Yesterday a lovely lady from Task Rabbit cleaned my bathroom. It has never been this clean before. It gleams. She is not available to come back again this week. Fair enough.

I still need to clean the kitchen: oven, fridge, and I really should do a solid wipe down of everything else. We will sweep the house again on Thursday. Outside I think the kids have gotten most of the little bits of trash picked up. (I hope.) I need to go get more mulch today for the plants. I think I’m about two hours of yard work away from done and I have a dude coming tomorrow. He can do the lifting work.

At this point in the garage we have one 5×5 black shelving unit with all of our food and toys and books on it. We have the dish cabinet with dishes and bathroom stuff and kitchen frou frou stuff. We have the bathroom metal shelf in the garage with computers on it. Computer desk. The armoire will be taken outside today because we haven’t been able to get someone to pick it up for money.

The room is looking pretty empty. I’m almost salivating about the extra floor space. Oh thank goodness we have more room to move around instead of standing in one place rotating.

The house goes on the market in 6 days. We hope to be out of here permanently in 52 days. That’s my goal.

I’m looking at marketing materials. I think we are going to have to start at $825,000 and pray that we get several bids to drive the price up. When I look at what is selling now in our neighborhood…. we missed the peak. Dangit. Oh well. Get out.

And really, if we don’t clean the fridge or the oven before the staging…. no one is taking a picture inside them on Friday.

We are basically at “go”.

That feels so good.

The kids had a moment of panic yesterday when I pointed out “Those cubbies you keep expanding into more and more of? All of that stuff has to fit in your backpack.” They did the cartoon eyes bugging out of the head thing,. “But that’s too much stuff!” Well… you know how I’ve been after you to cull for six months now…. it’s closer than it was!

I read about other slow travel families. One family travels with like five different gaming consoles. We will travel with kitchen supplies. We like to cook. It’s a big deal. Missing out on key cooking pieces sucks. We will have knives and some fat and some containers and portable silverware…. I’m dorky. But goodness I love these collapsible silicon containers. And bathroom stuff is still a lot. And I haven’t packed our daily use stuff! We have too much stuff. And we should all be using mouthwash 5x’s a day until we move. Good grief.

I’m feeling both hecka anxious and really happy. It’s 2019. It’s time for a new adventure. A huge adventure. The biggest adventure of my life.

In 2018 at least someone in my family went to: (domestically) Boulder Colorado, Los Angeles, Austin Texas, Santa Barbara, Nashville Tennessee, and (non-domestically) Japan, Mexico, and Malaysia. In 2019: Nashville again, Minneapolis, probably DC, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Scotland, possibly Netherlands, and England.

Dang.

Mexico sure was amazing. I want to see the other side of it. And the middle. We’ll be back.

Today I need to work on cleaning up the kitchen slowly. I need to hang out with my kids and snuggle. I need to exercise. I really should sort through the mass of screen shots I took right before midnight. Money last year…. ouch. We spent a lot. We aren’t broke but things are tight. I got us right up to the wire of selling the house. Frankly, I wouldn’t have let petty cash get so low if we weren’t selling. The latest remodel wiped me out. I’m feeling quite anxious and bad about myself. I allow us to go out to eat too much. But it helps, it really does.

Ugh. We live within our means. But I wish we were living within 50% of our means and I’m mad at me that we don’t. Because we always pick the more expensive higher quality choice. Ugh.

WHY DON’T YOU PEOPLE WANT TO LIVE ON MCDONALD’S. (my kids would)

Ugh.

But these are good problems to have. I’m not pressed. Just trying to figure out how to do better next year.