The stuff is mostly packed (and threatening to take over our living room.) The moving sale is over with. The housemate is gone (Although he left me 6 ear-wax-covered q-tips on the floor of his bathroom to remember him by. He's a thoughtful guy like that.) The child has been promised a dog once we move. The jobs have been applied for BOTH in the PORTLAND area and SEATTLE! (Gotta git wherever the gittin' is good, after all. I would actually be overjoyed to be in Seattle since I have several friends and family members up there, including one of my two BFF who is in the Coast Guard and is stationed up there...) My work has been given notice that I will be giving notice in the very near future. Andrew's mom is moving in tomorrow. And I... I am sitting here, trying to stay positive. We CAN survive a few weeks with his mom in the house. We CAN find a way to move up North quickly. Andrew WILL get a call back for one of the jobs today.
I must try to embrace the chaos right now. Shiva is dancing. And hopefully if I hang my Ganesha mask on the wall all of these obstacles will get the heck out of our way so life can finally just happen.
I'm sure that you've probably figured out by the title of this blog that
I'm going to have some David Bowie for you to listen to while you read.
Well, if you figured that out, you're wrong.
Sorry.
Life can be unpredictable sometimes.
The chorus in this Incubus song is my motto right now.
Whatever tomorrow brings I'll be there
With open arms and open eyes, yeah.
OK, let me explain for those of you who aren't my Facebook
friend or don't read everything I post: We are moving. To Portland. Hopefully by the start of June.
Backing up for some history on this: Andrew's Grandmother,
Lillian, passed away this April. She was a wonderful, kind woman and it was so
sad to have her finally slip away. When
she died, she owned three properties: one in Goleta, one in Santa Barbara, and
one in Chadron, Nebraska. Since April 2009, Andrew's mother had been living
with her and taking care of her in the Goleta house and we were living in the
Santa Barbara house with our kiddo - we knew the house we were in would go back
to Andrew's mother eventually and that when it did we would move out of town
(since the rent here is so astronomically high when you're not getting a family
discount.) Well, Lillian willed the Santa Barbara house to Andrew's mother, the
Goleta house to Andrew's uncle, and the Chadron house to Andrew.
I know what you're thinking: why aren't we moving to the
house that Andrew owns now? 1- It's in
Nebraska. #2 - It's in NEBRASKA. #3- It's currently being rented anyway, so
it's now a source of income too. Plus, it's in NEBRASKA.
(No offense, Nebraska people. I grew up in the hills and I
need trees and mountains and stuff to climb on, though. Not cornfields and
tornadoes.)
So, at first we were told that Andrew's mother wanted to
move back into this house "within the next year. We then discussed getting
out of Santa Barbara by September, which seemed like as good a time as any. Then,
a few weeks later, we find out from Andrew's mother that she and her brother
have been arguing a lot about the things he expected her to do in the house
that he owned but she was still living in and she told us that she wanted to
move out of there as soon as possible so that she could stop having him being
her landlord (and thus, stop fighting with him). After Lillian's memorial
(where the tension about the moving issue was very apparent) that timeline then
turned into "I need to move in there by June 1st."
Definitely a, "Ummmmm, are you serious?" moment in my life.
We have long-since decided to move to the Pacific Northwest
before the kiddo reached Kindergarten - the school systems (and libraries) in
California are regularly raped and plundered by our inept governing bodies and
we wanted to move to a place where education is actually made a priority
instead of just seen as an& emergency piggy-bank for lawmakers who can't
get their sh*t together. Since I can
take Summer off of my grad program fairly easily and Andrew can (hopefully)
transfer jobs to another Costco warehouse, the timing of it all isn't really
that bad... except that we're going to have to take out a loan to get the move
financed. And we don't know when Andrew will actually get a job so we may have
to share a house with his mother for a few weeks before we can move with the
knowledge that he'll have work when we get there. This would be uncomfortable for us anyway, but
his mother also smokes. A lot. Indoors. Which
is really a dealbreaker when it comes to our child.
I will say, though, even though the timeline on all of this
is freaking me out, if it weren't for Andrew's mother and her house, we
wouldn't have been able to live in this beautiful paradise for all this time. She
was incredibly generous in offering up her house when she found out we were
pregnant so that we could stay in town and have a decent amount of space to
raise the kidlet it. Even though we had a lot of cleaning and fixing up of the
place to do when we first moved in, we have loved living here in Santa Barbara
and getting to raise our child here for a while too. I will miss this place intensely, but I'm
trying to focus on the positive and remember no matter how flustered and
stressed out I get during this move, I need to keep my attitude of gratitude
going and remember that it's just a transition and we will be in a great place
once we move, too. Internships in children's librarianship are 200% easier to
find up in Portland, which means my resume can finally start heading in the
same direction as my degree.
Plus we can finally get a dog. And I've had puppy-lust for years now, so
that is a big one for me.
Now someone please get me that robot suit I asked for a few
months ago so I can start lifting all this crap, will ya?
Potty training a toddler to go in public places has given me a new set of ninja skills: I can make a paper toilet seat cover in like 20 seconds. Which is FAST, I'd like to add. In case you haven't ever had the fury of a toddler's bladder upon you at a freaking carnival to test out exactly how fast it normally takes. And you parked 6 blocks away. And stupidly left your child in their underwear and didn't pack a diaper.
