new beginnings

Woo hoo!  I’m back!  I’ve just re-opened my Etsy shop and am ready to go again.

I’m doing the happy dance this afternoon.  Not even 48 hours after the last of my stuff arrived here, I’m almost completely unpacked and settled in.  I only have my bedroom left to unpack.  Otherwise, its mostly decorative stuff – hanging pictures, putting little things in their places, that sort of thing.  Two things helped – one, I hate living among boxes as much as I hate moving so I’ve been super motivated to get it done and two, there’s more storage in this place than I possibly could have imagined, so finding homes for things has been very easy.

I love my new place more than ever

I’m off – work beckons…

At last, I’m here.  It feels so right.

Yesterday’s move, in a downpour, was quite the adventure.  As Jacie so aptly put it, everything else about my move was easy — finding my apartment, painting, recruiting friends and family to help, even packing was quick (I packed most of the house in a day and half) — so something had to happen to make it a little bit hard.  Rain, in the grand scheme of things, not so bad.  I’m not sure this is what we had in mind when she said that: 

That’s what happens when you your brother parks a UHaul truck (and a small one at that) in your muddy front yard, packs it full and attempts to drive away.  You get stuck.  Really fucking stuck.  Thankfully, a neighbor with a big truck came to the rescue before a tow truck got called.

Even more thankfully, I wasn’t at the house for that part, nor for the chaos that came with it.  I think if I had been, I wouldn’t have slept in my apartment last night.  I would have slept someplace with locked doors and a little something to calm me down.  Instead, I was at my apartment, waiting for my landlord to fix some stuff and bathing the kitty who got scared in the car and peed in his crate, hearing all of it by phone.  Fun morning.  By 10 AM, I was seriously contemplating hitting the Patron that I was saving for the end of the day.  Once unstuck, all things consider, it went OK.  By late afternoon, my friends and family had gotten the last of it in and headed home.

When I was finally alone in my apartment, able to let my cats out to see our new home, I sat down on the floor with them and cried.  It all came out — the relief, the sadness, the stress, the happiness.  All of it, like a huge, cleansing wave.  The journey I started almost exactly a year ago has finally come to an end.

I don’t care how cliche this sounds, today feels like the first day of the rest of my life.  Its good to be home.

Things are coming along nicely.  Yesterday, thanks to my incredible friends and family – namely Paula, Dr. Al and Jacie, along with my mother and brother, my place got painted, scrubbed a good bit and 4 cars worth of stuff got moved over – pretty much everything I’ve packed so far.  I have brighter and prettier rooms now:

My bedroom is a lovely shade of medium purple, more on the on the side of gray than pink.  In other words, feminine but not so girly that I want to throw up.  Combined with the lovely new duvet cover and curtains from IKEA, just right.

Office and future Painted Sheep headquarters are now a rich beige – so much better than the gray that was in there before.

Lastly, my bathroom, the top half of which was the color of dirt (at least in the polite description) is now a much prettier green – one that actually works with the avocado green toilet and tub.

We accomplished all that painting, got my stash, my dye studio, my knitting books and a bunch of assorted stuff over to the apartment.  My fridge looks like new and bathroom is freshly scrubbed.  What a difference a day makes!  I can’t thank this crew enough!

This week brings packing the rest of my house (which pretty well translates to all of it), work chaos from Monday to Wednesday and the big move on Saturday.  Today I shift back and forth between working at home on a grant and packing.  Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday is work, work and more work.  Then I can focus solely on the move on my days off.  One step at a time, I keep reminding myself.

I am going to take my Etsy shop offline later today.  Much as I hate to close it up even for a short time, I can only manage so much in this moment!  I’ll ship out orders tonight, close up shop and pack up my little business.  I hope to be back up and running within a week.  I’ll post here when its down.

And again, I’ll update when I can.  Crazy busy and very exciting week ahead