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Today was mostly spent putting things into boxes, moving boxes around, and throwing out old boxes. I am sick of boxes.
I'm also reaching that stage of moving where you begin to fantasize about just torching the whole lot, or abandoning it to whomever takes it, where you cannot help intoning morbidly to yourself, "God, I have a lot of crap."
Two more days to go.
Just letting you all know that I'm back in the land of the blog...
...though I'm expecting to be absolutely swamped the next few days as we prepare for the movers on Wednesday, so posting will probably be sporadic at best.
Regular, sane blogging will likely recommence sometime mid-August.
There is a lizard on the rock
A bird on the pinyon
A snake in the shade
Now it is gone.
My parents are in town, we're picking up my brother tomorrow (his flight got delayed and re-routed), and I'll be away for the next week or so. Partly this will be a happy trip -- we're going out to the desert country as an intact family again, along with my beloved godmother -- but the main reason for it is to scatter my godfather's ashes, so it is a sad trip too.
Still, I'm hoping to take a lot of pictures, have long conversations with my brother, and just enjoy being away from the packing for awhile. I'll see you all when I get back, and if any of the pictures are worth posting, I'll put them up.
(Oh, and they reversed the denial of my unemployment claim. Yessss! *fist pump*)
It seems that Chris Clarke and one of his commenters, tost, have gotten into a "whose dog is better" competition. They want us, the readers, to vote on Chris' Zeke and tost's Cody. My money's on Zeke, and I mean that literally. Each voter pledges a small amount of money (mine was a feeble $1; other folks are averaging $5) for each vote cast. The winner of the contest will determine which of two animal welfare groups gets the money, with voters sending it in on the honor system.
It's for a good cause. May the best dog win, and a bunch of homeless animals too. Check it out.
As the furor around the Downing Street Memos and the Rove-Plame leaking story gets more and more revved up, I keep running across this phrase in the comment threads. And I have to say it disgusts me.
As much as I loathe this administration, as much as I want them to spend the rest of their lives in ignominy, and preferably in jail after a trial by the international criminal court, this is an abhorent thing to say.
That it is self-styled liberals who are saying it makes me even sicker.
Look, people, the horrors of detainee abuse at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are no laughing matter. They are matters of the profoundest violation of human rights, not suitable fodder for snarky barbs, no matter to whom those barbs are directed.
The behavior of this administration with regards to these holding facilities is part of what makes me so angry at them, and while I admit there would be a certain poetic justice in their ending up there, sending anyone to those facilities, regardless of what crimes they may have committed, would serve to put the stamp of approval on all the inhumanity that has happened there.
I don't want what goes on there to be continued, even if the only people being punished are the likes of Rove, Bush, Cheney, et al. I want it stopped.
It is an unclean, unjust, morally wrong enterprise, and no decent person should want even the smallest part of it to continue, for any reason.
Otherwise, we are no better than the bastards we condemn.
Because I need to stare at something other than unpacked possessions.
This flower was a complete surprise. See if you can figure out what it is.
(If your browser does mouseover links, the answer is the name of the jpg.)
So, for the past couple of days I've been packing up my apartment. I never really much like this process, because it means transforming my cozy home into a bunch of piles of random crap surrounding a cluster of boxes.
It's somewhat interesting this time to be doing this with entirely new, unused moving boxes. Not only is it easy to label them clearly (no competing info), but they are also conveniently labeled with their dimensions and cubic volume. (They even have little bars and half-bars on the side to indicate whether they are 1.5, 3, or 4.5 foot volumes.)
What's mildly aggravating, though, is that the "small" or "book" boxes are in actuality much larger than the boxes I've used for books in the past. Not only does this mean that these purportedly small boxes weigh a ton when filled (though, since we're paying people to move them for us, is less of a worry than it might be). It also means that it takes many, many more objects, whether books or otherwise, to fill up one of these containers. Since I like to keep the contents as homogenous as possible (yoga books; office supplies; paperback fiction) it's driving me a wee bit nuts to collect together all of my books on a topic, place them carefully in the box, and then discover that there's room for three times as many. Moreover, there's always this odd nugget of space that nothing can fit into except socks -- and I'm running out of spare socks!
I'm also worrying about the implications for packing breakable or small items; I suppose what I'm going to end up doing is putting them inside other, smaller boxes, filled with padding, and then packing those. Seems a bit awkward to me, but then, I'm not the one who has to organize a moving truck full of cartons, and I want the movers to be happy as they can be while handling our stuff. (Truly breakable items will go in the cars with us, but there's a lot of oddiments like framed pictures and lamps that I don't really want to haul along if I don't have to.)
The most annoying thing about the process is the aforementioned piles o' crap. It's like there must always spontaneously generate a huge clump of stuff that can't be categorized except as "Random Crap" and which at the same time can't just be tossed in a box if you want any sort of order to result. (I may, however, as time grows short, do just that. It'd be like a 1.5 cubic foot equivalent of a junk drawer -- oh joy.)
Moving. Gotta love it. /sarcasm
Here's a meme I've seen at wolfangel's and at Dr. B's. While I'm not that fond of this kind of meme, this one is curiously appealing. Perhaps this is because I've been thinking about money a lot these days, and the notion of having money is very pleasant to contemplate.
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