These are a few of our LEAST favourite things

We are in the single digits before we close this chapter and open the next, and that...kind of gives us the butterflies, honestly. We still have quite a lot to do. And the time we have left here feels both oppressively long (can we just be there already?!) and far too short (and ever shorter—how can we say goodbye?). 

Our house is getting echoier and echoier and I feel pressed to make every day be The Best Day Ever (although today we mostly stayed home because Phoebe was up all night complaining of a sore tummy and trying to make herself throw up...she did have a low-grade fever...and all the kids have had their run with this summer cold that is going around...so I'm sure she didn't feel fabulous, but it would have been nice if she had tried more sleeping and less gagging. She seems fine now though). 

Before Miriam left, we sat down to make a list of our favourite things and least favourite things about living here. Today I'll present the lows, which I'm not sure that I can necessarily rank in importance...so here they are in no particular order:

1. The traffic. You've probably heard things about Atlanta's traffic—bad things. All of it is true. The traffic here is pretty terrible. And I recently read an article that Atlanta no longer has a "rush hour" traffic pattern to speak of because it's all terrible, all the time now. Which is not super fun.
2. Flooding. Specifically the "in our basement" variety. Our basement flooded twice and both times were no bueno (no brainer?). 
3. General house woes. Keeping up a house is hard work. Enough said.
4. Flat tires. To add to the complaints about traffic, we have never lived anywhere with so much junk on the roads. We averaged one flat tire a year here, constantly running over nails and whatever else is on the roads. That doesn't seem uncommon here...but it feels uncommon compared to other places that we've lived.
5. THIS HILL. We live on a hill and it can be a doozy to walk up. When we first started going for walks we joked about how fit we were going to be. But after walking up that hill daily for approximately 2555 days (that's 7 years), we feel no closer to conquering that hill than the first day we climbed it. Every time we start feeling the burn we'll curse, "THIS HILL!!" It's fine. We've walked it approximately 2555 times and it never killed us, but it's just not always the first thing we want to have to do when we walk out the front door (and yet it is the first thing we have to do). 
6. COVID days. This, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. While there were aspects of this time period that we enjoyed, it's fairly universally acknowledged that this time was straight up not a great time.
7. Ward boundaries. They split our amazing ward mere weeks after we moved in and then peeled us off the stake and plopped us into a new one a few months later. So we were in three different units the first six months we lived here. It was rough and, honestly, our ward never quite recovered. It was on the struggle bus the entire time, just limping along. But now that we're moving (and taking about half the primary kids and half the youth with us) leadership is once again seriously considering adjusting the boundaries (at least, that is what we heard from a member of our stake presidency).
8. General malaise. Due to the ward being split apart and moved, we never really got welcomed into our ward (and were specifically told that everyone is new so they couldn't spend energy welcoming us in particular, when we mentioned to leadership that we just felt a little lost in the shuffle and that it might be nice if they explained to, like, the primary kids that our family had just moved in because all the kids seemed to know each other from school or previous wards, but our kids didn't know anyone...but...that never happened. Like our records didn't even get read in before the ward was split and rearranged...). And then COVID happened and church went remote about six months after we moved here (literally the week after we were put into the new stake). So we just felt new and unsettled and unfamiliar and isolated for...honestly?...two or three years. It was a rough go of things, and honestly it still really doesn't feel like we have lived here for seven years because we don't know the city very well or anything.
9. Bugs. There are just a lot of them here. We are always setting out sticky traps or bait traps for something or other. Ants. Cockroaches. Whatever. There's always an infestation of something going on. We try to keep a clean house (it's an ongoing battle) but I remember asking a dear friend in North Carolina (Lindsay Alder!) how she keeps ants out of her house because I was so beaten down by an ongoing ant problem in our then-house. She just looked at me and said serenely, "Oh, we don't!" You can treat an infestation (folks—the ants recently found an entry into a bag of brown sugar in our pantry and...let me tell you...they moved right on in...until we moved them out to the garbage can and set up bait traps for the rest of them) but they will keep on coming in. There is no way to have an entirely bug-free house (especially in the hot, muggy south). And then there's joro season...which we will thankfully miss this year.
10. Critters. These are bigger than bugs: The lizards in the basement. The possums in the garage. The squirrels in the attic. The constant worry about copperheads. The deer that eat everything in the garden. We are always scanning the road for deer—they're always popping up everywhere! The fawns are sweet, but they are a nuisance.

I think those are our top complaints about living here. I'm sure there are others, but really our list of complaints was pretty short (we only had seven things when we made the list together—I added things like bugs and stuff for the sake of coming up with a nice even number). 

Our list of favourite things is much longer (at least twice as long), so stay tuned!