posts from my laptop

I wrote the following posts as we were in the process of moving, so they're a little behind. I'm just going to post both together, though, because I'd like to get back to regularly scheduled programming.

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[last Friday or Saturday perhaps]

My life is chaos right now. We are at the latter end of a move right now – the part where we live surrounded by mounds and mounds of boxes and slowly find permanent places for things to belong. If I could find the camera, I would take a picture of the craziness and share, but um…right, finding stuff isn’t exactly going to be a strong trait of mine right now.

In my determination to actually purge our lives of some of the clutter (note: I said “some”), I am delving into boxes that haven’t been opened in anywhere between two and five years. Among the things I’m letting go are our wedding ring pillow, a Trapper Keeper covered in bears and a whole slew of candles. Among the things I still can’t let go are a Port of Subs kid’s meal pail full of rubber bouncy balls, a bag of badges I never sewed onto my Girl Scouts sash and a “spacemaker” box that holds my comic cards and a comb with a tiny chocolate bar motif.

Also, apparently unpacking makes me uncontrollably giddy. I have just spent the last forty-five minutes giggling over love/stalker letters to JDA (I’ll share when the scanner is set up in this place), the Wedgie Rangers theme song and tags from pajamas that have long since disintegrated.

And now, as I add to this entry later, the giddiness is gone and the exhaustion sets in. I’m tired of moving. I’m tired of unpacking. I’m tired just thinking about going back to the house tomorrow to clean and throw the rest of our random belongings into bags and boxes only to bring them here and realize we have no place for them. I think it’s time to call it quits for the night, go upstairs, take a bath, read a magazine and get some rest.


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[a couple of days later -- Tuesday]

Here I am again, still unpacking. Verrry slooowly, our apartment is becoming less chaotic. Cardo is totally focused on the whole picture: we walk in and BAM!, chaos. However, a friend just gave me the advice to just take it one box at a time, to not focus on the humongous mess. Good advice, I think.

We’re hitting bumps here and there. The refrigerator here leaks and we’ll have to have that fixed, which will be difficult as we have food in there and the freezer is completely jam-packed (it’s that classic pull-one-item-out-and-everything-else-follows situation in there). I remember the first time we lived here our refrigerator broke and they had to replace it. That was a pain. Also, right now, the washing machine is being a butthead. Everything was fine until the spin cycle and now the agitator refuses to move. I really need to clean some laundry (well, some more, because there is clean, incredibly drenched laundry in the machine) and I have no idea how to fix it. I’ll have Cardo look at it when he gets home.

Pic, Baby K, Ms J and I went to storytime at the library today. The regular woman was not there (she was attending a junior high graduation for one of her daughters) and the much quieter librarian lead storytime. Pic was actually very well-behaved, which surprised me because the last time this woman lead storytime, Pic wanted to leave about three minutes in. She likes the noise and the movement of storytime. I’ve tried taking her to preschool storytime with Mr J, but there are no noisemakers, there is no music, there are only the books and she got bored very easily. Maybe I’ll try taking her to that one again soon and have her sit through one story and we’ll work our way up…we’ll see.

Anyhow, things are moving along. I’ve survived all of this chaos and I continue to do so (even though I had my doubts for a while). Pic is super excited to be here (I think she inherited the moving gene from me, which could work out as we’ll be moving plenty more times in the future). Together, she and I will drive Papí crazy with our incessant desire to always be somewhere new. It’s important to have goals in life.

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That's all folks. Later, I'll catch y'all up on aparment livin'.

Currently reading: back issues of Self magazine and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell