I’m looking at this house’s last remaining nest of chaos.

It’s nearly done. Three weeks after moving to Santa Rosa, it’s nearly done. I can walk through the house without seeing a single box or orange packing label, all the pets are happy, everything is in its place (well, except for the flatware which never materialized. And the toaster oven. And the blender. And Karen’s super-duper-expensive paring knife), and there’s a minimum of clutter overall.

I’m in the computer room, which is a bit vague because nearly every room up here is a computer room. That’s what happens when you combine a home and an office and never throw any computer away, ever. This one, the one I’m writing on, is our oldest, and I would be in bad shape if it crashed. Yes, it’s been ages since I backed up my writing, but there are programs on this one which I cannot easily replace — Microsoft FrontPage, for one, and Paint Shop Pro.

There — right over there, in the center of the room, lies a nest of cables and cords and defunct mouses (mice?) and speakers and routers and two keyboards. In the closet are two monitors, a scanner, several power strips. Against the wall we have two large filing cabinet/hutch units from our office, and there’s a third filing cabinet beneath the pile of computer accoutrement. I’m thinking Craig’s List may be a must. But will people really come out to my place and pick up my stuff? And do I really want people poking around our house trying to decide, Is this file cabinet-hutch really worth $350? Or whatever.

But it’s a relatively tiny nest of chaos, that part of the room, and it’s a screamingly far cry from the chaos present in this household even 12 hours ago. You see, today, I hired a big guy to move stuff for me. That’s what us little guys with good jobs do: we hire big guys who think they’re asking a lot of money from us, not realizing we would probably pay twice as much rather than lift that crap ourselves.

But he made me pay in oh, so many non-monetary ways. I had to listen to his life story. I had to listen to him rant about Mexicans and lesbians (an odd collection of prejudices, don’t you think?) And I had to listen to him sing to Creedence Clearwater and Lynyrd Skynyrd and God only knows what other dinosaur rock we listened to en route from my house to our storage facility. And I had to give him a nice smile when he pitched me on his miracle drink that kills cancer cells and regrows cartilage and cures whatever happens to ail you.

It was all worth it, of course. He and his Big Truck shlepped all of my paper and cardboard waste to the recycling center, and made two trips to the storage facility. Then I made him cart all the other boxes out of the house and into the garage. Yes, sadly, I rented too small of a storage unit; on the other hand, we were ultimately successful. I’ve moved enough stuff around so that the house is livable and the garage is usable.

I’d say, “And now I can take a shower and crash,” except I can’t.

I have one last load of laundry.

D.

Walnut, September 6, 2008. Category: such as it is.

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