Adjusting to Home

We’ve been in our new home for almost a month now. I’ve chronicled a few of the major changes involved (mowing, for instance, which I did again on Sunday), but there have been lots of smaller adjustments to make, beyond those and beyond buying furniture and unpacking:

• Now that we have a two-car garage, in theory we can both park inside. In fact we’re still staging our stuff in one side of the garage while we figure out where to put it all. So since Debbi’s been parking on the street for five years I told her she could have the garage and I’d park in the driveway. This past weekend we emptied the storage unit into the other side of the garage, so now we’re both parking in the driveway, but that shouldn’t last too long, as we’ll get rid of the lot of the stuff from storage one way or the other.
• We’re still trying to remember which light switches control which lights. We have a lot of light circuits, so there’s a lot to remember.
• We have air conditioning now! And we’re having a heat wave this week! But we haven’t really figured out the thermostat yet, and haven’t gotten into the habit of turning it on. In Wisconsin I’d turn my A/C on for much of the summer, but that’s because it was humid in Wisconsin for much of the summer, and I had a much smaller place to cool, so it wasn’t a big deal. We only really need A/C here for a couple of weeks out of the year, so we’re not used to turning it on.

  I need to figure out how to program the A/C, and then I could leave it at (say) 80 during the day and have it kick in an hour before we get home. (The cats, weirdly, actually seek out the hot parts of the house when we have heat waves.)

• I’m still figuring out my routine when showering and dressing in the morning. Somehow everything (the bed, my dresser, the closet where our robes hang, the bathroom) is just far enough away from each other that I end up walking back and forth a lot. In the old place pretty much everything was right next to each other.
• For the first time in my life, my comic books are not in my bedroom. That’s still kind of weird to me.
• I’m still training myself to remember where things are in the kitchen. I do a bunch of unnecessary walking back and forth to get plates, glasses, silverware, etc. for various meals because I haven’t got the location of everything down intuitively.
• We now have litter boxes both upstairs and downstairs. So I’ve adjusted my habit to scoop the litter in the mornings rather than the evenings, so go up and down the stairs slightly less. But sometimes I forget to scoop, which means an extra trip upstairs when I do remember.

None of this stuff is major, it’s mostly just changing my habits or committing details to memory. It’s just taking some getting used to.

I do sometimes think of the old house a bit wistfully. It was a good house and I lived there for almost 10 years. It’s hard to let it go, even if the new one is much bigger and nicer.