004 THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING

THE SIGN FROM FRONT DOOR

They say that the top five stressful things that can happen in a person’s life are a death in the family, selling a house, buying a house and getting married.  In this past year I have now experience four of the top five, and I have no plans to get married.  Normally I have no problem dealing with stress, but I think it is starting to catch up with me.

Losing Dad early last year sort of kicked things off.  The day after dad died, before I even had time to process it, my sister and her family arrived and started clearing his things out.  This led to the attic as well and there was stuff from the 1930’s found up there.  I spent 5 full 8 hour days just shredding old documents and then months later, found a whole bunch more to shred.

I got busy with the arrangements for Dad and also getting started on dealing with his estate.  That took a couple of months to get the initial part done, but I cannot complete it until I do his final income tax in the next couple of months.  Add into this getting a 25-year mortgage so that I could keep and stay in the house, and wow, things were really heating up.  I was scared that I would not qualify for one, but it proved fairly easy through my credit union.  But talk about stress.  Having a mortgage with such high payments.

This is really happening, I’m moving and very soon.  It was sort of an abstract thought after selling the house October 30, 2015.  My new place would not be ready for many months and so, life just continued on as if nothing had changed.  Then I got the call that final inspection of the new place would take place on February 17, 2016 and things snapped into focus.  I had to start getting rid of stuff to downsize.

When my daughter and her boyfriend came over yesterday to get my Dad’s old kitchen table and chairs, they also wanted my old stereo surround-sound setup.  Since I wasn’t using it anymore, and I could never get away with using a sound system with 1500 watts of power in a townhouse, I decided it was best to re-home it.  We or they loaded all of the stuff up into my truck and I drove them home, where they unloaded it.

Once I got home, my tiny living room/bedroom area is looking decidedly empty and that is when it really hit home that this is actually happening.  Now I need to bring in the 1-800-got-junk people to get rid of a bunch of stuff and declutter.  The more stuff I get rid of now, the less I have to pay to move.

Earlier I mentioned how the stress is catching up with me, my sleeping patterns have been all over the map in the past year.  Suddenly I cannot sleep past 5:00 AM and some nights I’m up at 4:00 and even once or twice at 2:30 AM.  I also noticed I am getting migraines again on a regular basis, and they had pretty much gone away before.  I had a wicked one that developed in the afternoon and lasted all night.  Now I get to deal with the migraine hangover.  It’s just like a real hangover, except you get the headache first, but don’t have any fun getting there.  It’s a combination of how the migraine physically beats you up and all the medications to try and stop it.