Well, our house sold within a week. The new owners take possession on Sept. 21 — aka, ONE MONTH FROM TODAY. That’s the good news!

Or at least, it was. Back when we were leaving on Oct. 1.

The deal is, the government will pay for 10 days of living expenses before we leave for Italy. Hotel, food, dry cleaning, etc. It is intended to fill the gap if, like us, there is a period of time between when you have to vacate your current housing and when you actually leave the country.

We got our buyers to wait a little longer than they wanted specifically so the timing would line up perfectly with using our 10-day period before we left. Because we are so clever. (/sarcasmfont)

Except that now we may not be leaving until Oct. 24

Yeah.

I’ll save the whys (more accurately, WTF WHY WHY WHY WTF WHYs) of this for tomorrow, maybe. But the one-word answer is “incompetence.”

The good news is, we do have a plan. I tend to lose my shit a little bit when I don’t have a plan, but now that we’ve worked it out I feel like I can breathe again. Even thought it is a fairly shitty plan, which includes driving up to Chicago or Indianapolis to stay with relatives every weekend between Sept. 21 and Oct. 24 and staying in a Bloomington hotel (so Chris can go to work and Owen to school) during the week. Because did I mention that basically all the (decent) hotels in Bloomington are also already booked up on the weekends because of football? Whoops.

Still, it’s a plan. I’m clinging to some optimism (Chris would does refer to this as “delusion”) that we won’t actually be stuck here until Oct. 24, that people will come through and we’ll leave, if not on Oct. 1, sooner than the 24th. But if not, at least we know where we’ll have places to sleep this time NEXT MONTH.