I mentioned this before but I’ve been incredibly busy for something like 2 months now.

Over the past weekend, though, I’ve finally –finally– finished up the last of the things that have kept me so damn busy.

It started with a trip to Texas to deal with some issues regarding my eldest daughter and her car. She moved there a while before COVID-19 truly hit and the car she took was under my name. I needed to transfer the title to her name and get a new Texas license plate issued to the car but the wonderful pandemic pretty much halted all that for a year’s time.

It was difficult bordering on impossible to get to a title agency (for a while, one had to do appointments via the internet and months in advance) and even when I made my trip there close to two months ago I was unsure if I’d just made that trip for nothing… that’s how unsure I was as to whether I could get this done.

This is something about me that is bothersome: I worry. A lot. When I have something hanging over me, like getting the car issues settled, it gnaws at me and it was gnawing at me for a very long time.

Luckily, we figured out the tag/title quite literally the day I flew to Texas, though it might not have happened had I not asked the DMV people -who were not taking walk-ins!- if there was some place I could go that didn’t need appointments to get what I needed done.

The guy -so very unhelpful- first told me he couldn’t help me. I needed an appointment to get what I needed done through them and that appointment would be over the internet and, you guessed it, the first opening was well past when I would be gone.

The idea of wasting my time and money flying to Texas, and having to do this all over yet again to try to resolve these issues was like having a 100 pound weight on my shoulders.

So I told the guy my situation and practically begged him to tell me if there was some kind of alternate way to do this which did not involve getting some appointment over the internet for a month plus down the road.

And the guy, perhaps feeling a little sympathy, told me about a tag/title agency -which was pretty far away and which I didn’t know about- that allowed walk ups.

My head just about burst. I alternately wanted to profusely thank the DMV man while also wanting to strangle him.

Why couldn’t he just say this to begin with?! Why did I have to plead to get some alternate means to get what needed to be done?

Anyway, we resolved the issue and I got to enjoy the time with my daughter (only 3 days or so) before returning home.

The second big thing on my head was my other daughter’s apartment in Jacksonville.

With the lease set to expire this month and her formal studies done at college (though it was unnecessary for her to be up there because courses were given online this past year), we had to pack up the apartment, clean it up, and turn in the keys.

She lived there for some 4 years and had accumulated a lot of stuff.

It took us some 4 trips over the past month plus and immediately after taking care of the car issue. The last trip was done this past weekend and during all this time we slowly got everything, including furniture, beds, bedding, clothing, books, etc. etc. etc. out of there.

Yeah, taking care of this was weighing on my head as well.

We drove up there this past Friday -a nearly 5 hour trip by car- and were lucky to just miss the worst of the rush hour traffic heading north.

When we got up there we got some food and got to the apartment, which had almost no furniture at all left and plenty of cleaning material and a vacuum cleaner/Swiffer mop/broom/cleaning liquids.

The wife and I -my youngest daughter, who used the apartment, was unable to come on this trip and help us out as she is now doing her internship and had a session on Saturday- spent that day finishing the apartment off, cleaning it while grabbing what little was left there and transferring it to our car.

By around 4 PM, with the front office closing at 5 PM (deadlines…! More pressure!) we got it all done and turned the key in. Luckily for us, we checked the front office hours and realized they weren’t open on Sunday so we had to finish everything off on Saturday.

We then spent a lovely 5 or so hours driving back home but were content with the knowledge that we were done.

I slept so damn heavily Saturday night and last night and today, Monday, I realize that next weekend, the first weekend in a very, very long time, I won’t have to do anything.

It’s a beautiful thing.