Ready to move in any direction

I CAN’T GET STARTED ON ANYTHING

Because I’m literally in the middle, feeling like a millipede, waiting for a shoe, any shoe, to drop, so I will know what to do next.

I can’t even plan. I have a general outline of what needs doing between now and some kind of stability: get whatever still needs fixing done on the house between now and the closing date, assuming the house inspections and the mortgage applications don’t run into snags we can’t resolve, which would toss us back to a Step a few before the current one, like Groundhog Day. Until we got it right.

I know we have to finish some kind of packing job to take whatever possessions we decide we want to retain with us.

The parameters are not mine to set

I’m on someone else’s time schedule.

We are waiting to find out, now that they finally have all our paperwork and deposit, whether the CCRC we’ve applied to will take us. We don’t have huge worries there – they were very nice when we visited, and are perfectly pleasant when I email, but I have been disabled for a long time now, and it shows. It shouldn’t keep me from moving into an Independent Living apartment, but I still haven’t heard. So I wait for that shoe.

Can’t seem to get hold of the handyman – that’s a surprise. He’s probably on vacation with his family – or something – but I’ve left a couple of messages over several days requesting a callback, and nothing yet. His work was excellent, and he was recommended by our agent (who doesn’t know him personally, nor his work), and we will need another couple of full days of his ministrations. I said on the voicemail that we’re not in a huge hurry. Maybe that was a mistake.

We can’t use him until the building inspector for the municipality comes on Friday…

…Oops. The above made me check my phone – two missed calls from Chris. Phew. We had a short talk; he’ll make time. One more down – except that this was nothing more than a ‘stay in touch’ call, requested by the husband. Nothing has actually happened.

Being in standby mode

That’s typical: I am to be available to do what needs to be done that I’m better at – as necessary.

Being in standby or sleep mode is very taxing.

I can’t start projects because it is likely I’ll get interrupted. I take an inordinately long time to get projects going, and much of that time involves figuring out where I was since last time I was able to put any effort into it. There’s really no point to doing anything new right now, and all my writing projects (ie, PC NETHERWORLD) are too involved to pick up for a short time before the next interruption. It’s just not worth the pain.

I have to be really, really careful with energy expenditure right now. The uncertainty cost me the ability to get to sleep two nights ago, and I didn’t get to sleep until 5am (that’s when dawn and birds are starting up), and then caught almost enough sleep by staying in that bed until almost noon. Which I’m still paying for, two days later, with a lot of time in which I can barely stare at the computer screen.

Ah, the computer

My entertainment and communication device, my MacBook, has been having storage problems. SOMETHING in my usual work/play setup was chewing up space on the internal drive, and the thing announced every couple of days that I was running out of space. I never found out what would happen if I actually ran out of space, and I still have absolutely no idea what is taking most of my space when that occurs, but I discovered an easy fix: restart the computer.

Which worked reasonably well for a while, except that I noticed I was fighting a losing battle: every time I did the restart, the amount of storage freed up was a bit smaller.

Well, we finally reached 2GB. Yup. GIGA bytes. More storage space than the whole world when I was growing up. Probably more storage than it took to get men to the moon.

So I thought I’d reinstall my system software, Yosemite, and clean things up a bit. Only Apple informed me 2GB wasn’t enough to reinstall anything.

So then I thought, well, let’s upgrade to the latest system, High Sierra (closest I’m getting to mountain climbing is Apple systems lately), and start clean. Well, that needed a lot MORE space.

So, trusting to the Time Machine backups (remind me not to trust anything any more), I went ahead and erased the internal disk, downloaded HS, and installed it.

You’d think there’d be a few more warnings about knowing what the heck ‘backups’ really means before you do anything.

Yup. I have a nice clean new system – and I can’t find anything over a week old. Not my emails. Not my bookmarks. Not my applications such as Word and Excel. And Scrivener – which I absolutely need to function every day. And Pixelmator. And Dramatica Story Expert, my ace in the hole.

Gone. All gone.

Where? Dunno. Probably retrievable, though I was planning on upgrading both Pixelmator and Scrivener. But not necessarily RIGHT NOW.

I have a vague memory of doing a specific backup of all the applications I use, a while back – but I’ve never tested whether they’ll come back when I want them (they’re in a separate folder, if they exist, on the backup drive I am NOT connecting to my computer until I know what I’m doing.

I can probably get it back, more better and up to date

But not exactly the kind of project you do when you’re going to be interrupted on a random schedule not your own.

Meanwhile, I set up a browser, Mail, and communication with the exterior world (with no history – I have no idea how to get the 976 MB of mail messages on my computer back into sync). I suspect I need to use the Rebuild command – and I’m not doing that until I’m sure I won’t use the NEW mail messages.

I was functional enough to approve the changes the attorney wanted to know about (the sale and moving part of the world didn’t stop just because I screwed up the computer) via phone and email, so we are past attorney review. Phew!

But I’m sitting here daily at minimum capacity, playing nonograms.

Until a shoe drops – and I have to leap into action.

Minor disaster today

I’ve mentioned we’re living in someone else’s house, with someone else’s pale carpeting, white wood, and very light walls. And a new oak flooring laminate in the kitchen and dining room which shows every little fragment of coffee bean that leapt out of the grinder (I don’t drink coffee).

I go to the pantry to load up the bottom of the refrigerator door with more Diet Coke cans (two of those a day are my caffeine drug of choice – more, and I can’t sleep; less, and I can’t function). To notice that the Coke box is sopping wet on the bottom. No, it wasn’t the Coke (I drink the stuff regularly enough so it doesn’t get old). It was the Diet Pepsi we’ve had problems with before (to be fair, the cans in our basement the husband is bringing up so we drink them before we leave are literally ancient, and way past their sell-by date, way past) because they will randomly leak.

I thought soda cans couldn’t DO that, leak. Well, if something is old enough, it is allowed to leak (advance warning for human bodies, as well). And there was a small puddle on the BRAND NEW kitchen flooring we paid a mint for and was just installed less than two months ago and is probably the reason we have a buyer.

Stop. Panic never helps anything.

Clean up the spill. Make sure the floor is dry, and liquid isn’t allowed to pool on the NEW FLOOR. There was no damage. Phew. I put the whole box of Diet Pepsi in the SINK. Then I mentioned it casually when the spouse came in. He’s been working his little tail off pruning bushes that aren’t really ours any more. And the tree he like to keep pruned so we can see out the window. I said, helpfully, “Maybe the new owners will prefer to have that tree screen the neighbors from view.” Deer-in-headlights look from spouse – he hadn’t considered the possibility. Anyhoo.

Keep a jaundiced eye on the rest of the Pepsi in the basement. It has done this before. We are so frugal, but the stuff tastes old, if that makes any sense. Even in a sealed can and a cool basement, it deteriorates with time. You heard that from me.

This is my life for now

And it matters nothing that it is the worst possible life for someone chronically ill and with no energy and no flexibility whatsoever.

We are living as if our lives depended on no one knowing we’re here.

We can stop some of that now, since, in principle and if nothing goes really wrong, no more home viewers will come a’trampling through our home on short notice.

We were very lucky, as we had less than three weeks total of that, although there was a decent amount of traffic (which mysteriously died off completely before and after the 4th of July holiday). Husband thinks it has been just too darned hot for people to be willing to go look at houses. As if that were going to get better in SUMMER in NJ.

Technically, we’re under contract. They don’t have a mortgage approval yet. The house inspector could find aliens living in the attic.

I’m resting as much as I can while waiting for the next ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED thing than ONLY I CAN DO.

Oh, yeah. My assistant will be gone for the next two weeks.

The staging ladies will be coming back for their wares soon – they only lent them for the Open House and a month later – and I won’t be sad to see their delicate (and fake) plants going. We could rent them – but only if we fear the buyer will evaporate and we will have to resume hawking our home to uncaring strangers.

The spouse bought a small kitchen table – which I assembled! – so the wrought-iron ‘bistro table’ could go back outside where it can’t possibly scratch the NEW KITCHEN FLOORING. And promptly cut a slash in the brand new seat cushion (thank God it wasn’t my fault – I’d never hear the end of it), and the darn chairs are very uncomfortable anyway, so no desire to move them to California for meanwhile.

I can’t complain

Just because of my limitations, which make ANY change in routine difficult and fraught, the problems/opportunities/events are all first-world problems of people lucky enough to be able to sell a house and move. Soon, this will all be in the rear-view mirror, a source of amusing anecdotes for a small while (after which I promise never to bring them up again), and I will be slowly and carefully reconstructing my life better someplace where people make my dinner and it has veggies every night.

I fervently hope so, as I’d like to get back to writing NETHERWORLD.

But I realized that not being able to do or think anything was a reaction, not an indication that I’m losing my marbles. I’m overtired, and will be for the foreseeable future, and that’s just going to be the way it is. I have to conserve spoons, because I can’t been in spoon-deficit when the next Call to Action comes along.

Doing my best here. Everything is going along far better than I had any hope I could manage. It will happen. It is even possible it will happen efficiently (as in, getting us into a place without having to find an apartment to rent in between – that’s really amazing).

Pray. Send good wishes. Think, ‘there but for the grace of God…,’ and don’t wonder why I’m erratic. I can’t believe we’re really doing this, but it appears we are.

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Thanks to Stencil – I was able to figure out my password and get back to using their ten free images a month wonderful plan.

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This would be a lot shorter if I were capable of self-editing right now. Ignore typos. Just for now.

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