To say that our lives have been somewhat upside down since we decided on this big life change is a huge understatement. Our house is in utter chaos, and it's all I can do to make myself pack, instead of hiding in bed with Dawson's Creek reruns, in a fruitless attempt at procrastination. Am I dreading our departure date? No. Am I super excited to leave? Absolutely. Am I in total denial about what is left to be done? Clearly.

This past weekend, I had lofty ambitions to clear out the green room, otherwise known as our office. Otherwise known as the room where we have dumped the "we're not sure what to do with this yet" stuff that we've collected as we've emptied other rooms. It's very simple to make yourself look organized if you have a place to dump all your crap which happens to have a door that closes. Open the door and you are treated to an array of old magazines, paid bills, art supplies, jigsaw puzzles, mountains of schoolbooks from both of us, photos waiting to be framed, random homeless wires and cables from various electronic things that we most likely no longer own...the word "mess" doesn't even begin to describe what I'm dealing with here. And when you're faced with such a dizzying array of crap, it's hard to know where to start.

Tomorrow, salvation arrives. My mother, in all of her label-making, expert-packing glory, flies in tomorrow afternoon to help with these final stages. As her plane descends, the clouds will part, sun rays will fall on us, and an angelic choir will sing. She'll set us straight in no time, I'm sure, but I'm not sure that Kurt is ready for what's about to hit.

The last time I experienced this phenomenon was in August of 2002, when her and I tackled my apartment, cleaning it out and packing it up for my move to Ottawa. Oh. My. God. It was really something. I hated every second of it, but when it was over, my entire existence had been reduced to a neat stack of carefully packed bins, each marked appropriately with labels such as "Kris - Rock Collection" or "Kris - Knick-Knacks" (it actually says this) or, my personal favorite: "Kris - High School Yearbooks, documents, ect." Facebook would LOVE what I have in that bin. What isn't stored in bins in their basement was shipped out to Ottawa with me, where, as I mentioned in a previous post, most of it remained until just a few weeks ago. In short, the packing whirlwind that is my mother is a force to be reckoned with. She is ruthless...and thank God for that, because I have a slight tendency to hoard, apparently. As evidenced by numerous useless, forgotten items strewn about our house.

One of the best aspects about the move is that we are going there with only the items that we actually need. It costs some pretty serious duty dollars to bring things in, so we're not going to be wasting money and bringing in things that we're not 100% positive we'll need and use while we're there. In fact, the only things that we don't have to pay to bring in are used clothes, books and golf clubs (how appropriate). Everything else gets a hefty duty tax stamped on it and we'll have to cough it up at the airport when we land. To reduce the sting, we have to pare way back, and that's actually going to feel pretty good.

They say that the state of your home is a reflection of the state of your life, and I definitely find that to be true. When we're in our normal state of meal-planning, grocery shopping and cleaning, life is generally stress free. It's just our routine, and we do it well. However, we currently have no schedule, we haven't bought groceries since July, I haven't cooked a meal since June, and we don't know where anything is. Worse, we don't have any motivation to restart our routines now that we're about to leave. It's definitely taking it's toll. It spirals outwards too - my normally somewhat organized workstation is a mess, I haven't been drinking my normal 3 litres of water each day, and I've actually chosen muffins for breakfast, which I would find gross otherwise.

In short - order is important to me. I like bringing my lunch to work, and knowing what we're making for dinner each night. One of the things I'm most looking forward to is settling into our new routine once we get our feet on the ground. It's going to be like the "new us", just a little warmer year-round and hopefully a lot more relaxed!