We moved recently for the second time in three months.

That in itself is enough to cause most people to jump out a fifth story window.  But since this house is only one story, I’m having to make do with simply pulling my hair out.

Moving day itself is actually pretty much fun, relatively speaking.  We women love seeing how the furniture is gonna look in our new house, and we love setting up our new nest.

But that’s the only part that’s remotely close to fun.  We’ve been here a week and still don’t have the phones or internet service straight.  There are television cables running throughout the house because we’re still waiting on the guy to run the wires through the attic.  Boxes are still everywhere.  My son’s drum set is in a million pieces on what’s left of the floor space in his room.

But still, that’s not the worst part.

I was smart and moved the whole kitchen ahead of time, because I’ve done this enough times to remember gazing at the twenty-something kitchen boxes on moving night and trying to find a fork or a glass.  Yes, we can eat.  I don’t feel like cooking, of course, but if I DID cook, we could eat.

But I forgot something.

I forgot how utterly gross it is to move attic stuff and how moving the garage stuff is even worse.  If you wait and do it last, it’s even harder.  I REALLY don’t want to deal with that stuff, but I gotta. 

We had big plans to get it all moved the day after the big move, but … you guessed it … it’s still not done.  We were busy unpacking what we already had at the new house, and didn’t have room for all that stuff anyway.  So a few days passed, and we decided to hire someone to move it for us.

I guess nobody likes doing it, because the guy we thought we had hired won’t return our calls.  It’s like he looks at caller ID and screams, “NOOO!! It’s the people with GARAGE STUFF!!!  I’d rather DIE!!!

But, that’s still not the worst part of moving.  The worst part … are you ready for this? … is deciding what to do with the dead animals your husband has had stuffed over the years.

A husband, of course, feels these deer, ducks, or polar bears should be the focal point of the house.  The woman keeps trying to lose them.  I had managed to get our house down to just photos … of deer, geese, ducks … that were easier to fit into the scheme of things here.  But then he caught this great big fish and before I knew it, he had it stuffed and it was on my wall.

This fish is his current pride and joy.  On moving day, as everything else was being chunked into the back of the pickup, the fish rode on my lap for the cross-town trip.  My husband kept looking nervously over at me, worried that I might break a fin or something.

It will have a place of honor on our wall until I can figure out something else.  (This is why women agree to add on a game room or an office … it’s really not the space they want, but a place to put all the dead animals.) 

We were at a restaurant the other night and they had a BUNCH of stuffed fish all over their walls.  I wondered out loud where they got all of them.  My husband, the naïve person that he is, said they probably got them from taxidermists … from people who had never picked up their fish.

Not a chance.  They got them from wives.