Ni Hao Kai-Lan wins this morning. Nick Jr. is running most mornings around here, but he never actually watches it the whole time – which is a healthy thing, I suppose, because then he would be a couch potato. But for the moment, with Dylan engrossed in his cartoon, with twenty minutes of peace tops, just for the heck of it, I reread my opening scene from my first chapter. I read it out loud, which made it feel actual, and different than the way I’ve skim-read it recently.

Oh, how I miss Danny and Lexi, and their ridiculous best friend/lover antics, trying to negotiate if they should or shouldn’t do it before going to his father’s funeral. I mean, really, how funny is that?

If my novel could talk, it would say, “Please write me!”

It’s hard to say how much of it I actually finished, before everything fell to pieces back in December. I think maybe about 48%. And that is certainly not solid from the beginning. But in pieces, here and there, random scenes and some completed chapters, and a good solid outline. I’m looking forward to everything settling back to normalcy again, and I hope when it does, when I get my brain back in my head, the story will come back to me. I really hope. I think it was a good story – or at least not any worse than some stuff out there, lol.

But first it has to be given life, and I guess I’m the only one who can do that. This particular story, in my head, nobody else can finish but me.

This is my “sunroom” on a not very sunny day. I envision two comfy chairs there for reading, and a houseplant that I’ll try not to kill, my desk to the side, and my bookcase. We have some unpacking to do before I take any real pictures of this apartment, but here is the view from our living room, the woods, a ravine that I hope Dylan won’t fall down, and some snow? The snow I was hoping to leave behind in Michigan. But it’s just a dusting, we’ll live.

We’re here. I’m sore as all heck, even though we hired movers. I feel like I just ran a marathon or something. Which I didn’t. But even with movers, there was still a lot of cleaning involved, and a lot of carrying things out to the trash. I have a funny story for you – or not funny, but so tragic that you just have to laugh. It’s called, “Hubby Was Right.”

He said we should have the movers take the vacuum. I said, no, we’ll need to use it. He said, but it’s too big to fit in the car – we’ll have to leave it behind. I said, no, I’ll make it fit, just let me try. So he did. He let me try. I love him for that.

It was a Dirt Devil vacuum, the bagless kind, not a Dyson or anything, but not cheap either. It even got a second chance, sitting there with the boxes, and Dylan’s big blue bouncy ball. The movers said, the vacuum too? And I thought about it, I considered it, but I said, no, ummm, no, let’s keep that, we should probably do one last vacuum before we go. Take the ball though. So the movers took the bouncy ball. The bouncy ball got moved. Dylan is playing with it as we speak.

We have a Pontiac Vibe. There were a lot of things we should have packed on the moving truck – dirty laundry, my filing cabinets, more of Dylan’s toys. Pontiac Vibes are SMALL. The vacuum didn’t fit, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Most of the stuff we thought would fit didn’t. Not just the vacuum. Old towels and toiletries. All of the non-perishable foods we thought we might transport. Worn out pans and plastic cups I honestly stole from TGI Fridays back when I waited tables there in college. It was just stuff we threw away – old raggy towels and a couple of new ones too, our pillows, all of our dishes we didn’t pack, things I’d stocked up on in bulk, like my favorite Caress Tahitian Renewal body wash, which I found on sale, 3 for $7.99!

But we managed to save most of everything that had any kind of sentimental value or monetary worth, which is the important thing. I told hubby, the stuff we threw away was mostly junk. And it was, just junk we’d accumulated through the years. We didn’t have to throw away anything that mattered. We sold the washer and dryer. We gave away the half-broken treadmill to two young ladies who worked very hard to get it up our basement stairs.

I only have two regrets. Dylan’s training potty, just weeks before we planned on potty training. We were waiting until after the move to start. And that damn vacuum. We could have just had the movers take the vacuum, but no, I insisted we could make it fit.

And the stupidest thing of all was that we didn’t have time to do one last vacuum anyway.