Thursday, November 27, 2014

Why I'm thankful this Thanksgiving

I've been a bad boy... I haven't written a blog post in three weeks. My 2014 goal was to post at least several times a week, but all of my spare time and resources have been invested into the move from the apartment at Ridgepointe to the house near Grant and Swan.

This is the 25th move I've made in my lifetime and easily ranks number one as the most difficult. It's taken the longest, cost the most, and never seems to end. (It's still ongoing -- started October 25). As of right now, I have two or maybe three carloads of stuff left to bring and then the cleaning of the apartment.

I've often felt like a failure during this process. Anthony has been helpful in a variety of ways but is difficult for me to negotiate with on a number of points. I haven't been successful in selling him on why I want to do some things a certain way in an attempt to make this process easier. It's not his fault. I never figured out how to make him feel like my ideas would benefit him as much as they would me (or us). He has strong opinions about what works for him and I can't say anything negative about him looking out for his own best interests and feelings.

As far as why this process has been lengthy and difficult -- to start with, the house needed a lot of cleaning. There have been a lot of problems to solve including how to heat the back half of the house (the furnace only feeds heat to the front half), why the clothes washer had the hot and cold water switched, where everything should go, getting cable installed, having furniture delivered, switching out the light bulbs in the house to more energy efficient ones, how to successfully integrate Lucky into his new surroundings, what areas of the house are off limits to me, figuring out why the bathroom I'm using had such a slow drain in the shower, the list goes on. I also made the decision to do this without taking time off work. It could be debated about whether that was the right choice but this process has taken so long that I would have been disappointed that I couldn't do the whole thing taking a couple of days off.

I'm thankful that I decided to give this a shot. I've been hesitant to move from the apartment due to costs and the gut feeling that it would be a challenging move. I was right, and even though the house rent will be 1/3 less than the apartment, the front end costs have been huge. But, nothing exciting happens in life without risk. I sometimes feel stagnant in my life without challenging myself. So, I'm giving it a shot.

Today, Anthony and I took a break from moving and unpacking and went to his mom's for Thanksgiving dinner (and his brother Mike also was there) and it was delicious. I had a nice time.

I have been a loser at taking pictures the last few weeks -- as in, I've almost stopped entirely. That will resume shortly since things are starting to calm down a bit. In the meantime, enjoy this photo of Anthony, Brin, and Alex at the James Van Praagh show a few weeks ago (he's a guy who speaks to the dead). Anthony and I took a break from moving to go to this event. And, Alex was kind enough to devote half of a Saturday two weeks ago to help me move the large pieces of furniture from the apartment.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Anthony, Alex's girlfriend Brin, and Alex
at the James Van Praagh show.
James spoke to the dead
and I successfully farted undetected.