Minor setback. They won’t release the gas inspection report until the house is finalized. They won’t put in the order to install the gas meter til the inspection report is released. They need 24 hours to assign someone to come out and do the installation. We can move in, but there will be no gas hookup. Electricity but no hot water and we won’t be able to use the stove. Oh yeah, and heat. No heat either.

So…keep your fingers crossed that it’s a mild weekend for weather in the Sacramento valley, folks. I have a feeling the nights are going to be pretty bad otherwise. I’ll admit this is for purely selfish reasons that I ask this. If it’s cold, the cats will come onto the bed, and since they leave Richard alone, guess who’ll be mummified in cat fur.

Ah well.

Zero hour approaches and we’re ready. Almost. We’re at the point in packing when it’s all miscellaneous stuff – not quite enough for a box of its own, but still needing to be packed, so it gets thrown into a box with other stuff, labeled something generic like ‘paperwork’, and then we’ll spend the next few weeks searching through boxes trying to remember just *which* miscellaneous-labeled box we stashed this thing whose importance will be inversely proportional to the difficulty we’ll have in finding it.

The cats know something is up now, but so far they’re relatively calm. After all, in their eyes, anything that involves empty boxes and scads of packing paper through which to slide can only be a good thing. I have a sneaky feeling that this perception will change when they all get locked into a room with no furniture tomorrow, but for now its kinder to let them have their delusions of normalcy. Goddess knows we lost ours far too long ago.