Congratulations! Here's a punch in the stomach

Yesterday, I came home from picking up Pebbles to Man, who greeted me with the news that our approximate separation date would be March 28.

What???  You mean that we have to move out of here within two weeks so we can go find a house only to get cut off with no paycheck until May, with no job and no house lined up yet????

Yeah, something like that.

So I started to furiously clean the stove, prime some walls, and apply spackle to corners that have chipped.  Man came home from a recon mission to the the transportation office and the human resources office to find that when they told him his date that they were flippin' looking at the wrong paperwork. 

So I swallowed my heartburn and cleaned at only a slightly slower pace, because we still have to be out of here by mid-March at the latest.  We get a lovely benefit called terminal leave, which is the leave Man's allowed to take to look for a job/house out in his home of origin (home of origin is how the military knows where to send you when you get out of the military, and it's how the IRS knows how to tax you.  State income tax on military members is based on home of origin, which is why you've never known why so many soldiers "come from" states with no income tax, nudgenudgewinkwink).  He also gets a block of time called Permissive TDY, or an opportunity to travel with the same goal as terminal leave.  It's a way of getting him some time out in the real world to land on his feet while still drawing a paycheck for a short while.

I have to say that, despite knowing that the other shoe would drop for the last year, it came as a shock.  We were told last November that the whole process would take three months.  Obviously, there was a miscalculation.  Taking school in the spring was a risk, because we thought were might have to move soon.  Taking school in the fall was even more of a risk, and I prayed that we'd be in the area at least until mid-December so I could take my finals and dash.  Then we were told that we would have to move in mid-January.  Now, mid-March actually has some credit since that's what's written on the orders packet.  All they have left to do is calculate his actual retirement pay, how much Tricare is going to cost us (military health coverage), and get him outprocessed from post.

We have learned that they definitely will move us if we ask them to.  And I'm going to ask them to.  I don't want to pack and lift my house any more than I have to.  We've given up on buying at the moment so we know that after we do buy we'll have at least one more move to do before we throw out our strap clamps, old blankets, and plastic grocery bags (cheap packing material).  But my mom has suggested that we keep everything as boxed up as possible if we're only going to rent for a year.  Which might sound like a long time, but it truly isn't. 

It's still a complicated situation.  No job, no house (those are the two over which I'm all but obsessing, because it leads to...) no idea where to put the kids in school after we get there, no real understanding of the layout of the city, no knowing where to shop for groceries in an affordable manner, and no way of knowing how long this situation will persist.  Anywhere we move, it'll be stepping off of a cliff yet again and I'm getting dizzy from all of this cliff diving over the past ten years.