Moving again

I am once again packing up boxes. This time it’s easier: much less stuff, and all of it’s going, except for the things that were in the apartment when we got here. Tomorrow afternoon a lovely man with a van is coming to load & move the boxes. Tuesday night we’ll be in! Then I can get settled in the new place, unpack all the boxes, see my stuff that I haven’t seen in 3+ months.

NOTE: the phone & Internet lines are not yet turned on in the new place. It may be a few days before I am back in touch.

If you have a few minutes and a high-speed connection, check out the new place: Ungererstrasse 74 Note that the pictures make it look bigger than it is, but it is a lovely old building with high ceilings.

The apartment won’t look that lovely with us in it; we spent time Saturday at IKEA buying storage furniture – shelves for the hall, a butcher block table for the kitchen, etc. I hope to have the place looking similar to the pics within a month of us landing there, it will take some time to figure out how to put everything away. For example, the lovely roll-front piece in the living room is stuffed full of bedding! We laughed – thought it would be electric components and a stereo system. So we’ll put the bedding in boxes under the beds and free up those shelves for books.

I’ve also heard from brother Greg, our parents are settling in to their new place too. A visiting nurse had mentioned a place to Dad 3 weeks ago, they went and saw it a couple weeks ago and everyone liked it. So last week Greg & Andrea moved the folks in. Over the weekend, they got furniture from their house and brought it over to the place – it’s big, 900 square feet which is as big as the ground floor of the folk’s house. So lots of their familiar things fit.

One of the hardest things about this transition for my folks is that they feel they were forced into it. In reality, they were having a harder time keeping up with the day-to-day chores and spending all their waking hours clothing, caring for & feeding themselves – they are just moving that slowly. If Dad hadn’t landed in the hospital, they would have eventually been found out. But it might have been an even worse circumstance. For example, Mom has put on some weight as she’s getting 3 meals a day, and the aides check on that. (Mom often insists that she has no need of dinner – but if it’s put in front of her, she eats.) I talked with Greg last night to catch up; he said that it’s clear that Mom is done with cooking. The folk’s new place has a kitchenette, but other than having drinks in the fridge and snacks, we think the folks won’t really use it.

So, lesson learned is to really think about where you want to be if you get old and slow down. Check on places well before you have to go anywhere – because it has been extremely upsetting and disorienting for the folks to be whisked into a place, and then move to another one in the space of 6 weeks. And they are often a bit cranky about it. Not how you want to be when someone else is caring for you – charm is the key to the best service and someone making exceptions, say, for someone with very bad memory problems (Mom) staying in a non-memory care unit (with Dad) as long as possible.

Logan was in Sweden last week – Stockholm. He’ll probably go back in mid-September, and I’ll go with him then. On one of their projects, Saab is the prime contractor & they’re doing testing at their site in Stockholm. I can’t wait – I visited Stockholm for 2 ½ days in January years ago and I look forward to seeing it in more summer weather. They actually have summer there, as opposed to Germany, where it’s been 60 – 70 degrees. Overcast & rainy for several days a week all summer so far. The leaves are changing color already.

Hope to be back on-line soon! Enjoy your weeks, wherever you are.