Moral has dropped on this project I’m on. Confidence is lower than it’s ever been. Even when it seemed as if the odds were stacked against us, there was still an undercurrent of hope. Not so anymore – not since the powers that be released their latest scope and timeline documents. The reaction from both business and consultants has been the same. What are they thinking? How can they just blithely ignore the recommendations; the mountains of facts; the downright begging of those they’ve hired to advise them to please, please, wake up and realize that we can not do it this way again. It’s failed twice before – unless they change things and change them significantly, it will fail the third time too.

They do not listen. They refuse to listen. They get furious when brave people risk their jobs to gather facts and send them higher up the chain than the ‘normal’ line of command thinks they should (while the rest of us cross our fingers, hold our breath, and silently cheer them on). Serious questions of how scope creep will be managed (or in other words, will it *finally* be managed this time?) are met with laughter from those who are supposed to be doing the managing in the first place. There is a hopelessness in the faces of those like myself who have been there since the beginning. It doesn’t matter how hard we try. This is bigger than us – bigger than the entire IT organization. If they will not take responsibility for what they are doing, we are only chasing a moving target once again.

They say that the third time is the charm. Not so in this case. They say that those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Unfortunately, sadly, painfully, unless something changes and the people who are supposed to be leading finally wake up and listen, this will most definitely be the case.

I’m trying to figure out where the time has gone. It seems like only yesterday we were still planning our move and now it’s been a week since we moved in. A whirlwind of activity over that time and suddenly there are less than two weeks til May 5th, when Richard flies away.

One weekend remains between then and now and it’s already booked solid. Three months before the wedding means it’s time to register and we have to do it before he leaves. We need to make some decisions on landscapers so we’ll finally have a front yard (before the neighbors start to complain). We need to have the quotes on the built-in office so we can figure out when to have that built and installed. Somehow I thought there was at least one more week in there somewhere and suddenly the time left is a lot less than I was prepared for.

A lot of people have wondered aloud why we were in such a rush to move in. Why not wait? After all, we gave our notice for the entire month of April. Yes we were excited about the house being done, but more importantly, he’s leaving and I did not want to move into this house without him – to have him come home to an unfamiliar place. We rushed, but at least he got to unpack his things. He’s wandered through stores with me searching for soap dishes and shower curtains. He figured out the quirks of the garage door opener. It’s his home too, this way.

I’m not ready. He’s ready – he’s been ready for years. This is his dream – this trip around Europe on trains and in hostels – just as the house was mine. But I’m not ready. I’m not ready to watch him walk through those gates and board a plane that will take him so far away from me for so long. I’m not ready to say goodbye.

How can it be this soon? There’s supposed to be more time. Why isn’t there more time?

Saturday we loaded a rental truck full of all the junk left in the old house and carted it away. We stood in mud ankle-deep and flung old furniture and trash into an untidy heap. To our right a pair of men emptied piles of branches from a beat-up trailer. To our left, another truck deposited a load of trash. We were the first three contributors to this new repository at the dump. I feel so proud.

That morning we went to the Starbucks in our old town for what will possibly be the last time. They know us there – what drinks we order and what pastries we always request. There is a little bakery and coffee shop in this new town, but it’s somehow not the same. The apple turnovers are flaky and sweet but they do not satisfy the craving for a cinnamon chip scone.

Yesterday we came with brooms and rags to clean out the garage and wipe down the windows and collect all that remained. Yesterday we ate lunch at the little sandwich shop down the street from where we used to live. He had grilled ham and cheese, oozing lettuce and tomato. I dipped my grilled cheese carefully in ketchup. We ate outside, enjoying the warmth of the sun. Once upon a time, we used to walk down here on weekends. We would eat those sandwiches with oreo cookie shakes and then end our lunch with a round of RoadBlasters – one quarter for each of us.

Tonight we turned in the keys to the landlord, and walked around the house for the last time. There is the window where Ashton jumped through the screen, and my roommate and I had to wake our neighbors to let us into their yard to fetch him – he was chasing their rabbit (the one who always escaped). The carpet in that room is ripped because that’s where the kittens lived when we fostered – a room full of purrs, small wet noses, and needle-claws who saw humans as trees to be climbed, with laps and hands to give food and affection. There is the towel rack that falls apart if you breath hard next to it, and the blinds through which Allegra would run at top speed, back and forth early in the mornings.

The backyard holds the deck where we hung the wind chimes and where, one year, we grew in the huge flower box to the left English peas, piles of pale striped Aremenian cucumbers, and one small stunted carrot. In the front is the window where Azrael used to sit, waiting for us to come home and put the key into the lock so he could bat at the turning knob. We walked past the kitchen I hated because there was never enough room; the linen closet where Zuchinni liked to hide until one of us would open it and be bowled over by a terrified cat; the water softener that overflowed twice, spilling enough water to soak under the walls into the dining room and saturate the carpet; the fireplace we never used; the hook where we hung the mistletoe.

I was still in graduate school when I moved in, six years ago, working toward a career in research and writing. In this house I discovered the joy of bottle feeding orphan kittens, the bitter acceptance that some would never survive no matter what we did, the pain of feline leukemia, and the true and hopeless hell of FIP. In this house I earned my independence and lived for the first time in my life entirely alone, never thinking I would ever find a reason to give that up. In this house I huddled in my room and told my grandfather I loved him over the phone as he lay dying in a hospital halfway across the country.

This was the house from which I was already dreaming my escape before I ever moved in.

This was the town I could never let become mine.

This was the house I would never let become home.

We had our first official guests in our new house today. In a mass get-measured-for-wedding-outfits exercise, my older sister, her husband and her two sons, Richard’s sister, her daughter, and her significant other, one of the groomsmen, and my parents came over, along with the seamstress, her assistant, and her adorable little 6-month old baby girl.

It was a wonderfully fun and hectic afternoon, and we learned a few important things about this house of ours:

• We need furniture. Desperately. Badly. The tiny love seat and trio of assorted chairs in the living room just isn’t enough to hold everyone. And eating with a crowd is a bit easier when there is a table – everyone ended up either perching on the stairs or settling onto the floor. On the plus side, all but two of the cats decided they wanted to pretend to be shy of strangers so our guests didn’t get too pestered for having food at whisker level, but still, it would be nice to be just a tad more formal next time.
• We need curtains. Or throw rugs. Pictures on the wall. Anything. Just as long as it could help soak up the sound. The down side to having hardwood floors, no carpets and minimal furniture is (as Sebastian – the cat who could double as a foghorn – has taught us) that sound echoes in this big half-empty house. Really really well.

But on the plus side, even with that many people over, the house wasn’t crowded. There was plenty of room for everyone and more besides – in the old house it would have felt crowded with fewer than this (a fact which often puzzles me as I recall distinctly having a Halloween party one year with over thirty people crammed into that shoebox we used to live in). This house has space to spare. Even when we finally get the furniture that we want there will still be room. It’s an unusual feeling, but a long-awaited one. We – and the cats – are thoroughly enjoying it.

After the flurry of all the must-unpack-now items, I’m unpacking slowly – organizing, shifting things around, getting settled. The kitchen has empty cupboards I don’t know how to fill. I have more counter space than I expected. I am in awe of how much space is in this house. I feel as if we rattle around in it. Our furniture seems so tiny in these rooms.

We put up hooks for our robes last night and felt ridiculously pleased with ourselves. It’s so ….well…adult to do this kind of thing. It’s an odd feeling.

It’s fading now, but every now and then I don’t quite feel like I belong here yet. It’s our stuff and the cats are here and I walk around and know where things are but still – this isn’t quite yet my house. It’s like we’re merely squatting in someone else’s beautiful house, and eventually they will come back and we’ll have to go away again.

We have two city-issued garbage cans. one gray and one green. We’ve got the utilities set up in our name now. We’ve got – hopefully – a mailbox key (which they have yet to deliver to us). And we have DSL – finally DSL.

The office comes next but that’s such a small task compared to the house itself. We’re getting a list of things that need to be fixed. A leaking sink. Scratches in a marble countertop. The electrical connections that run the gas fireplace in the master bedroom aren’t working. Nothing major, but still significant enough to note and get taken care of while we’re still under warranty.

There is an echo in the stairwell. We call to each other and the voices become garbled and difficult to understand. Upstairs you cannot hear the garage door when it opens or closes. The doorbell has a clean new tone to it – bold bells. The stone dragons are on the front steps. The stone goose is by the door.

I can look out the window next to my computer and watch birds fluttering around the yard. At night we lay in bed and listen to the song of birds in the neighbors’ trees. Occasionally through the window we can see (but not hear) a tractor in the farm beyond the street’s end, and when everything else is perfectly quiet, we can hear the whispered echo of the train horns as they pass through the edge of town.

I am more at peace here than I’ve been in some time. It’s not just that I have time off from work, nor is it simply that the house is done and we are finally moved in. It’s that we’re home. Finally home. And this time it’s really and truly ours.

I got DSL a while ago, back when it first came out in my area. This was prior to all the known problems – months of wait to get it installed; poor connections; etc. Two weeks and I had a nice young technician at my door who turned my phone outlet into a double jack, handed me a network card and supervised as I installed it into my own computer, and did a few quick configuration steps on my computer to make it play nicely with the DSL modem. Half an hour he was there, and when he left, I was connected – blissfully happy with my speedy new connection and unwilling to ever go back to dial-up again.

Everything went along swimmingly since then and probably would have continued just as smoothly, except I made a big mistake. I decided to move.

You wouldn’t think this would be such a big deal. You’d think (poor naive soul), that it’d be a simple matter to transfer the DSL from one phone number to the next. In fact, the newer DSL is even nicer than the old. Instead of splitting one phone jack, they told us, the whole house would now be wired. We could pick up our computer and move it around and we’d be connected everywhere. All they had to do was turn it on and we’d be set, right?

Except that back when I got DSL, they were still giving away static IP addresses. And because we set up our own little local area network with our very own router and firewall, we sort of needed to *keep* that static IP address. In fact, when I went through the rather lengthy hassle of setting up the new phone lines and the DSL transfer, I insisted that we get to keep it, and I actually got, in writing, their agreement to do so. A grandfathered clause, as it were. Not a problem, they said. Piece of cake, they said. I should have known better though. Getting transferred in circles simply trying to get them to figure out that I wanted to transfer my DSL (with or without a static IP address) was painful enough. I should have realized what was to come.

I won’t bore you with all the nitpicky details of what I had to go through to actually get them to do what they agreed to. Let’s just boil it down to this. Three days. A total of about eight hours on the phone. Circular transfers between DSL and regular phone service; between DSL ordering and DSL support; between lots of people who didn’t know what to do with me and kept foisting me off on yet another person who didn’t know what to do with me. It all finally culminated in three (yes, three) technicians showing up at my house this afternoon to do the highly complicated (yeah, right) task of replacing my external DSL modem so that I *finally* got connected.

It also ended in me figuring out that apparently, in order to get *anything* accomplished with Pacbell and their DSL partners, being nice doesn’t work. Biting the head off of the next tech support person one is transferred to on the phone (after going around in circles for the better part of an hour) makes them actually listen to you. It also, I think, makes them put little notes on your account that you don’t like to be put on hold (heh heh) and tend to be a bit volatile, but at least it worked.

I finally did discover that the source of all my happy DSL-connection nightmare fun was, quite simply, the transfer of the static IP. You see, they just don’t *do* this anymore, so no one knew quite how to handle my request. I guess they figured that if they shuffled me around long enough I would just go away, or give up and take the dynamic IP set-up.

Ha. They guessed wrong.

An email showed up in my inbox this evening from Pacbell. They noted I’d recently used their tech support service and they hope I’d be willing to offer some feedback on the service I received.

I’m letting this one sit for a while. I’m not so sure they really want my feedback right now. I have a sneaky feeling they wouldn’t know what hit them.

There are stars, so many stars. We can see them from the windows. It’s something we’d noticed long ago, coming out here late at night with flashlights trying to see what progress had been done on the house. And now, inside, they are still there. Such a small thing; such a large and beautiful sky.

I am wondering why I thought stairs were a good idea. We are both sore and exhausted. Granted the movers did most of it – lugging every box and stick of furniture into their truck and then carrying all the heavy stuff up the stairs or wherever it went. But still, we each had our own cars full of things too fragile or unpacked for the movers to carry. Computers. The antique glass lamp. Baskets of laundry.

We came last night – filled cars with all of the clothes from our closets, and boxes of food from the pantry and brought them over. Just a few little things to give the house our stamp – make it more ours.

The cats mill about in confusion. They spent the day in the bedroom at the old house, locked behind a door but still able to hear the noises of the move. They cried nonstop on the drive over when we went to fetch them this evening, and all but two are still huddled inside cat trees and carriers and bathroom cabinets still, unsure of this new place to which they have been brought but still needing constant reassurance that we, at least, are here, and there is something good and familiar.

We have so little furniture. This house is so big and empty. The stairwell echos. There are new and different noises.

There are birds in the neighbors’ trees, and the sound of the wind through the leaves is soft.

And there are stars.

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.

Only three days and the pressure is mounting. There’s still so much to pack and so many things to do. My cold is lingering, settling into my sinuses so that by the end of the day my head is pounding from the pressure. We’ve chosen a mover and need to call PG&E to set up the gas meter. There is still the nagging issue of whether the garage door opener will actually work. I keep opening closets and cupboards and finding more things to pack, or stuff that should have been left for Salvation Army when they came earlier. The night before the move when we should be doing last minute packing, I’ve got to be at church because long before we knew we were going to move that day, I agreed to play an oboe descant for one of the songs for the Maundy Thursday service (and no, I don’t know what Maundy means either).

We went to dinner last night in our soon-to-be-home town and discussed church politics with the waitress, who also happens to be the choir accompaniest. It was an eerily adult feeling. We drove home with shared thought that by this time next week that trip home would be a lot shorter.

There’s nothing left to buy for the house; that is, no more decisions that have to be made before it can close. We’ve plenty more to buy once we’re in, but nothing of the earth-shattering status that results in quests like this past weekend, where we were reduced to wandering umpteen home and hardware stores searching blearily for just the right towel bar and toilet paper holder. It’s an odd feeling to no longer have questions to answer. Now we’re the ones with the questions. Will the inspections pass? Will they get it done? Will anything happen to prevent us from moving in?

The piles of boxes in the garage are growing, marked with the room each one should go to in the new house. The cats don’t seem to be too fazed yet. They’re having fun diving through piles of packing paper (special blessings to those who saved their dishpacks and nice packing paper for me, piled in their garages for months) and lurking in and around the empty or half-full boxes. I watch them and try to remind myself that I wanted this; have looked forward to it; have dreamed of it.

Three days and then it’s over. Finally over. We just have to make it that far.

I’ve been sick the past few days. Sore throat, stuff nose, and absolutely no energy. I was feeling so draggy that I stayed home from work yesterday and today, knowing I could still dial in on the conference calls and thereby not miss anything. Not, mind you, that there’s much to miss this week anyway. We’re still in thumb-twiddle mode, waiting for the powers-that-be on this project to make decisions on what we can work on, and when we can start again.

Granted this has worked out well in my favor. It means I can actually be sick without worrying over what I’m going to have to spend extra time making up when I get back. It means I’ve also had time to make all the phone calls necessary to arrange for the move. And being home meant that I could have movers come over to do estimates for how much they’ll charge to take all our stuff, stash it in a big truck, drive it 20 miles, and then unload it (a lot, by the way. It will cost a lot. Ouch).

I’ve had a low-grade fever – probably the reason I’ve been so exhausted – and all I want to do is to curl up and take a nap. The problem is that my mind is racing too fast and I can’t sleep. Last night I lay awake all night, trying desperately to make my brain shut up. I curled up on the sofa, hoping that the lurking in the quietest place in the house might do the trick, but no luck. I lay there trying to think of absolutely nothing, and meanwhile my uncooperative brain jumped merrily from topic to topic. Remember that odd little doctor from the play Arsenic and Old Lace, and while we’re on that subject, let’s recap the little old ladies singing at their basement funerals, shall we? Counting sheep? No, no, let’s count boxes instead – how many more do you think we need for books and then there’s all the rest of the stuff. Where are we going to put the third cat tree? Against that wall in the living room, but then that leaves an orphan bookshelf, unless that goes…no..maybe…hmm. How long did the neighborhood rules say we can live there without having the front yard landscaped and do we get special compensation for moving in in spring when every gardener in the surrounding three counties is triple booked?

Of course, insomnia at least means I’m not jerking awake from my current stress dream-of-choice – the one where we’re barreling down the freeway and all the cars in front slam on their brakes but we’re not stopping and I wake up seconds before we slam into them.

But still, if I could just get some sleep, I’d feel better. There’s too much to do and not enough time to do it. And I’m so tired. So very very tired.

Did the insulation guys finish the attic? Where are we going to put the cat food and water bowls?

Make it stop. Please, just let me not think. Just for one night.

Sob.