Times Just Past

I've had a bit of a week.

Last week was the big final push to get out of my mother's apartment. I went ahead and hired a service after I found myself driving 20 miles to drop off a single bag of yarn to charity knitters. I was making myself crazy doing this stuff, and it could have gone on for months more. And every time I went to the apartment, more stuff went into my car to take home.

So Monday I met the project manager from the company I hired. "This is really nice stuff!", she said. "But there's a lot of it!" Tuesday I met the donation coordinator from the thrift shop onsite at my mother's community. We tagged what they would take. "This is really nice stuff!", she said. "But there's a lot of it, so we're only taking the best!". Thursday, the packers and organizers came. "This is really nice stuff!", they said. (You know the rest.) They sorted into several piles: Donate onsite. Donate at Habitat for Humanity. Donate clothes and soft goods to Lion's Club. Take to storage unit. Ship to Georgia.  TRASH!  (I have no doubt many things were trashed that could have found a use, but I was done and just couldn't deal.) It took the packers all day, from 9 to 5. I was there off and on, and they found several things I hadn't realized were there - all of which ended up back at my house. Friday the movers came. They didn't comment on the niceness of the stuff, but clearly were taken aback at the volume. It took them past noon to load the truck, layered from front to back, to the several different destinations. Again, I was around off and on - no point in hovering every moment, but things came up. When they moved the big furniture, for example, some things were discovered. Again, most of that stuff ended up at my house.  Around 3 pm on Friday, I met the truck at the storage unit where it took all of about 15 minutes to put that stuff away. Then I went home, with a stop at the grocery store to buy ice cream which I used (as my friend put it) to toast the end of a phase.

Things have emotions tied to them, as we know. So this whole week was fraught. But in addition to the Big Push, I also:

• Bought a car.
• Had a day where I retreated to my chair, and had the fewest steps of any day since my knee operation a year ago.
• Had a birthday party for my brother-in-law, where I cooked my heart out, and only two people showed up.
• Had what may be the first of many welcome crucial conversations with one of the kids about their mother.
• Had my (old) car break down at my mother's campus, with a big audible THUMP followed by a grinding noise. It was three hours for AAA to come tow me to the dealer, where I don't have it back yet. This was the first car tow I've had in 20 years. (I have used the nautical equivalent of AAA several times in the interim!)
• Had a major tranche of money of the inheritance go awry. It's not lost, just not distributed to the correct family members, due to very very complicated circumstances. I may have gotten it corrected, but I'm learning lots about how the American financial system works.
• Worked out once, for a paltry 15 minutes.
• Ate carbs throughout the day, every day.
• Lost my keys for the first time in years, including the fob for my new car and all the keys to the storage unit. They turned up, 24 hours later, as keys tend to do, but I never misplace my keys. It was traumatic - I spent the whole day looking, and tossed and turned all night with new places to look the next morning.
• Woke up with a sore throat and painful swallowing.
• Had a proliferation of aches and pains through the whole body, turning me back into the ancient version of the Red Lady. This is not new things actually structurally wrong with me, but my body reacting to the stress.

I'm SO done with last week, and ready to move on! But I'm also overcome with the sense of excess stuff my mother had - maybe 40 t-shirts? - and fired up to pare down my own possessions. She also had stuff from hobbies past and future aspirational projects - I know I have a bunch of that and I need to take a hard eye at those neatly stowed boxes of equipment and supplies. So some of this is good and it will push me in a good direction.

I got up this morning and spent a nice half hour working out. It's sunny, and hopefully I'll get back to a better routine. The sore throat and aches and pains are still here, but I'm feeling better and the energy level is high.