Sunday, June 22, 2008

Oh, so many things to do!

We got our official transfer notice on June 12. Since then we are getting more information and Craig has been talking to more people from Iqaluit.

There are so many things to do. We have to do a sealift order, sell our house, go through all our stuff and get rid of all the junk, sell the stuff that isn't going straight to the dump, stay sane....

We contacted Marche Turenne, which is where we were told to do our sealift order through. They emailed us their catalogue right away, which was great. Not quite what we expected, though. We were imagining pictures and descriptions. Instead, we got a spreadsheet - with 8689 lines of items we can order, with cryptic descriptions like "PC BM BAR FIG L/F WHOLE WHEAT". After looking at a couple of thousand of these items you can tell instantly that it means "President's Choice Blue Menu Fig Bars, Low Fat, Whole Wheat" - not so much when you first start. And there are different brands with different sizes to differentiate; do you want three 1.5 kg blocks of cream cheese, or twenty-four 250g blocks? The bigger ones are cheaper... and it goes on and on like that until your eyes are crossed and you can't remember whether you marked down toilet paper after comparing brands or not. And how much do you need for a year, anyway?

In other news, we listed our house yesterday. Our agent came and took pictures. Our bedroom looks like crap. I knew it was bad, but once you see it on the internet, you think "Come back today, it looks so much better with nice sheets and properly made bed!" So the sign went up on the front lawn yesterday morning, and it went up on MLS today. And this evening at about 6:15, Jodie called to say "I know you said that you wanted quite a bit of notice before showing the house, and that you'd rather do it in the morning, but how does tonight work for you?" After running things through my head like "All the sheets are in the washing machine, the kids' toy room is a disaster, the laundry room still has everything dumped in it from taking pictures; on the up side, I did clean the bathroom last night" I said it was okay. And we made it. And when we came back, I was shocked at how nice the house looked. In fact Liam walked through and said how clean our house was. Poor kid, you'd think he lived in a disaster zone normally. Hey, it's not that bad!! I guess all went well with showing the house; Jodie said they would have liked 8 foot ceilings in the basement. I guess now we just wait and see.

While I was madly trying to get the house ready, my darling children amused themselves. First, Logan ran up to me covered in lines of ink. When asked, Liam explained (with matching stripes on his face) that they wanted to look like tigers. As Logan is only 18 months old, I don't think this was his idea. However, they were cute and the ink was coming with us, so we just moved on. In fact, I took the time to take some video. It wasn't quite so charming, however, when I discovered Logan with an open tube of yellow finger paint. After discovering that it also was only on him, my heart started beating again. I really had better things to do then clean the carpets/walls/linens. We made it out of the house just in time, ink and all!

Now we just have to maintain what we've done, and improve on the rest of our messy stuff!