Settling in and Laundry Line Disaster!

First, let me start by saying that we're absolutely thrilled to be in our new house. Seriously, we love it and couldn't be happier. We are, however, experiencing some "first week after moving" woes that we had forgotten about because we haven't moved in so long. Just normal things like trying to cook dinner without knowing where the dishes are, trying to go back to work when you can't find the boxes that house your work clothes, trying to simply exist and maneuver in a box farm, that sort of thing. These problems are compounded by the fact that we're so far out of town, because we really need to budget our time, and haven't yet worked out how. So we came home last night after our first day back to work and before we even knew what hit us, it was bed time. Our first day looked something like this:

• up at 6:00, out by 7:00
• drive forever, arrive at work in the neighborhood of 8:30
• work until 5:30
• drive forever, through driving rain and wind, worrying about the laundry on the line
• arrive home in the neighborhood of 7:15
• get soaked opening and closing the gate
• get even more soaked picking up laundry that's scattered all over the yard
• get yet more soaked moving my rain-pummeled seedlings under cover
• change into dry clothes, feed and generally pay attention to bouncing-off-the-walls dogs
• tear every still-packed box in the kitchen apart looking for things with which to make dinner
• make and (finally) eat dinner
• wash dishes
• run the two loads of soaking wet clothes through another spin cycle, and hang inside to eventually dry
• take showers
• Oops - it's 11:00 now.

It just felt like a marathon. I'll be really happy when we settle in to a routine.

We've also had some pretty serious laundry misfortunes. With all the moving and working on the property, we've dirtied many, many clothes. I have a gargantuan pile of laundry staring at me. Hubby was kind enough to hang my two clotheslines on Monday, and I proceeded to wash. It felt great to be out in the yard hanging clothes on the line. It felt like home. Naturally, as soon as I had gotten the first load hung and the second washed, a storm rolled in. Hubby arrived home and helped me pull the clothes off the line, and we waited. After a short while, it appeared to have blown over, so we hung them out again - both loads this time. At this point I got really cocky and put in a third load. And the rain came again. It was getting late in the day by this time, and the wind had died down, so we decided to just leave them on the line overnight and they'd dry the next day (yesterday) when no rain was predicted. "No rain" then turned into zero-visibility, pouring rain and high winds. Thus, our laundry wound up all over the yard.

Our dryer is broken, by the way, in case you were going to ask.

Every day things will get a little bit smoother. And we're still on to take delivery of the chickens this weekend, so we're really excited about that. I really will post some pictures soon, but there's not much to look at yet except piles of boxes, so I'm trying to clear some of that out first.

Lastly, it seems that our dogs have discovered the cows that graze across the road. They've taken to standing up on the couch looking out the window at them. And...barking...at them. They stare and bark and growl and twitch and bark and run in circles. Those cows are blissfully unaware that there's a fat little ham hock of a dog just waiting to rip their faces off if they get any closer. It's really, REALLY funny.