So many changes...even for the bunny

Our family is undergoing a season of many changes right now.  We just moved out of our house into an apartment 1/3 the size of our home after storing entirely too much of our junk in various PODs and a storage building.  After we had purged and packed every room in the house and filled up the two PODS we had ordered to the brim, we were plum worn out. That's when we remembered that we had stuffed tons of old things into our "tiny" attic.  By the time my husband had pulled out everything from the attic, it filled up the entire third floor, and the movers were coming the next day.

Loading the first shell

At that point of utter frustration and exhaustion, I likened "stuff" to cancer.  It grows and grows, hidden from view, until it manifests itself in horrible ways after it's just too late to shrink it much.  We spent the next day hauling truckloads to the dump, but we still ended up needing a third storage unit.  When you consider how much most of the world owns, our excess is utterly shameful, and I was ready to torch it all.

Very last load

Some of the stuff in the attic were "keepsakes" Mom had kept for me all these years.  My parents are of the generation that kept everything, and with an attic the length of their ranch home, they had room for it. (Our next house will not have a usable attic at all which is the trend these days for our throwaway culture.) For example, when we were home for Father's Day, we mentioned that our daughter had outgrown her bike and needed a larger one.  My dad disappeared for about three minutes and returned with the bike I rode when I was her age. It was missing the brightly colored tassels and had faded, but the banana seat was as beautiful as the day I first rode her. 

Whenever my mom comes to visit, she usually brings a load of gifts for the kids and a few boxes for me as they gradually purge their attic.  I had forgotten about all those boxes, so during my frantic purging of our own attic I chuckled while glancing at old diaries, my prom corsages (yes, dead flowers she preserved all these years), high school graduation announcements, high school pom-poms from homecoming and so forth.  She also included a fold-out poster of John Stamos, my childhood crush, from those old pre-teen Bop magazines.

John Stamos poster from Bop Magazine (early 1980s)

The kids were shocked and amused to hear that I had a crush on a TV pop star, and I STRONGLY discouraged them from admiring anyone except God Himself, but they were at least relieved to see such a strong resemblance between John Stamos and their daddy when he and I first met.

My husband (circa 1991)

And at least John Stamos was modestly dressed in the poster compared to what some pin-up models wear these days.  Lawsie-me...what ever happened to modesty and decency?  And as one friend noted, when it comes to my fold-up poster, at least I "know when to hold 'em..when to fold him...when to walk away." ("The Gambler" written by Don Schlitz and recorded by American country music artist Kenny Rogers).

We finally made it into the apartment after more trials and tribulations than I could possibly describe in this blog post, but I will mention that the last hurdle in selling the house was the roof, the roof which only needed a few shingles replaced for purely cosmetic reasons according to the due diligence report signed by buyer and seller. However, when one roofing company falsely claimed the shingles were defective and part of a class-action law suit, the buyers insisted that that we replace the entire roof.  All these negotiations went down less than a week from closing, but if the roof really was defective, we wanted to do them right by paying to have it fixed with the hope that we could collect a small percentage back from the lawsuit pay out.   The day before closing, another roof estimator came out to get us a sample shingle for the lawsuit payout. When we actually crawled up on our roof (unlike the other two roofing representatives who only judged the roof from the ground, he immediately determined that these are not the shingles in the class action law suit but standard shingles easily purchased at Lowes.  He also offered to write a guarantee that the roof had many more years of life left.  So we will not be collecting any payout from lawsuit, and we are out much more cash than we ever expected when we signed the due diligence, and I wish they realtor had sent out the roofing company I requested initially, but at least the house is sold, and the buyers have a nice wad of extra cash in their pockets.  We no longer own a home, and better yet, a home no longer owns us! (Gift #337)


I wish I could say that the move to the apartment went smoothly, but it has been one headache after another. I won't go into that in this post, but I will say that were it not for the amazing support of our church friends who helped us load the PODS and my parents who lent us their truck and took our kids for a few days during the move, the move would have been much more disastrous.  We can't thank God enough for all that support. (Gift #338)

All these changes have affected our bunny, too, who had to be neutered for apartment living.  His swelling from the surgery finally went down so we were able to give him his first bath. He didn't like it much, but he was so cute in his towel and sat so peacefully in our daughter's lap as she worked on her Latin homework while his fur dried.  He's such a sweet pet. (Gift #339)

While we purged and packed, he enjoyed hopping into Easter baskets he found in my Goodwill pile.  We got him a new indoor cage, and though it is much smaller than his outside hutch, he really seems to like being inside where he can beg for food (more dramatically than any dog) whenever anyone walks by.   Once we got to the apartment, our daughter made him a leash using scrap felt, and old headband and a carabiner.  She takes him for walks around the tennis courts, creek, and pet play area many times each day.  A bunny on a leash just isn't something you see every day, so he has attracted lots of kids in the new community who have become new friends for our kids. (Gift #340)