Round and Round She goes, where she Stops...

I sure don't know.  I doubt anyone else has a clue to that one, either.

I've never done particularly well with change.  I am most definitely a creature of habit, and have been for a very long time.  I have my routines, I'm comfortable with them, and when circumstances force me to step outside the boxes of those routines my mind tends to go a bit haywire.

Lately everything has been changing.  The changes have been sweeping and most definitely life altering.  My home is gone.  The 2 cats that had been with me for 6+ years are both gone to wait for me at the rainbow bridge with their various per-deceased furbaby adopted brothers and sisters.  A friend died from heart problems at the age of 42.  I've moved in with my boyfriend despite our agreement that while we work in the same place on the same shift, living together probably isn't a great idea.  (So far it's working out, simply because we each have our own room, which means we each have someplace to escape to.  I'm not certain how long such will be the case, though, simply because my paranoia gets to me at times.)  Then there's the lawsuit that's pending against the con artists who are trying to rip me off for the rest of the money from the sale of the house, having to deal with a lawyer on that, and the uncertainty that always surrounds legal proceedings.

I'm finally beginning to get a few routines set back up (altered, really) now that I'm pretty much settled in here at James's place.  Some of them are easily enough altered, simply because they were relatively simple routines having to do with work to begin with.  I'm setting up a few new routines to cover some of the areas that have changed so drastically, mostly having to do with my smoking since I can't inside the house.  (That was going to change regardless of where I ended up - I had already decided I wouldn't smoke inside the new place, as an added incentive to help me quit, which I think is going to work doubly well over here.)

The question I find myself asking this past couple of days is "when am I going to have the Opportunity to go look for a new place of my own?"  Well, I ask myself that, and I ask myself, "should I wait to look for a place until I have a chance to pay off the old fines and get my drivers license back, and possibly have a car?"  That one  though I've already formulated a plan to deal with, provided the lawsuit doesn't go terribly wrong.  Even after the lawyer takes her cut, I'll have enough to pay off all the fines and get a fairly nice car and get it tagged and insured.  

Moving isn't going to simply entail finding an apartment or rental house to move into.  It's also going to require some planning on my part to account for things like renting a truck to move everything out of storage (about $100 there as far as moving expenses go.)  It's going to require replacing all the stuff for my kitchen that ended up getting left behind as not worth the trouble to box up and move, mostly because the vast majority of it was either worn out anyway, or in need of washing before it Could be boxed up, thanks to the plumbing problems that were prevalent over at the old house.  That's going to be tricky to put a price tag on.  I'm going to have to replace dishes and silverware - about $50 between them.  I'm going to have to replace all my pots and pans - there's another $200 for a decent set.  I'm going to have to replace the dining table and chairs - opps, there's another $150 for a cheap but serviceable set.  All the small appliances are going to have to be replaced as well - which will run anywhere from $300 up to about $1500, depending on whether I get a few of the things I've wanted for a long time but didn't get because of either financial factors or because I had a working whatever even if it wasn't as nice of a model. 

Either way, moving out of here and into a place of my own is both imperative and expensive as a proposition.  Hang on kiddies, the ride isn't slowing down any time soon.

Pick Up Sticks...

The tree that was my life had itself chopped down at it's roots, and turned into so much kindling.  Now I'm in the process of picking through the branches and sticks, and seeing how much of it can be salvaged for replanting elsewhere, and how much is just so much kindling to use for lighting a Samhain fire to feed the pain to the past.

It's been nearly a week now since I had to be finished with moving out of my old family home.  The keys have been turned over to the new owners.  My household items (at least those which I kept) are safely in a storage unit.  My bedroom has been set up in the spare room over at my boyfriend's place, and I'm slowly getting everything in order and finding a place for it in a vastly more limited space than I'm used to dealing with.  The dog settled back in as though he'd never left.  (He's one of the last litter of pups that my boyfriend's dog had, whom I had taken over to my place with me.)  The cat is adjusting well, and has come to his own terms with the roomies' resident cat, Pandora.  (Rather aptly named little psychopath that she is.)

The sense of dislocation is intense.  Despite my boyfriend and his (now my) room mates doing everything in their power to make me feel both at home and like part of this extended family, it feels far from "Home" to me so far.  Granted, I've only been here for a week, and I'm still putting things away, but that hasn't helped in coping with the nearly overwhelming changes.

Every day - pretty much every 2 or 3 hours while I'm awake that we're not at work - I'm reminded forcibly of just how vast the changes are when I have to go outside to smoke if I want to put a stop to the insistent nicotine cravings.  Going in the back yard feels strange, simply because I didn't make an attempt to disconnect the hot tub from it's separate fuse box and bring it over here. (It would have been a rather useless lawn ornament if I had - requiring the time and money to get wiring installed so it could be run, and then requiring that a service tech take a look at it to finally determine what was wrong with the pump so that it ran in the first place.)  All of my various paintings and other artwork is in storage, so the walls of my bedroom are bleakly bare of the hangings that I'm used to having up. 

The sounds and sights and smells of this house ... just aren't..... "right" somehow, to the subconscious portions of my brain.  It seriously hasn't had time to adjust yet to any of this.  I keep reminding myself to give myself some time to get used to it.  Then I tell myself that I can't afford to get Too used to it, since I'm still looking for a place of my own to move into, and at some point in the next few months I'm going to have to go through the whole danged process over again.  Though at least when I move out of here into my own place, I won't have to go through the tedious pain in the rump that is boxing everything up and moving furniture from one house to another - just from storage into whatever apartment or rent house I happen to finally locate.