Summer Solstace = Insomnia

The longest day of the year has arrived in Scotland, and I was up at 4 AM to greet it.

When it’s this bright outside at four o’clock in the morning, it’s hard to sleep in. Especially since, in my sleeplessness, I used my bedside i-phone to check a comment left on my blog and noticed that I had misspelled Aberdeen in the blog heading. Suddenly the typo of ‘Abderdeen’ was all I could think about and I just had to get out of bed to correct it. Now it’s hard to believe that after 4 months of blogging, not one of you called this glaring mistake to my attention. You guys call yourselves my ‘friends’ but let me humiliate myself in front of THOUSANDS of readers (okay more like 15 readers, but who’s counting?). Just kidding, of course:)

Another thing that makes sleeping in difficult is how extremely warm it is in our bedroom. Warm? In Scotland? I know, I’m a bit confused too. I’ve heard that heat rises but there is seriously a 10 degree discrepancy between the upstairs and downstairs in our house. Downstairs is always slightly chilled, but when you turn the corner on the landing of the stairs, it becomes uncomfortably warm. We’ve been sleeping with the windows open and only a sheet on the bed, but it still makes for some tossing and turning throughout the night, and for the past two nights I’ve awoken at 4 AM to find that Jonathan was sleeping downstairs in our guest bedroom.

Maybe the fact that our Queen Sized bed-set didn’t fit up the stairs was a blessing in disguise. We’d probably make that our Master except for the fact that our closet is upstairs and I feel more comfortable sleeping next to my shoes. And once winter sets in, I’m sure we’ll be grateful to have a warm and snuggly spot to escape the cold.

Another thing that makes it hard to sleep in…Samson’s snoring. He followed me upstairs while I was getting ready for bed last night, and quickly fell asleep on the floor next to our bed. I didn’t have the heart to disturb his nap to take him downstairs to his kennel and decided to let him sleep in our room, just this once. He was just so quiet and peaceful... until I started to fall asleep. And then, I could have sworn there was a dragon in the room from the noises coming out of that child’s sinus cavity.  

So do you get the point? I’m slightly tired. Okay, I’m so tired that it physically hurts, but there is work to be done. In the battle between power nap or caffeine binge, caffeine wins out today.

An update on unpacking: I’m officially out of survival mode. I have cleared a pathway on the floor and all of the kitchen surfaces are cleared off.

Our bedroom, kitchen, and living room are livable and next up is organizing the bathrooms and starting to chip away at our junk room.

The most panicked I felt during the entire experience was while opening boxes and thinking ‘why on Earth did I find this important enough to bring it across the world with me?’. Though our house is spacious, our storage options are not, and frankly there just isn’t any room to continue to hold on to 164 coozies. Or 651 hangers.

Seriously? We have no closets and yet we apparently brought every single hanger we’ve ever owned. Why, oh why?

The clutter is making me anxious, so I’m ruthlessly going through boxes and chunking half of the content away. The only problem with this is that the City of Aberdeen only picks up our trash cans every other week, which means that off-loading this trash is going to take about 6 months. We’re also making piles of items to try to sell, recycle, and donate.

I just didn’t realize that I was such a junk collector. Honestly, I could be up for an episode of Hoarders. I’m trying to revert back to my state of mind pre-move and wondering what posessed me not to get rid of this stuff when I had the chance. There is just no room to be sentimental when you transition into Ex-pat living.

I’ve written this saying down on a post-it and carry it around with me from room to room, so that when I start to hesitate about throwing away a party cup from DZ’s 2004 Semi-Formal, I ruthlessly toss it the trash bag. It's getting cuthroat in here.

And when throwing half of my possessions away gets too exhausting, I look around and acknowledge that buried underneath the chaos, my home is full of useful and beautiful things.

This loot was literally 'buried' underneath about 20 bathing suits. Because I need 20 bathing suits in Scotland.

I’m energized by the fact that slowly, but surely, our house is beginning to resemble a home. A home occupied by a band of particularly messy pre-schoolers perhaps, but a home none the less.