Emergency Shoes

This weekend was filled with the joy of moving. Oh, you know that joy. Unless you are still living at your birth home in your little kid bed (like we are at my in-laws now…), you have at some point moved (Heck, they didn’t buy this house till he was 8, so even he has not fully regressed!). And you are aware of the general bliss that this is… not. So you can imagine what a fun weekend we had sending all our furniture to storage, packing up everything, finally fixing all those annoying little things we’d been meaning to fix for years and now only fix for the tenants (man, it could have been so nice for us there…) and then trying to find space for everything in storage / at my in-laws between taking phone calls from the realtor that no, she has NOT heard back from the listing agent / selling bank / title company yet and she doesn’t think this looks good. I thought the tenants might have to pry the keys from my cold dead hands…

But we somehow did it. On Friday when my husband looked in my closet at all that STILL needed to make it over to his parents b/c I’d forgotten to pack my shoes and starting referring to me as Imelda Marcos and asked me what else I was hiding, we still managed to stay married. I looked at him and said – you’ve been married to me for 3 years – why are you surprised I have so many shoes? He told me he wasn’t surprised I had so many shoes – it was that I had so many emergency shoes. He understood that I would certainly have several pairs – just not double digits! Now I have to note – I am definitely pleased that my husband is not only embracing the concept of ‘emergency shoes,’ but that he also fully realizes that there would be multiple pairs of them. But this mess was not entirely my fault. You see I’d realized earlier in the week that I’d held out too many clothes. This was due to a combination of stress / pushing forward / doing multiple things, but mostly because I was trying to sort through and donate/throw out a lot of clothes rather than just store them. So storing them was like one step up from donating – an admission that I didn’t really need them and possible should be throwing them out. Well that and the fact that I have no idea how long we’ll be at our “temporary” residence. I should hang on to my summer clothes as it’s still warm and we would like to take a vacation sometime. Then I definitely need my fall clothes as it’s getting to be fall soon. Do I need winter clothes too? And is this sweater really winter or fall…? You see how this goes? Anyway, I’d wound up with a lot of clothes left. So earlier in the week, I’d mentioned I could sort out more for storage and my husband had said – NO! We have no more room in storage. Nothing more can go to storage! So I’d left them. Which brings us to Friday and the emergency shoes situation.

Luckily my emergency shoes were overshadowed by a different ‘emergency.’ Just for old times sake, our condo decided to have one last water based gaffe for us before we left. Water was leaking through a fixture in our front hall. My husband had noticed it early in the week and contacted management, but they didn’t send someone over till Thursday. By this point, we were getting our backs to the wall – the tenants were moving in next week. They needed to come fix this right away! So my husband offered to go buy the supplies at Home Depot for them (to be reimbursed) so they could fix it. He was at the store when they called to say the insulation he was buying wouldn’t work, but they’d take care of it all tomorrow morning. Friday afternoon, we still hadn’t seen anyone. So my very ticked off spouse headed over to the office around 3 where the building manager said – well, I was off, so I didn’t know about it till yesterday. Oooh… bad move, building manager. My husband is a reasonable man, but what ticks him off more than anything is someone who wimps out and won’t take responsibility for their stuff. He looked at the guy (not in the eye, as the manager was now refusing to meet his eyes) and said – look, it’s not my fault you were off gallivanting (yeah, I think he might have really said gallivanting – like 1943) and having fun this week, but the rest of us were working and this needs to be done! To be fair, the building manager deserves a vacation as much as anyone else, so he’s allowed to go off and ‘gallivant’ all he wants. But he is supposed to leave someone in charge and things aren’t supposed to come to a standstill. The interchange did NOT go well, but he called my husband a little while later to say someone will be there and it will get fixed today.

Well, 5:30 comes and it’s not fixed yet. As we know the office closes at 5, this is not good. Not for anyone – not for my husband’s blood pressure, not for the building manager come Tuesday morning (my husband’s next weekday off), not for anyone… He’s totally steamed now – when there’s a knock on the door and the repairman is there to fix it. My appeased husband sits down and looks at me and says – you know, you just let yourself get too upset about these things, honey. You’re going to give yourself a stroke getting upset when clearly it’s getting done now. He looks at my mother who is there and says – I don’t know why she lets herself get so riled up. Ha! Why am I not allowed to drink?