Are We There Yet?

I know life is supposed to be about the journey, but sometimes it's nice to just get home and relax. We're not quite to the relaxed stage yet, but we're getting there. This move turned out to be much harder than I imagined it would be.

Hard to see through all of the landscaping - we love palms here in California.

Standing out on our back patio listening to the cacophony of birds, I know it was worth it, but it was tough.

Our back patio.

If you've ever bought a house, you know how difficult and stressful it can be. If you've ever bought and sold two houses in 30 days, you're wondering about my sanity. I am too, believe me.

Thankfully, only one of us was freaking out at any given moment.

I told you this already, but the house we owned sold in just 6 days. That meant we had to find a new house really, really fast. And to complicate matters, it needed to pretty much be our dream home, or at least be something close. We did find it, but it didn't go very smoothly. In my last post, I left you while I was waiting for the keys to our new house.

There were pumpkins and other decorations, but the juvenile delinquent (aka our 11 month old labrador puppy) stole the mini pumpkin so all ground level decorations are now IN the house until Halloween.

The keys did not come that day. To start off the chain of events that became a list of mini-disasters, the house we sold didn't close escrow on time. There was some complication with how the buyer paid her down payment. The next day, there was another glitch with the buyer - there was some kind of lean against the husband.

While these glitches were happening, we were living on takeout and paper plates. I had one pair of shoes at my disposal, and all my pants were packed.

Escrow on the house we were selling finally closed, but then we had a glitch. The lender needed one more bank statement from my husband, but I had literally just packed up the wireless router so we didn't have internet. Fortunately, our mortgage broker came up with a solution, but it delayed the close of escrow yet again.

This wouldn't have been that big of a deal, but the movers were loading the van with our stuff, and we were paying them by the hour. As I write this, it sounds like such a tiny thing. In that moment though, I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

We had nowhere to move the stuff to.

I think that in the history of moving, no one before us has ever told the movers to SLOW DOWN. We were in full panic mode. We had no keys and escrow hadn't yet closed on our new house. As the morning wore on, we worried that the movers would have to drop everything in the new driveway as they had a moving job for the next day. Out stuff had to come off that truck.

By early afternoon, everything that would fit was loaded, but we still had no keys. The movers grabbed a piece of driveway, and we all sat in near silence. I offered to buy everyone lunch, but the guys preferred to just hang out. To my surprise, they'd been through this plenty of times before. Apparently, many people have to wait on the keys.

A half hour later, we got the call that escrow had finally closed, and the house was ours. The movers got the van rolling, and we spent the next ten days unpacking, scheduling repairmen, and furnishing a house nearly three times the size of our old one.

Living the good life!

We're not quite done and probably won't be for a while. We have several more repairmen coming out this week and furniture is being delivered. For now though, the boxes are unpacked and we're getting back to normal. On Saturday, I rode for the first time in two weeks. I am also looking forward to riding in another clinic with Christian Schacht in mid-November. Before that, we're going to the Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita. 

We love watching the sunset ...

We might look and feel a little travel weary, but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's good to be back.