(I should just define this as Conversation A and get it over with, but have you ever noticed that if you don’t call a friend (say) for a week, then suddenly you need a good reason that you haven’t called, and it had better be a good phone call and you don’t feel up to a Good Phone Call so you don’t call and then it needs to be An Even Better Phone Call — which you don’t feel up to so you don’t call — and then it’s been SO long you almost feel as if you need to send flowers or a singing telegram rather than just calling and saying Hey and the whole idea daunts you so fully that you still don’t call and all that time, you should have just called and said Hey. Well, yes. That’s how I’m feeling now. Ergo, Conversation A. So next time when I say “Conversation A,” you’ll know what I mean, kay?)

I have lost ten pounds — doctor scale certified (although I was in the doctor’s for something else altogether). This is the ten pounds I put on since I found out we were moving. This is the unhappiness ten pounds. The moving ten pounds. The “I feel like misery warmed over and cookies help, they do, even if only while they’re in my mouth” ten pounds.

Thing is, now that I’ve lost it (hooray!) I feel like it should be a sort of Hallmark Movie moment when I realize that I’m not that unhappy after all and that I’ve shed the depression of the transition and I’m ready to go forward into my new life, cookie-induced flab-free. I’m not getting that though. I’m still in the struggle. I’m just back to where I fit into my summer clothes again. So while it’s good, it’s not a Sign.

Life isn’t tidy like that. I sometimes wish it were, but it’s not so I just have to go forward which means still trying not to eat every slice of cake in the house (metaphorical cake — there is no cake in the house right now) and dealing with my moodiness in somewhat healthier ways. Like by drinking. (That’s a joke. Mostly.)

Now I just have to lose the ten pounds of second child baby-weight that I’ve been hoarding all these long years. And when THAT’s gone, I will need me a Hallmark moment, though for what I’m not quite sure.

And until then, there is laundry.