Just an update on the moving sitch because I know you don’t all follow me on Twitter, and who goes back to an old post to look for edits? Not me! So it was kinda rude of me to expect you to do that. Sorry.

As it turns out, the landlord’s SIL did not get fired, and in fact, the new owner of the motel she works at is building her and her Family a whole new house.

I don’t know if this is a thing everywhere, but out here in the country, in Central NY, a lot of the motels have a big house where the owner or manager lives with their family, and then a separate building that has all the rooms. I’m not sure of all the details, so my understanding of it is fuzzy at best, but I guess there was an old house next to the motel she worked at, and the new owner started tearing it down. Instead of talking to the new owner to ask what was going on, she freaked out, and started looking for a new place to live. And when she couldn’t find one within her budget, she went to her sister and asked if they could move here.

Fast forward a few months, and she finally goes to talk to the new owner, and he tells her that they’ve torn down the old house because they’re building a modernized house for her and her family; one that will be better suited to her children (who both have degenerative eye disorders) and her 80-year-old mother-in-law.

So basically, EVERYONE freaked out for no reason. Them, the landlords, us.

They’ve all apologized profusely, and we’ve decided to just move on. Like, it’s shitty, what they put us through, but they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, and when it’s a choice between friends and family, most people would choose family. Doesn’t make it right. Doesn’t make it okay. But it does mean we need to be adults and forgive them.

Originally, when we were in the midst of me falling the fuck apart, and M being absolutely livid because someone did something that made me fall the fuck apart, we’d decided that if something were to change, and we were allowed to stay here, we were going to move anyway. Maybe not right away, but by next Spring, at least. Give ourselves some extra time to save money, so we weren’t stealing from Peter to pay Paul a security deposit.

Now that things have changed, and we’ve reached the point of being able to forgive, we’ve decided not to do that. We both really love it here. Like, we go outside to sit on the deck, and I get close to tears over how amazing this place is. We watch the animals, and listen to the birds, and marvel over the horses whinnying on the hill. M loves mowing the (half acre) lawn so much that, most of the time, he won’t let me help him, even when his back is bothering him.

And the wrap-around Flower Bed has been amazing therapy for me. There’s nothing I love more than going out to water and weed the lilies, and spiderwort, and rhododendrons, and hydrangeas, and all the plants that I haven’t been able to identify yet. It’s a really prolific bed full of summer flowers, and I can’t wait for them all to bloom.

When we moved in, last August, the back bed was completely overgrown. The landlord and his wife both have full-time jobs, and they’ve got small children. Besides that, he works on the family farm, and they’re major family people, so they do a lot with their relatives (from get-togethers, to working on their cars, to helping them with things they need done around their houses) and last year was particularly busy for them, so they just didn’t have time for it. The weeds were as tall as the deck, and the flowers were so choked out that I couldn’t tell what any of them were. And I was ecstatic. I know that sounds weird, but the idea of bringing the flower bed back to its former glory had me so excited.

Despite the fact that I still haven’t been able to get rid of all the weeds that were already rooted there (I’m getting close, though!), I’m loving it far more than I expected to. M says he expected me to love it just this much.

We’re working on mulching the whole bed so that weeding will be less work going forward. So far, we’re 9 “3 square feet” bags in, and we’ve got it just about halfway done. I thought it was going to take at least 30 bags, but now that everything is starting to reach its full potential, I think it’ll be more like 20-25. We’ll have the back bed finished this weekend, weather permitting. It only just stopped raining almost every day, and finally got warm a couple days ago, so we’ll see. Then we’ve just got one more side bed to do, and really, that doesn’t have to be done this year because it’s mostly hidden and, for whatever reason, doesn’t seem to be getting as many weeds as the back bed has. We’ve still got some car repairs that need done (an alignment and new tires, for sure), so that takes precedence. If we don’t do that side bed this year, we’ll definitely get it done next year just so everything is matchy-matchy.

I thought I’d killed the rhododendrons and hydrangeas, but they’re bouncing back quite nicely. And I found a huge bleeding heart under the deck, so I plan to move that next weekend before I mulch the back bed. I need to widen the bed a bit, I think, to put it where I want it, but that’s easy enough.

There are a lot of hostas in the front that I want to move, but that’s waiting till next year. There’s five on each side of the porch, a few with all green leaves and a few with green and white leaves. The green and white ones aren’t getting enough sun, so I might move them to the side bed. The hydrangeas there are getting too much sun, so the best place for them to go would be where the hostas are currently, but that might look weird with the rhododendrons in back.

I do understand the danger of me making plans for next year when this year, us living here was up in the air. I’m trying to be more optimistic because I let myself go straight to “it’s the end of the world,” when we heard we had to move. I kept asking my mom, over and over, what’s the point if every time you get some semblance of peace, shit explodes again? And that’s really not okay.

Now that we’re not facing impending doom (and some of our problems either have been solved, or are in the process of being solved), I feel like I learned a few things.

Like we’re way better off than we were. If we had to move, and we were given four months notice (like we were with this situation), we’d not only be okay, but we’d be able to find another house in the country, even if our car is broken. We didn’t have to test this theory, but we worked out our budget for what we expected to have to spend, and it would have been doable. When have we ever been able to say that?

And just because the entire world is spinning out of control, and our personal life is being savaged with emergencies that require money to fix, doesn’t mean the world is going to end. We’ll get through it. There’s no need to panic. What’s meant to be will find a way. I mean, I grew up in the south, and M grew up in New York, and we still managed to land right in each other’s paths, so obviously, that’s true.

Yeah, I’m pretty old for learning that lesson, but that’s what happens when you spend your adolescence drunk and high and so deep in depression that you can’t see past the end of your nose.

So we don’t have to move. And I’m so glad because this place is everything I’ve dreamed of, if one excuses the minor structural differences. I’m willing to look past them for all the other wonderful things.

I still don’t know what’s going on with this site. I still don’t want to write about kink. But once upon a time, back before anyone ever read me, I used to use this place as a journal, of sorts, and I might want to go back to that. (And god, don’t go back and read it, because holy shit, I was an asshole. I don’t think most of those things, anymore, and I’m no longer that much of a bitch, and I’ve been resisting the urge to just make everything before 2009 private.)

I’m still working on my mainstream thing, and I’ve picked out a domain name, but other things have been taking precedence, like the car, and the flower bed. And I realized that if I want to go totally mainstream, I’m going to have to use a different pen name. I had a hard enough time choosing this one, so you can imagine how well that’s going.

Anyway…that’s all I wanted to tell you, today. Thanks for reading. Hope your Monday isn’t sucking. Here’s some pictures of my garden. They’re not great. It was too sunny, and I was too shaky. ✌