The Future

We have sort of moved into our new home, while still living half in our old home, and cleaning both homes at the same time.

I am stinking tired. I need a vacation again.

Our old home is beautiful, and the buyer will be quite happy. We already have three investors who are seriously interested and begging for our permission to haggle with our mortgage company already.

Our new home is beautiful, and we will be quite happy here once we are truly moved in and the extreme stress of an unsold home on the mountain is long gone.

I cooked the first home made meal in weeks for my family last night - BBQ country pork ribs, cheesy/onion cornbread, green beans and rice, and walnut fudge brownies. I think they were happy and feeling a little more like normalcy might be in our future.

I woke them all with breakfast this morning, taking orders and serving them all so that they would not look for distraction inside a fast food joint. Last Friday night, against my strong objections, my family chose to eat at a local burger place and three out of four of us got food poisoning. And we all still had to move and carry heavy objects all day the next day.

I have painted a fresh coat of paint in just about every room of the old house, steamed all the carpets, washed all the windows and bathrooms, and vacuumed four million times. Tonight, we go there to get more stuff and mow the lawn. In the new home, I have been working on training my children not to run up and down the stairs and scream at will when playing. The nearly deaf old woman next door says we are not loud, but she can feel the thumping around.

I think it has been more than a decade since I have felt such stress. We have all lost weight and there are migraines and stomach ailments abounding - though there is very little complaining. It is a very strange adjustment. It is as though we have only been renting our home on the mountain and now we are returning to our 1905 home in the last town that we lived in. Both older homes are very similar - though this rented one is nicer. The only thing I am really obsessing about at this moment is selling our other home before foreclosure and making our rented home economically sound during the winter. I have lots of tricks I employed at the 1905 house that may work here. We shall see...

Who knows anything about the future? Not me.