Transition and muscle aches.

It's been Festival of Home Improvement here.

Saturday, My Guy and I each ended up organizing our respective basements. It wasn't planned - it just happened that the moons of Jupiter aligned and it was Clean Up Your Damned Basement Day.

Sunday, we landscaped like we have never landscaped before. I showed up at his house with a car full of mulch and potting soil and hostas and plants galore. We ripped out a cruddy old planter, and then I went to town weeding and mulching and planting and hosing everything down. Basically, I was a landscaping diva while My Guy cursed home ownership while cleaning his gutters.

Did I mention it was 96 degrees and humid?

We were dying by the end of the day. Dying. So My Guy made us the dinner of champions: Kraft mac and cheese and purple Kool-Aid.

Seriously. It was beyond awesome.

But why the flurry of activity?

We've decided to put not one but both of our houses on the market right after Independence Day. Because we are insane. And the housing market scares us in a it-might-take-72-years-to-sell-these-houses sort of way.

When I got home last night after the landscaping death march, I found myself almost disappointed. Why do we own two houses? We have two, TWO houses to stage! Oh, for the love of Pete! Whoever Pete is!

But tonight, as I'm finally sanding and prepping the woodwork in my kitchen ... my kitchen that I remodeled three years ago and just lived with the chipped woodwork? Well, my heart is a bit heavier.

First of all, whoever painted the trim with the cheapo paint? You suck. I can't sand without the paint peeling off in cheapo strips. Buy the expensive paint - it is so worth the extra $10. So. Worth. It.

But also? My heart is a little funky because I'm so excited to be with My Guy. It's just that simple - I want to be with him. I want to live with him, even though he doesn't know the proper way to fold sheets or towels. I love him even though he dowsed my bag of gardening gear not once but twice yesterday with both water from the hose and the crap that comes out of gutters and smells like turtles.

But my house? I love this house. It's going to be hard to let go of this house. It's the only place I've ever lived where I had the ability to make it any way I wanted. I painted my closet pink, for Pete's sake (again - who the eff is Pete?). And buying a house was a huge accomplishment.

When I decided to leave Ex-Ex and his wicked ways, I had exactly $25.35 in my bank account. This is not an exaggeration. I was building my freelancing business and I was brokity broke, broke, broke. I moved into a slightly shady apartment that approved me because they checked my checking balance on exactly the right day, after the deposit but before the bills cleared.

Less than two years later, I bought a house. Because I could afford it. Because I was wildly successful in my freelancing career. And so, I left The Apartment of Shame behind for a house that I remodeled and tweaked and smudged with sage. My intent for this house was peace and prosperity.

And so it has been.

And so it shall be in the fab, new, yet-to-be-determined house that I will share with My Guy. And our (gulp) four dogs. Although Lil' Frankfurter is really more the size of a ferret.