Thank God

The packers come tomorrow.

For the past few weeks, the stress of trying to sort out all our world possessions has been steadily mounting - And not in the "oh-good-here-comes-the-end-of-the-film-where-everything-sorts-itself-out" kind of way, but rather "Honey-you-didn't-just-throw-out-this-pile-of-papers-including-your-daughter's-first-macaroni-portrait-did-you" kind of way.

My bride and I, fortunately, have alternating stress cycles. Last Wednesday, for example, as I frantically ran about the house trying to spot all the missing bits of baseboard, she smoothly talked me off the ledge. Currently, I'm well past the point of stress and into some sort of zen-faith that the packers will manage to make some sense of our belongings. My bride, on the other hand, is bouncing off the walls, alternating between making endless lists of all the documents Her Majesty's Government is likely to deport us if we forget and muttering comments to herself like "they have soap in the UK, right? I'll just pack this, just in case."

However, even after we've taken piles (4 trips worth) of unneccessary junk to the dump, and set aside more piles to go to Salvation Army, we still have piles of things all over the house. Moving has forced us to take all those pieces and parts that we've tucked away in closets and drawers "just while company's over" and go through them again. I've come up with no less than 5 unidentified power cables. Not having that many items which have lain about unpowered for months or even years, I've no idea where I've gotten them all. It's led to endless distraction while trying to pack: each of us has, at least a half dozen times a day, been forced to drop everything we're doing (usually right when we're at our packing-productivity-peak) and made to look at some scrap of a ticket from that time we went to the fair and ate too much popcorn and got sick on the Slap-and-Whirl... remember that? Yeah. Good times.

The good news is, Ella's taking all this in stride. She apparently thinks giant pyramids of books/videos/clothes/etc. are all great fun, and takes joy in selectively redistributing random items from one organized pile to the next. When she hears a frustrated cry of "Now where's the bloody X?!", she's taken to proudly stating "I did it!" (Which, by the way, really saved my butt on the whole, 'where'd the macaroni portrait go?' question.)