The movers claimed they could not get them in so they dumped them in the garage. One of them is a lovely sofa I have had for 30 years, currently recovered in gorgeous but brittle chintz cotton. I expect the worst.

So, all my efforts to the contrary, I am going to have put some of this in real storage. The killer here is that I took this dirty, crummy duplex house mostly for the storage. Go Figure.

The place was filthy, I have done what I could to clean it. The grease and dirt encrusted cabinet handles in the kitchen have been replaced (the $30 it cost me is well worth it). The dead bugs have all been cleaned out of the light fixtures and the walls/doorknobs scrubbed, the linoleum floors too (Linoleum, I have not had floors made of that in 28 years). And the bathrooms!!!

This feels like a huge step back in my life, like I have regressed. Meanwhile back at the ranch, my empty house is being shown, zero interest yet.

It is odd, I had 3 sales while I was off-line. None before and none since. Another Go Figure.

I am pretty much going to have to start marketing NewNeedlepoint.com from scratch.

What ever blog readership I had is long gone, my extended absence has not been good for this pitiful little blog but truthfully, I had nothing to say that anyone wanted to hear.

No one wants to hear how tired & sore I am.

One interesting tidbit however. For the last few years the only needlepoint stitching I had done was samples for my web store. When I stopped listing Bargello Needlepoint I no longer had to do that anymore (although I am told I should be stitching some of the canvases I sell, I don’t see the point since they are all one-of-a-kind).

So, I had begun to do my own neglected needlepoint again but now, my hands & arms are so sore & stiff I can’t hold the needle. I hope this is temporary but who knows, I can’t , at 60, do what I did at 40 and then snap right back and that is no joke.

Jack The Cat did wonderfully on this long 3 day car trip. He hates his kitty carrier and meowed the whole time he was in it but once we let him out, he sat between us on the console the whole time.

I think as long as he could feel us both there, he was ok, There or in one of our laps. He was great in the hotels too. He always used his cat box and ate well (we could not feed him before a ride, he got sick.

His only real protest was the last morning, Keith was at work and I had to put Jack in his kitty carrier one more time and take him to our new house and wait for the movers.

He took one look at the kitty carrier and disappeared under the bed (s). He would not come out. I ended up having to lift both queen size beds and stand the mattresses & box springs on their sides to get him.

Ok, the movers were a disaster, no surprise there. They stacked my boxes to the trailer’s roof with no regard to fragile markings. They arrived quite crushed and with much minor damage to my things.

Now on to Hotels. Keith stayed, the 10 days he was here before he came to get us, at a Hawthorne by Wyndham, it was OK.

Our first night on the road was at Country Inns & Suites, it was very nice, very clean and they were nice about Jack.

The second night we were in a Holiday Inn Express, not so clean but they allowed us to have Jack. Pet Friendly Hotels are not so easy to find.

Ok, we got here and stayed at the Host Hotel in Lancaster. It was a huge former Holiday Inn resort. It was so old that there was no elevator. To comply with the law they had a wheelchair lift. We had to hump all our bags & Jack and all of it up 3 steep flights of stairs. We stayed there, in the shabby, not redecorated since the 70′s room for 2 nights. On the third day a cockroach scampered across the bed.

I freaked and we moved out. We went across the street to the Red Roof Inn, the only other pets allowed place in the area. Huge Mistake. It was filthy, really grimy and sad. The rooms were so small that we got 2 rooms, one of each of us (they had no connecting doors). We would have killed each other shoved into one tiny filthy room together (with Jack, who stayed in my room).

The red roof in also had roaches, the toilets plugged up anytime you used them and my room had 1 working light fixture or lamp, the other 2 did not work.

The free breakfast room was filled with flies, buzzing you as you tried to eat their “free breakfast” garbage.

We had no place else to go so we stayed 2 nights until the movers came.

So, Pennsylvania is lovely, this area is mostly rural with enough industry to be affluent. The Amish are something, on Sunday their carriages are everywhere as they visit each other after church. The single men must drive open top carriages, only married men may drive a closed carriage. I did not see a woman driving anything.

The Mennonites are different, they dress colorfully, but from a different time. I see them in Walmart & Target and the supermarket, the women with their lovely little caps on.

I saw a group on Mennonite girls clustered around a computer at Target, they were giggling and seemed fascinated. I can’t imagine a like, today without internet but they obviously can & do.

There are many local Farmer’s Markets and lots of local produce, that is wonderful and we can get Poland Spring water from Maine here (not in Florida)

So, here I am. Here we go again.