Moving into our new place is proving to be more of an uphill battle than I had anticipated. I just realized that this is the first time I’ve actually moved in two people at once, the me-and-kniedzw unit; I moved into the previous Castle N about five months before he did, so that one was done in two major stages. The difference of magnitude might account for some of the slowness.

Definitely London accounts for some of it, too. We spent two weeks moving our stuff; that ended a week before I left, but the last several days of that week went to trip preparation. Then I was gone for a week and a half. Then I came back and was mostly useless for a few days. Two weeks, two and a half, more or less down the drain as far as moving in was concerned. The result is that there are still boxes unpacked, objects without a home.

But we’re getting there, mostly by dint of me tackling stuff in easy stages rather than trying to finish it all at once. I’ve hung at least two objets d’art a day for the last several days, sometimes more; it turns out we have a lot more than I realized. (With the footnote that “objets d’art” in this case means both pictures and swords.) Plus several pictures that I will be getting framed in the near future, that we’ve never actually hung before. The house is starting to look civilized, though it isn’t totally there yet.

But between that, re-reading the Harry Potter series in prep for the last one, re-reading the Lymond Chronicles for my book-blogging (which, yes, I’m behind on), and researching and writing Midnight Never Come . . . that pretty much eats every day. It isn’t a bad life, as such things go, but at times it feels like a very slow-moving one, with not as much in the way of dramatic progress as I would like.