I’ve been on vacation for a few days here (glorious!) but there is a ton to do. I have to say: you can get a lot more done without having to work!

I did spent a little time this morning responding to emails, but mostly I haven’t even had to do that. And since my lesson scheduling is fairly automated, I don’t need to worry about sending out reminders when lessons start up again: the program will take care of that. (Though I did send a fair amount of reminders about vacation…maybe they were unnecessary, but I had gotten a lot of questions, so things aren’t as automated as I’d like!)

In any case, I’ve packed a fair amount of boxes. We close on the new house next week, and while we aren’t moving immediately (getting some things done on the house first, painting inside and a few other small things) I realized we should move some boxes. I was getting overwhelmed figuring out HOW to pack, as in, the house is crowded here already and how would we pack and where would we put the boxes? And it occurred to me, pack some, and take those boxes to the new house and put them out of the way, and then we will have room in the house to continue packing. So that’s the current plan, to pack as much as we can now with stuff we don’t need for at least a month or maybe more, and then make more room to continue packing. Ultimately we are hiring movers (I am really hoping to get that date set soon or our options will be more limited) but we are still trying to figure out if we are getting something done with the floors, and we now have to wait until we close to get any more quotes.

Sigh. I would love to just have it figured out, but I think it’ll be fine. We can be flexible with our moving dates and February isn’t a prime moving time so the companies shouldn’t be super booked up. I’m assuming it’ll be in February.

I’ve also been working on picking paint colors, and I think we have our decisions made, at least as far as we need to be now–the next step is putting some samples on the walls to see in the space, and that will also have to wait.

Anyway, home buying is exciting but stressful! And January isn’t totally empty of work: I start back Thursday with some teaching and sort of ease into things: first a makeup week so not everybody is coming, then a full week and college starts up too. There are a couple of chamber music concerts coming up in the next few months (St Louis Chamber Soloists and Perseid Quartet) and I’ve been easing back into practicing as well.

I used to get email notifications of comments on this blog, but haven’t been lately, so if you’ve been commenting I’m sorry I haven’t been responding! One question awhile back had been about the catio and if we would have a catio in the new house, and the answer is: maybe! We’d love to but haven’t figured that out yet. There is also a sun room there so probably in nice weather we can open up the windows and the cats will really enjoy that, though not a specific space only for them.