Please Send Mittens and Gas!

Right now, I am trying to figure out what on earth my husband and I were thinking.

This weekend, we experienced one of life's biggest forms of upheaval - we moved. What made it even more difficult is that we took our kids with us. Granted, we only moved 10 miles away, but it still was (is) one of the worst experiences we have had together.

We thought we were doing pretty well. We picked up our moving truck early, and even loaded some boxes early. The next morning it all began to unravel.

The first kink in the move was the fact that almost everyone who committed to helping us move bailed on us or changed their terms. My dad, who was scheduled to help us early that morning, didn't show up until after 11. Loading the truck took FOREVER. I decided to take the kids to the new place to wait and went to turn on the heat. Nothing.

It turns out, the community we moved into is a gas community. Guess what runs on gas? The heater and hot water heater. At our old house, the gas was provided by the city, so you didn't have to have a separate company for your gas and water. Not so in the new city.

I called the new gas company and learned that it would be 13 days before we could get the heat turned on. How on Earth could my family go for 13 DAYS WITHOUT HEAT AND WATER? Well, I couldn't figure it out either. I actually called the gas company on a Sunday and because they had a huge outage on the other side of the valley I live in, they answered. I was able to get the gas turned on 7 days earlier, which left us with a total of 5 days without heat and gas.

This forced my husband and me to be more resourceful. While boiling water for the kids' baths, we discovered that boiling water on all four burners heated up the house nicely. Unfortunately, we also discovered that if you boil that much water continuously, it will ruin your stock pots (three in all).

Besides the problem with our heat, I am waiting until we get the money from the sale of our house to get my office set up. This means that right now, I am typing on my keyboard and looking out the window of my office. My monitor sits about two feet away on my filing cabinet. I would have liked to put it on the table with my keyboard, but the table is only 18 inches wide, so not much fits on there.

I have been trying desperately to get back into the habit of working, but with icy cold hands and feet, boxes in the living room, driving further to take my son to school, and a post office who has "misplaced" our new mail key, it's been a little difficult. Maybe once I regain feeling in my hands and feet and I unpack the vast amounts of junk that I somehow fit on my broken desk, I will be able to get back to my previous levels of productivity. Until then, I am going to go warm my hands over the oven.