Early days

I moved to a new country on Wednesday. It is now Saturday, and I have spent the last two days cleaning my house, stocking up my cupboards at Costco, befriending the kitten (including believing I had lost the kitten out of a window, crying in the garden thinking I would be dumped for being a negligent girlfriend, finding said kitten inside the house after all - hiding in the recliner), and attempting to get my head around the gargantuan to-do list. It's early days in the New Life.

I have also succeeded in eating badly, sleeping badly, overreacting, panicking, and my personal favourite: sitting in a stupor.

Cowboy is hiding from me this morning, while I scowl at the computer. Who knew it would be so difficult to find affordable, relatively nice furniture in an actual shop where I could go in and just get the furniture? I didn't realise how important it would be to me to have furniture. I've been living out of a suitcase for weeks now. It was fine while I was waiting to move, but now I'm here, I want to plunge some roots down and feel like I have a home.

It's becoming an ordeal. If I could hide from myself, I would.

On the flip side, things that I thought would be horrible, terrible, insurmountable issues as part of the move have turned out to be nothings, and the relief is overwhelming.

Yesterday I played with the horses in the rain, and began to see how good life is going to be. If I could only get some furniture...

The to-do list

Well, gosh...

I always imagine that, at some point, I will be on the winning side of my to-do list. I'll eventually have fewer things to do than I have already done, and the end will be in sight. Occasionally I dream that I will have nothing left to do, and then I can mess about being creative and frivolous (and play Xbox).

On my brief trip out to Washington last month, I drew up a to-do list in the first day or so, and then spent the entire visit adding to it. A few things were crossed off, such as "buy Xbox", and generally I'm pleased with what I got done at the new house, but I left behind so many tasks that I felt I should have been able to conquer if I hadn't been wallowing in illness and misery on the couch.

Being ill in America is very crappy, and I do not recommend it.

I have come back to the UK for what I hope to be the last time before I get permission to be in the US for the foreseeable future. My to-do list here is growing by the day. I grapple most with the strange way that other people's to-do lists seem to end up being put on to mine, because I have "nothing else to do but wait around", as I was told this morning.

How glorious it is when your work is tangible, and you can show somebody what you've been doing all day, when they can see you physically toiling away on an object or a task with immediately measurable results. What a luxury it must be not to have to explain that you might appear to be freely available, but you are in fact masterminding a global operation. It just happens to involve a lot of sitting down.

All I can do at this point is get my glasses on, get my head down, and get on with what needs doing, and attempt to hold it all together without having a meltdown.

I think Cowboy is expecting a meltdown soon. He usually knows before I do...