Seeing as I'm awake anyway...

The End Of The World was quickly identified as the shampoo falling over in the shower, but at 3:30am the startled brain makes mistakes.  The adrenaline rush seems to have put paid to my night's sleep, so here I am instead trying to sum up five weeks in the new house, hereafter referred to simply as 'the house'. 
We have done either very little or a great deal, depending on who you ask. The walls and carpets remain dated, but new shelves are up, and pictures hung.  We are insinuating our presence rather than attempting a 'makeover'.  Heaven forbid.
The garden is receiving by far the most attention.  We have taken out huge quantities of brambles, and pruned bushes to discover lost paths and sunlight.  Pots filled with only soil and snails have been emptied, cleaned, stacked and in some cases already re-used.  The greenhouse has been swept and tidied, ready to accept the tomatoes, aubergines and peppers currently decorating several windowsills, and potatoes have been buried with great ceremony.  Small white labels are currently the only clues to the locations of potential carrots, peas and radishes.  A frankly ridiculous number of lamb's lettuce seeds have already germinated.  That's not all, but you begin to get the picture.
Ten years with only a shared asphalt yard and the ruins of an outside loo fostered more horticultural frustration than we realised, and of course there's now plenty of room for the kids to play.  We have so many plans for the garden I'm sure it will be impossible to do half of them, but we'll enjoy ourselves anyway, and I'll even attempt to blog about the bits I deem interesting.
I can hear rain.  In a couple of hours I'm going to have to go out in that and plant more potatoes.  And that's ok with me.

The move.

It went well, all things considered.  It came down to the wire with our mortgage offer ten days from expiry, and there were several times when we just knew it was going to fall through, we had to drop the price to keep things moving, and we really felt as though we were putting ourselves through too much to cope.  I had intended to write about the process here just to share the misery, but as the weeks dragged into months I just couldn't raise the enthusiasm.  And it's really no different from most people's experience, I expect, of moving house, albeit perhaps a little more drawn out than was really necessary.

But ultimately everything slid into place a little under a week ago, and after a truly forgettable few days of panic, I am lying on the sofa watching the snow melt and listening to the birds sing and the infant snore.  No traffic noise. No drunken midnight shouting.  No neighbour tuning engines at all hours.

Our lives can now carry on, only New & Improved, and we are already smiling more, and at each other.  Our eldest danced around her new room singing about how happy she was,  so it was all worth it.

And I have a shed.

A quick one while I'm away.

I have spent the last three days questioning my own intelligence.  I have been in Leeds attending an IT course which was notable for including almost nothing of interest while being supremely useful.
If you ever attend an ITIL v3 foundation course,  be prepared to feel mentally beaten, and then realise that somehow, despite the course being delivered in elvish so far as you can tell, you seem to understand the whole subject.
The exam results may shatter this illusion, but I think it went ok.