Lair of the Wolf Dragon

Blaugust was a bust

Given the fact that this is my first post in over a month, it’s apparent that Blaugust 2016 did not turn out the way I had hoped. Remember how when I started, I mentioned briefly that it may be too much for me given that I was going to be moving out of one house and into another? It turned out to be WAY too much for me.

I suspected it wasn’t going to be easy to begin with. When I wrote that post on August 2, I had accepted an offer on my house and was looking for a new one to move into. I had to leave by August 23. I looked at quite a few houses, many of them outside the city before choosing one in the city in early August. The earliest possession date I could get was September 1. Notice the gap in between those dates? Yeah, I needed to find somewhere to store all of my stuff and stay at during that time.

Thankfully there was room at my parents’ house and I was allowed to work remotely during that time because they lived 1 1/2 hours away from the office. A couple of relatives lent me their trailers so I could store most of my belongings on there. And boy was there lots of stuff. Nothing makes you want to seriously downsize your worldly possessions more than having to pack and move them all. I hated moving when I was just living in apartments, it’s so much worse when you’ve been living in a house. Stuff just seems to accumulate over time. Between packing and trying to wrap things up at work (I took off the week leading up to the 23rd), this is where my Blaugust posting became too much and stopped. It was hard to write anything coherent when I was trying not to fall asleep in my computer chair and still had to do an hour’s worth of physio exercises before bed.

Thankfully, the packing and moving itself wasn’t too bad. My mom came over for two days and helped pack a lot of it, and I spent another two days packing the rest. Then on moving out day, a bunch of very kind aunts and uncles showed up to load up the trailers, while I spent most of the time packing up a few last minute things and trying to figure out how to disassemble my bed frame. Everything was loaded up in 4 hours, which was pretty damn good I think. Zephyr couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on but there were lots of people around and she just had to be right in the middle of the action. I was trying to watch her to make sure she didn’t get underfoot too much or run out the open back gate, but she did manage to “escape” once (and by that, I mean that she sauntered past everyone busy loading stuff and walked over to the neighbour’s garage to idly sniff around).

Then it was off to my parents’ place for a day before coming back to clean the whole house. Not necessary but the nice thing to do. That took up another day. And in between all of that, I was running around getting things finalized for both the old house and the new one. Legal papers to sign, mortgages to finalize, house insurance to arrange, utilities to close/move…I had to make lists just to remember what I was doing. When I met with my lawyer though, he seemed impressed with everything I had already done. In truth, all I did was read through the to-do list that his paralegal sent me previously and actually do those things. I guess not everyone bothers to do that? Anyways, to top it all off, there was a kerfuffle when the lawyer sent me a total of all of the fees I had to pay to him…and it was $1000 more than my bank had given me a loan for. So I had to scrounge together $1000 I had not been planning to spend in like 2 days. I also had a hard time getting the insurance people to send over their paperwork to my lawyer (in Canada, no insurance = no mortgage = no house).

In the end though, everything worked over for buying the new house. From August 24 to August 31, I was back at work and trying to catch on sleep in a bed I wasn’t used to (so that didn’t go very well). Then I was off again on September 1 and 2 to move into my new house and get things settled. We arrive that morning to find that the house hasn’t been cleaned at all! Somewhat expected but that didn’t stop my mom from calling the previous owners unflattering names while she cleaned the kitchen. I was glad that I had planned ahead and had scheduled for both the internet to be connected and the furnace/water heater/air conditioner to be inspected on the afternoon of the 1st. Having internet access that day was good, but even better was finding out that the air conditioner was busted. Since it’s written in the purchase agreement that all appliances must be working on possession date, the previous owners are likely going to responsible for paying to fix it. It may be a bit of a battle to get that money but I’ll take them to court if I have to. It was quite unpleasant indoors for the first few days because of high temperatures but the weather has been cooler lately, thank god. I’ve never been so glad for summer to end. Unfortunately there’s street construction happening right outside my house so the cool wind blowing through the windows is also bringing in a fair amount of dust. So hope that I have a rainy autumn here.

In addition to cleaning and packing (there’s STILL about a dozen boxes to unpack), I’ve been working on a major project for my job that has taken up some of my evenings as well as days. Hopefully that craziness will be done soon though and I can get back to my normal life. So that’s also prevented me from finding the time to post.

Going back to Blaugust, I really should have gone with a much less intense schedule but as usual, I underestimated how much time something would take. Lesson learned for next year though. I’d still like to continue The Storylet Experiment some time since people seemed to enjoy it. Maybe I’ll make it into a weekly or semi-monthly thing.

For the moment though, time to stretch and then do more unpacking.