traffic – but, from inside the house, there’s not much noticeable traffic sound other than in one room. And that’d be one of the kids’ rooms and they all sleep like they’re dead. So, y’know, that.

So, we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

In the meantime, we’ve started moving stuff to our storage unit and we’ve been boxing things up like crazy around here so Coffee can deliver more boxes each day on his way to work. In less than 10 days we have a guy coming to do some drywalling in our place, too, and we’re hoping to hear back from the painter very soon. Gotta’ declutter a LOT in the meantime so we’ll be able to easily get the work done.

Closer and closer…

For the past several weeks, I’ve attended this meeting while feeling kinda’ shitty – specifically, I show up with a stuffed up head (with sinus headache). Every single Wednesday. The meeting usually runs from 9 a.m. until 10. I don’t start feeling better until around noon-ish.

It took me ’til this morning to realize that it’s quite likely attributable to mould or other allergens at the outreach location that I visit on Tuesday afternoons. Next week I’m going to try taking an allergy pill (or ten) before I go to the outreach on Tuesday and again in the morning of the meeting.

The other mystery is that I often have a headache on Friday. I can’t figure out what that’s all about. My Thursdays aren’t anything special; I’m usually at a fixed outreach location in the morning (and I’ve never had any issues there with allergies – and I’m also there on Monday with no ill effect) and my afternoon is spent at any number of locations including working from home on occasion. I don’t eat anything weird on Thursdays and I go to bed at around the same time that I normally do. I wake up at the usual time on Fridays.

I’ll let you know if I figure this one out. Something tells me that it’s going to be a big obvious thing.

While in Toronto, I lived in residence for the first year, lived in the “married students’” apartment on-campus that summer, lived in a different part of the residence in second year, moved to the townhouse in third year, moved to the apartment at Davisville for a year (or two?), moved to Yonge & Eglinton for a year, and then moved to Hamilton.

I lived in the house in Hamilton (with my ex-husband) for a little over a year before moving to another city. I lived that other city for a few years (with Coffee) before moving to the place where I live now. We’ve been here for six years.

That means that I have lived in this house longer than anywhere other than my childhood home.

Preparing to sell it has been strange; every once in a while I get this frisson of anxiety and think, “No, no, I am not doing this.” I have made Coffee promise that we will not move unless we love the new place – that we are not moving simply to move, but, instead, to meet some of the needs we have (mostly the need for more space).

If we don’t find a new place with exactly what we want, we’re not moving.

I’ve been bouncing around real estate listings online, scoping out open houses and daydreaming. This morning I met with a painter to get an estimate for her to paint all the walls in the (boring) neutrals that are needed for selling the place. I’ve emailed our real estate agent a few times with questions. I’ve got a handyman coming soon to give us some estimates on a few other jobs we need to have done.

I have threatened the kids with death if they wreck anything else – ANYTHING ELSE – in this house between now and the time that we move.

Coffee continues to make progress on the various tasks we have on the ‘to do’ list – most of them aren’t major but they’re time consuming. He, like me, has a full time job – but he’s been coming home at night and getting started almost right away, then working until it’s almost dark. On my side of things, it’s been making phone calls and following up on emails and starting to declutter some areas of the house a bit (in preparation for putting things into storage).

All of which is to say that we’re making progress and I am doing my best to not freak out. I have grown quite attached to our little house and some of the wonderful things about it – even as I dislike some of the other parts. I don’t think it will be easy to leave.

(I know, I know, y’all saw that coming.)

In order to sell our house, however, we need to clean it out; some stuff will go to Goodwill and some stuff will be moved to a storage unit. We’re either going to paint a lot of the walls or hire someone to do it. We need to do some repairs to various parts of the house. Landscaping needs to be finished.

And the list goes on and on and on..

The front porch is currently a work in progress – Coffee is doing a great job, so far. The furnace room purging and cleaning is done, now, save for the stuff we need to move into storage for the sake of making things look more open in there.

We’ve bought boxes for packing things up. I’ve got my Sharpies ready for labeling things. We’ve planned out meals, for the week, that will allow us to spend our evenings working on the house instead of doing a lot of cooking and cleaning.

Here we go…

1. Coffee and I both laughed at the pre-approval that the bank gave us for a new mortgage.
2. Loving the new real estate agent we met with and deciding that, if we sell, we’ll hire her.
3. Daydreaming.
4. The bathroom will be finished this weekend and it looks SO much better.
5. Getting ready to go through cupboard and closets and .. purge! I love this.
6. The support group that I’m co-leading is lovely. Such nice people and good discussions.
7. Laughter.
8. My husband keeps me (reasonably) sane.
9. Advil for my sore shoulder.
10. The Ultimate Fighter (“TUF”) reality show is a good way to cap off an evening.
11. Pineapple-scented room spray – tropical! sweet! lovely!
12. Good conversation at work.
13. Having some (semi-) down time at work, during outreach, means that I got some supplies made and some tidying done and I felt very, very efficient.
14. Coffee admitting that we cannot live without A/C.
15. The cherry tree (?) in our yard is in full bloom – beautiful and smells so good!
16. Pizza on Friday nights.
17. Dried mangoes are a tasty (and fake-healthy) snack.
18. It’s been almost a full week since I last drank coffee and I have not died.
19. Fresh air through open windows.
20. My little tiny hippos.