As 2011 comes to an end

We are finally seeing some real progress on closing open - and thus stressful - threads in our life.

• MOVING!!! We're finally doing it. Finally.Tonight we bring the second carload of items to the house (the 2008 Prius holds a surprising amount! Between the fuel economy and the passenger and trunk space available, I absolutely would recommend this to any family). Tonight, we spend our first night in the new place. I'm pretty excited. There's still a lot to do. When you only have a couple of totes and boxes to work with, it can be difficult. Plus, the space we're moving into is a little smaller ... actually a lot smaller ... than our place in terms of space to put things so your laundry, dishes, etc aren't just all out on the tabletop.  But, it's a sign of our new start, our new beginning. We're *finally* shedding this house and most of the bad memories along with it and moving on. We will, until the bank finally sells the house and evicts us, be living between the two spaces, to make sure that we can keep an eye on this one. A vacant house begs for squatters and other such things so we're going to be switching back and forth between the houses to watch over the property and make sure we don't get blamed for something that is not our fault. Still, it's a step in the direction I want to be going in, and just in time for the new year.

• Dearest's eight month road to recovery is finally looking upward. We've made a new discovery. The surgery that he had in May probably had nothing to do with the real issue, with what was causing him so much pain. It did fix an issue that needed to be fixed (an extra foot of colon is a lot) but that issue wasn't what was hurting him. As it turns out, soy allergies run in his dad's side of the family. We had a chance on Christmas to talk to a cousin who has a severe allergy to soy - to the point of blacking out, passing out, etc - and most of her more mild symptoms line up with the ones he's been experiencing all this time. In addition to that, we did some mental backtracking and realized that his pain didn't really start until we started using our products A LOT - and almost all of our edible products contain soy. I'll be lobbying the company and the advocacy board to get more whey-based products available. Count in the fact that there's soy in a lot of normal stuff (like bread from the store, potato chips, ramen noodles, and many seasonings...just to list off a few) and we've basically been poisoning him without realizing it. But we're going to be working with that cousin to help get our diet to a regulated, safe-for-Dearest place and after that I'm sure that everything will be fine. That cousin, and her entire family, has worked really hard to make sure she can still eat normal foods without having to eat soy (they've searched and searched ingredients lists for hours on end to find what does and doesn't have soy or one of the chemical derivatives thereof) so I'm confident that we can trust them to guide us through this. It really is great to have family.

Those are the two major points. More end-of-year stuff to come later.