Whew!

Okay, we're in our new co-op apartment, surrounded by boxes, and I finally found the one that has my shoes. We have begun the process of opening boxes and putting things away, but have realized we overestimated the capacity of our new home. We are going to have to continue to down size if we want room to beathe.

One of our cats is enjoying himself after an initial alarm (I think he was a mountain goat in another life, the way he bounces from box to box), but the other is still traumatized -- she actually "holed up" in her litter box for a couple of hours. We put it inside a cabinet in the master bath so it must have felt like a little den. And since it was her old litter box (though emptied and washed) it must have smelled like home to her, too. Poor thing, our townhome was the only home she'd known since early kittenhood, while for our other cat, this is his fourth place to live.

I set off a week ago to write the new version of Thai Die, and to my immense pleasure and relief, the first four chapters simply poured out. My agent says I might get a month or six week extension of the November 1 deadline, so that's another relief. Now all I have to do is get my desk put back together and I can pick up where I left off three days ago when all this moving mess got underway.

We had terrific movers, they did not lose or break a single item (well, so far, there are boxes to unpack yet) and were friendly and courteous. And expensive. It's amazing what it costs to get burly men (and brawny women, for that matter) to pack up, carry out, and carry in your worldly goods. On the other hand the temperature in Minneapolis was in the nineties, with humidity to match, a really horrid day to be carrying heavy goods out of doors, so they certainly earned their pay today. Watching them, and catching fragments of conversation about other jobs, kindled my criminal imagination. I'm sure there's a mystery plot in there somewhere.

I'm posting this tonight instead of in the morning because we haven't got our new wireless system up and running but a neighbor hasn't got one of those guards on his so we're piggybacking. I don't know if I'll be able to do it again in the morning.

Now I'm pooped and my back hurts and I'm a little depressed at the size of the unpacking job in front of me, so I think I'll go to bed.