Prepared

Monday morning when we returned from our walk, the front door knob broke. It was an unsettling crunch in my hand, something I had not felt before. Bruno saw me turn the handle and expected the door to open but stopped just before bonking his little pun’kin head on the door. He waited patiently at the front door while I went around, through the back door and to the front door thinking I could open it from the inside. I couldn’t. He lost his patience and began to howl that soulful, mournful howl that sounds like he’s on his last legs. So I ran back outside to calm him down and coax him around to the back door with a treat. Bruno is such a creature of habit. Whatever door we’ve gone out of, we must return in to. With the front door unusable until it was fix (yesterday, by the way), Bruno was all out of sorts. The front door is fun to come in and go out of! I don’t know why but to him it is. This morning all was back to normal, the walk was extra long because the weather is pleasant and now the nap is extra deep.

It’s Thursday and there’s no new news. I’ve done all the follow up I can without being a pest or an annoyance so now I have to wait for decisions to be made. Keeping busy during this wait is a challenge. It’s so exciting to know that I could be very close to landing a great opportunity. Minutes tick by like hours…..really. Being unemployed and waiting for that decision is much harder than being employed and waiting. When you’re at work, you’re working and you need to stay focused on the job at hand. When you’re unemployed, the search is your job and you stay focused on landing the offer. It’s all you think about. It’s all my husband thinks about. Yesterday we had to make a change.

Yesterday we finished packing all of Christmas. Doc’s recent surgery dragged this process out because he’s the decorator in chief in our home. He knows how everything gets put away. This time, after the boxes were packed (you don’t want to know how many because we do Christmas like no else I know), they didn’t go back into the attic. They went into the garage of a friend who is loaning us storage space while we prepare for selling our home and moving. When this was complete, we decided to continue packing other things in the house and set a date for an open house, February 21. We started packing things that we know we’ll be selling and today we will get the right boxes to start packing the very fragile things that will stay with us. Things like our china and crystal. There’s a lot of it because we’ve entertained so much over the years. Every time we wandered into a Goodwill or thrift store we carefully looked through the glassware section. We’ve landed some incredible items, Baccarat and Stuart crystal, for example. These are things we would not have been able to afford at their retail of $25-75 each but there they were, looking for a new home at a dollar or two a piece. Picking through these items makes us trip through memory lane…the parties…the celebrations…the intimate dinners alone. What do you keep and what gets sold? It’s a hard choice sometimes, other times we say, “What were we thinking?” and laugh.

The process of moving has begun even without a job. We’re fully prepared to redirect our move and have been in contact with distant friends who had to do just that. Kris landed a job in the Carolinas and literally during the drive to the new apartment, she received a call on her mobile phone offering her a position with a company she really, really wanted to work for. She and her husband took 2 hours to “think about it” and she accepted the new job, in Washington DC. Called the movers and told them, “Turn North, put our things in storage for a couple of days, we need to find another place to live.” They gave us some good tips had they known in hindsight that this could happen.

So, we’re prepared. Now if the phone would just ring.