Overdrive

I just realized I haven't posted something in four whole days, which I think is a record for me (excluding the summer vacation between my two years of teaching). Our life has been really crazy lately with the new condo and our upcoming move (which is tomorrow morning!), so here's a brief summary:

We knew we wanted to rip up and replace the old carpet in the condo, since it was thirty years old and full of all sorts of mysterious stains and sticky spots and holes and other reminders of everyone who had lived on it for the past three decades. We also knew that we wanted to do this before moving all our furniture and possessions in, both to make our lives easier and also because the floor-installing people charge you an extra furniture-moving fee that we wanted to avoid. Unfortunately, we had to wait until this past week to start the whole re-flooring process, because for the week and a half prior the condo was being abated (did you know they used to make popcorn ceilings out of asbestos??) so obviously no one could go in then.

Long story short, in order for all our complicated reflooring plans to be possible, we had to drive to the floor store first thing Friday morning to sign a contract, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to get it done before we moved. I also had a Very Important Meeting at work Friday morning at 9:30, but since the floor store opened at 8:00 and is only 20 minutes away I thought we would be fine. Anyways, it was my first time driving in Philadelphia, which combined with my notoriously bad sense of direction and really intense fog that prevented our GPS from working resulted in us somehow ending up in Camden, NJ - surprise! We spent 45 increasingly frantic minutes trying to figure out how to get back to Philadelphia and the floor store, and when we finally made it there (at 9:10) I sat in the parking lot and cried from the combination of all my least favorite things: driving, being late, and general uncertainty. Ben very helpfully yelled at me to calm down and stop crying, which I eventually managed to do despite his efforts. Of course, the flooring situation is fine and I'm not fired, so all my catastrophizing was completely unnecessary, as usual.

My lovely mother drove up to help us paint over the weekend, and the three of us spent all day Saturday and Sunday painting at the new place and all night packing up the old one, which felt productive but is not a relaxing way to spend the weekend. Then yesterday and today was the annual staff retreat at work, which was awesome in that it was at the Adventure Aquarium (back in Camden, but this time on purpose) and we got to wander around and look at hippopotami during the breaks between sessions, but was also terrible timing in that it meant that for the two days of the year where I would have really liked to be able to leave early to take care of other things (letting in the floor people, talking to the movers, packing...) I couldn't. Oh well, at least I got to see a bunch of crazy-looking jellyfishes.

Anyway, the floor people allegedly finished today, but I won't see it until tomorrow when we move. For now it's back to packing, packing, packing, but this time tomorrow we should be officially all the way in our new home! Once I figure out where I packed the camera, I will take pictures to demonstrate how it is no longer a dark brown cave of ratty carpeting!