Six weeks in Cohousng

Where is the time going??? My body feels like it's still last January, but the calendar tells me that it's Nov. 7 and that we moved into our new cohousing community exactly six weeks ago today. You'd never know it to look at all the boxes and piles around the floor...our neighbors put us to shame! Last night, though, I realized that being a procrastinator has its benefits: we've had six weeks for reality testing to truly know how much we really don't need and how much we can do with far less than what we had before. I'm speaking primarily of kitchenware. We moved here from the World's Greatest Kitchen, one I vowed never to leave...but here we are, and I really like the new one! The peninsula is actually larger than the island in the old house. The new one is a one-person kitchen, rather than the two-person space of before, but I can work on one side of the peninsula with George on the other, and it all works out.

I have never slept so well as I do now in our new house--and that's been every night! The cats are missing the fireplace, I think, but now they spend more time on the bed with us at night. We couldn't find Nina last night when we went to bed. She's a creature of habit, but last night she broke her mold and disappeared to places unknown. She has seldom ventured outside for more than 30 seconds, so I had no doubt that she was still in the house--but I looked everwhere--and no Nina. George turned over in bed around 5:00 a.m., and there she was, in her usual place next to me on the bed, in her usual sleep--totally unconcerned that she had added another gray hair to my head!