High stress week

Judy and I at Manresa Castle in Port Townsend

Last Sunday, when I wrote my last post, I was not looking forward to this week, but it's been actually much more stressful than I anticipated. For one thing, I am almost five years older than I was the last time I moved, and while my blogging buddies reminded me that it's always a stressful time, I expected that I would breeze right through, the way I have in the past. The new places to live seemed more like an adventure than something to dread. Here's how the week has shaped up:

• Monday I went on a hard hike that lasted thirteen hours from the time I met my hiking friends until I returned home. It was hot and I found I could not go as far as I had hoped. I had to turn around before reaching the summit.
• The next day I was tired, but Judy and I had already made plans months ago to attend a Senior Center excursion to Port Townsend. It was brutal, as the bus was late and we waited almost two hours to board, and then two hours after the museum visits, lunch, and shopping to get the 50-person bus aboard the return ferry. I didn't get home until another twelve hours after I had left. I was already tired from the previous day's efforts.
• Then, the move scheduled to begin Wednesday was delayed as the new apartment was not cleaned, so we had to make do with packing in our old apartment, getting ready but not yet able to get the keys to the new place. It's just on the other side of the same apartment complex, but it's about a football field's length away. Lots of trudging to and fro.
• Finally we gained access and started the ordeal of taking personal items to the new place. Tomorrow two high school seniors will be here to do the heavy lifting. I've been washing windows and packing, packing. How does someone accumulate so much STUFF in just a few years?
• The internet stopped working this morning instead of tomorrow. I spent hours on the phone with Comcast trying to restore internet and cable for one more day here. The windows sparkle, but I'm so tired and frazzled that I begin one task and start another before it's finished.
• I've got one more day before I will turn over the keys to this place and am anxious that everything will work as advertised, and that this move is actually a step up. 

Today is Smart Guy's fiftieth anniversary from his first jump ever. He made a static line jump when he was twenty, from a Piper Cub no less, just him and his jumpmaster who was flying the plane. Fifty years ago today! And on September 3, Labor Day this year, it will be twenty-two years from the day I first made a skydive. Mine was a tandem jump. Our move will be accomplished on the day in between. It's a fortuitous juxtaposition, completely missed until now. My friend Trish would call it a synchronicity, and I guess it is. She said to keep my eyes out for them.

There's change in the air, I can feel the crispness in the mornings, and a few leaves are already beginning to turn and fall from the cherry tree in the front yard. Our view will  be different, but my garden will remain the same, and my apartment friends will also be around to help return some normalcy to my life.

I'm going to schedule this to post tomorrow morning, Sunday, although I'm writing it in the afternoon of Saturday when I have internet. Hopefully by next Sunday my life will be back to a semblance of normal. I wish all of my dear blogging friends a very safe and happy Labor Day, or Labour Day if you're in Canada!