Settling in

[simont]

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.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

At least you're fast making progress. Most people *never* fully move in, their last ununpacked[1] boxes being finally sorted through by their next-of-kin... OTOH, maybe that thought wasn't as cheery as it was when I thought of it.

[1] Can you justify my using "unpacked" there? That's obviously wrong, yet seems to convey the meaning better than "ununpacked"...

[simont]

"their last still-packed boxes" would be the simplest way to say it, surely?

I don't think I can justify "unpacked" at all.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah! I knew I'd heard something about it: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002171.html

So unjustifiable, but common. I'm happy to have an answer :)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I do wish I'd had the tuits to make the outside of a beanbag before September when everybody in the worl moved house, because I could have got enough polystyrene to fill it up by now if I had.

[simont]

I'm currently trying to buy a job-lot of lampshades, having found one I like. The two I've got my hands on so far have been packed in particularly shoddy polystyrene: the packing is apparently supposed to be big blocks, but it's half crumbled into individual crumbs by the time I get it out of the box. Ideal for beanbag-filling, I'd say: you don't have to spend too much effort on dismembering it. And I'm still expecting six more lampshades (once BHS find the gear lever on their arse) which will probably be similarly packed :-)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Is it ok to ask you to hang on to it for a while? I have a quilt in the patchwork queue at the moment doing a spot of bed-blocking.

[simont]

I can certainly start a spare-polystyrene bag if you like, yes.

(What is "bed-blocking" in this context? A quick google suggested that it's something to do with NHS ward management, which seemed unlikely.)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It's sitting in the queue but nothing is being done to it.