Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
I’m back!
Didja miss me?
I drove up to Santa Rosa on the 24th. Without traffic, it’s a 4.5 to 5 hour drive, but somehow I managed to 6.5 hours, what with stopping for gas, food, and water, toothpaste, toothbrush . . . The later it got, the more I began to worry that by the time I made into Santa Rosa, the grocery stores would be closed, so I stopped in Castro Valley to pick up some stuff, then promptly got discombobbled. Don’t ask.
The rental home in Santa Rosa was remarkably dusty. Sleeping in my bed was enough to kick my allergies into fourth gear, and sweeping up the next day only made it worse. I’ve been trying to decide if this is a cold or allergies. It feels like allergy only worse . . . but then, I drove back to Bakersfield with my trunk and rear passenger seat stuffed with bags of cat hair-laden garbage.
Once the movers emptied out all of our stuff, the rental home looked quite nice. Much nicer than when our stuff was still inside, which leads me to the conclusion that our stuff is crap. Which is true, really. We have a black leather (I guess it’s leather) living room three-piece set which looked handsome when we bought it back in the mid-90s, but that was a lot of baby vomit and cat hair ago. Our Ethan Allen dining room table and chairs were once nice, too, and still are, provided you don’t examine them too closely.
But the real problem is the hodge podge of furniture and the abundance of junk. Why, why didn’t anyone tell me in college to pare away all belongings? “Never own more than you can move in the smallest of U-Hauls,” someone should have told me. I guess it’s inevitable. You need a bed or two, a desk or two, a table and chairs. There’s a kitchen to stock, after all, and a TV, and a computer or two or five. To keep possessions to a minimum, I would have had to swear off owning my own home and only rent furnished apartments.
Which really doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, now that I think of it.
Just received the key to the new house . . . and tomorrow’s our move-in date. We’re in our furnished rental until the 30th, so I have a few days to make the new home livable. Part of Thursday, Friday, and the weekend . . . gaaah I’ll barely have time to set up the bedrooms and make the kitchen serviceable! Unpacking is the worst, the absolute worst. Let’s hope I won’t have to do this again any time soon.
D.
Thoreau knew what he was talking about: simplify, simplify, simplify..how I wish I could!
So get rid of the junk, and work on upgrading the remaining pieces one at a time. That’s what I’ve been doing.
Everything unnecessary goes into the garage, thence to Goodwill. We’ll see how much junk I can shed.
Yah, man, I think you’ve done enough moving for a while. Stay put.
I’m thinking we need to get rid of a bunch of junk too. A whole bunch of junk.
We have FIVE filing cabinets and EIGHT desks. That’s because when I closed the Crescent City office, I tried to sell as much furniture as I could, but no one wanted to buy the desks and file cabinets.
On the up side, I’m happy to report that one of our two fridges may have given up the ghost. We will soon be a one-fridge family.
You could start your own school with all those desks.
I have 32 boxes on a ship headed this way in four weeks and I keep thinking I’ll toss most of it. Why did we bring it again? I know we want the books/DVD/CD/comic book collection (We also have every computer game we’ve ever bought. Most of them we can’t play anymore because our computers are now too fast.) and my kitchen stuff is imperative but the rest? Gives me hives.