In Other News…

“…and now, we’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled fit of self-pity to bring you this important news bulletin:

I hate packing.

I promised R that I would pack like a Tasmanian devil this weekend. I have no motivation to pack, and I’ve been doing everything I can to procrastinate on it for the past few weeks.

My ‘Taz’ imitation lasted until I finished packing the guest bathroom, which was the first room I tackled. It consisted of a few towels, a couple of candles, a flower arrangement and a harness thingamajig with suction cups on both ends that is (theoretically, anyway) supposed to keep the dogs from leaping out of the tub when we’re giving them a bath.

It took me all of 10 minutes. And after that, I was ready to be done with the packing. But I pressed on, mostly because R wouldn’t let me stop.

In the room where we keep the cats when we’re not home, I dumped scratching posts, kitty beds and toys into a box without bothering to vacuum the coating of hair off them first. My mother is one of those people who cleans her entire house every weekend, and the idea of packing something without cleaning it first is beyond comprehension to her. The first thing she will do as we begin to get settled is unpack the pets’ stuff. Let’s hope I get to that box first, because if I don’t, the shock of it may be more than she can handle.

There’s still a ton of packing left to do. Did I mention that moving day is this Saturday?

It should be an interesting day. R has no problem paying other people thousands of dollars to paint the inside of our house, install landscape, etc. But spend a few hundred bucks to hire movers to load our stuff up, drive it over to the new house, and unload it? No way! He insists that he and his dad are going to move us. I don’t think it’s a money thing – it seems to be more a matter of machismo.

But here’s the thing. R is not in shape to do this, and neither is his dad. Not that I’m the picture of fitness, because I’m certainly not. But I have learned to recognize my limits. R, on the other hand, got out of bed this morning by rolling gingerly onto his side while moaning, then slowly slid his legs over the edge of the bed until he was kneeling on the ground, then put his hands on top of the bed and used his arms to push himself up, his face contorting in pain the whole time.

This, after only half a day of packing. I can only imagine what he’ll be like next Sunday morning, after moving the entire contents of a house into and then back out of a truck.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…”