Tom was peering into the “donate box.”  “What’s my duck doing in the donate box!?”  He wasn’t happy.  We’re moving and sometimes you have to make tough decisions.  Except the duck for me wasn’t tough.  I sneaked it into the box, hoping he wouldn’t notice.  It’s ugly!  He has other ducks, cool ducks.  This duck is not cool.  He got it at a fundraiser where everyone brought something they wanted to get rid of.  Some other lucky woman managed to sneak it into the sale and I’m sure her husband never noticed.

I lost out on the duck.  It is now out of the donate box.  Then there’s the shower curtain.  “We need a new shower curtain for the guest bath in our new house” I said.  “Why?” asked Tom.  “I have a perfectly good one here we can use.”  “You mean that old plastic thing you got at Target on sale for $5.95?”  “What’s wrong with that?”  You see what I’m dealing with here?

We’ve been in moving madness for weeks.  I have therefore neglected my blog and you.  I am sure you’ve been checking email and Facebook every day just hoping I might have posted.

Because we like to do things the hard way, we moved most of our things ourselves.  That entailed about 27 trips between the apartment and Milwaukie which is about 20 minutes.  We’d fill our Acura with all sorts of loose things which is how I found myself with a Kitchen Aid mixer on my lap and my feet in cast iron frying pans on the floor of the car.  We saved boxes from our last move and threw all sorts of stuff in them without bothering to label because I knew what was in them!  Into our new garage they went.

Then Tom decided to unload our 10 by 10 storage unit in Tualatin.  He enlisted a friend, rented a U Haul truck and they unloaded it and put it all in the garage.  Which is why I can’t find anything.  I have looked for one certain thing for days and can’t find it.

Which brings me to pillows!  We have opened boxes and boxes of them.  “If I see one more pillow, I am going to commit hari kari” said Tom.  He had a point.  Who knew I had so many?  And since they had all been in storage for 4 years, they all smelled.  So I had to take off all the covers and get them cleaned, and wash all those pillows.  By the way, I love my new washing machine.  It has more settings, buttons and dials then I have ever seen.  So 8-10 loads of pillows later, they all smell good.

I am now in my office, surrounded by boxes wondering how we ever got here.  In a house we took an hour to buy, in a suburb called Milwaukie, on a street with no trees, in a small development.  Are we crazy?  There is a school about two blocks down from us.  It has enormous track and field lights.  They are on every night, rain or shine.  We didn’t notice them when we bought the house.  Maybe someone who takes more time than us and is more careful about great big purchases would have noticed that…

On another note, I found another dumb duck.

Are you more careful when you move things than we are?  Can you find your things without tearing your hair out?