I can tell in advance, this is going to be a several-part effort. Just thinking about the past week or so makes me tired and a bit loopy. More so than usual, that is.

Let's see...

When we last heard from our intrepid heroine (that would be me), I had just gotten back from a day trip to New York to visit my great-grandmother. That was Friday.

Saturday dawned hazy and hot and humid and miserable. 95 degrees with a dewpoint of 106, give or take. We weren't actually moving our stuff until Monday, but we had to get rid of our fridge and stove, and in order to get them out we had to move other stuff, AND since we were only looking to hire movers to load our U-Haul rather than paying them to drive it to the new house, too, we got dropped for higher-paying customers two weeks before the move. ("Um. Oh. Sorry. We, um, must not have written that down right. Can you move on the 23rd?" "No." "Oh. Um. Oh. Sorry.") So we tried to get as much done in advance as possible. My husband spent most of the day moving stuff from the house into the garage, for easier moving on Monday, and by this point I can't even remember what I did all day. I'd guess that I did a lot of sitting on the couch, eating bon-bons and watching soap operas, except that by that point we had no fridge to keep my bon-bons cold and no cable to keep my brain numb, so that can't be it.

By the evening, we were ready to take out the fridge. Not mob-style, though in retrospect that might have been appropriate. Instead, we wanted to move it from the kitchen out onto the deck, so that the guy who was buying it the next morning wouldn't have to vault over boxes and babies to get to it. Turns out, it takes a certain minimum level of testosterone to move a fridge, and I don't quite meet that requirement. So we asked our neighbor to come over and help - he's the kind of guy who needs tools to open his toolbox, just to counteract all of the manly, machine-intensive fluids coursing through his body. He and Willem made the appropriate grunts and scrapes, and got it out. He then trudged out into the dark and manly night.

Leaving us with a constant drip under the sink from where the icemaker had been. No big deal, right? Just clamp it off, right? HAH! Maybe in YOUR house. In MY house, my husband has this weird thing with plumbing - he is compelled to try and fix it ("How hard can it be?") and he is completely unable to do magical plumbing-related things. There were several occasions in the past in which Willem would reduce the kitchen sink down to individual drain molecules, and then we'd shut off the water, and the next day he'd go to work and I'd call for help. The plumber for the old house had our address preprogrammed into his little car-GPS thing.

So, there was this little drip. Not a big thing, maybe a gallon overnight, but not the kind of thing you want to leave for new owners, right? (WRONG!!! In hindsight, I wish we'd hired vandals to flood the entire basement after we moved out!! But by this point, I hadn't reached my current level of hostility yet.) So we got to overuse technology for the evening - I was down in the basement with the cordless house phone, Willem was in the kitchen with the cell phone, and we had conversations that went like this:
ME: Okay, I'm in the boiler room.
HIM: Okay. Turn on the water supply.
ME: There it goes.
HIM: TURN IT OFF, TURN IT OFF! Mother of God, where is all this water coming from?!?

We did end up fixing it, but not without several such conversations. Great fun, that was.

It's also embarrassing to admit how many times I tried to rinse off my toothbrush that night - even though I KNEW the water was turned off, AND I had a bottle of water IN MY OTHER HAND. I had to awkwardly swing the bottled water off to one side in order to reach the faucet, and I still tried three times to turn on the water.

On one of my husband's plumbing-related trips to Home Depot that evening, I decided to try and be useful by taking the downstairs door off its hinges so that we could get our full-sized freezer outside to begin defrosting before the move. Pinched my left index finger to the point where I believe I was swearing, not only in several languages, but in alternate universes.

Later, I literally collapsed on the front lawn in hopeless giggles after watching my husband dance with said freezer. We had a sharply sloped driveway, so he was uphill from the freezer, sort of rocking and swinging it up to the lawn. I did my part by following behind and emitting a series of hysterical "Oh my's" and "Dear Lord's" and generally behaving like an idiot. A useless idiot, at that. At one point, he came within about an inch of smashing off my car's side mirror with it. The thought of that particular insurance claim struck me as even funnier than the sight of my husband swing-dancing with a major appliance.

We let the kids watch far too much television during the whole weekend, which succeeded in letting me get a bit more done around the house. We discovered that Jacob loves Sesame Street but is TERRIFIED of the Yippers.

Similar stuff on Sunday, more idiocy and stress and heat and humidity. We had a neighbor stop by because he thought we were having one serious mother of a yard sale - it took a lot to convince him otherwise, and he did end up buying our baby cradle.

The real fun happened on Monday. But it's late and this is getting long, so, for now....