One of the after-effects of moving house is that I keep noticing ways in which I'm not fully settled in yet. Every so often I'll seize on one of those ways which is particularly irritating me, and tell myself that when that one has gone I'll ‘really’ be settled.

Just after the move, for example, I told myself I'd have ‘properly’ moved in once I'd managed to do some laundry in the new place. Or when I'd cooked for myself, instead of just eating a ready meal as I did for the first few days while I unpacked and sorted out the kitchen.

When I'd reactivated my computer infrastructure enough to run my first proper backup in the new house, that was a milestone. And it took me a couple of weeks to hit the milestone of getting to work on time: I kept being delayed in the morning by either doing a quick chore before leaving the house, enjoying the new shower for a bit too long, or not quite having worked out the optimal route to work yet.

This week's one is that I hope to feel as if I've properly settled in (translation: at least until I come up with the next of these milestones) once I'm no longer generating more rubbish than the normal collection can easily cope with. Even now I'm not making regular trips to the tip any more, my black wheely bin is constantly about half a load fuller than I normally expect it to be, and to some extent I'm still queueing up rubbish inside the house to be transferred to the bin once it's been emptied. It's terribly annoying, and the most annoying thing about it is that it's not nearly over yet: I still have lots of things on my to-buy list which will come in packaging more bulky and annoying than the stuff itself, and which will overflow my bin for yet another fortnight.