I sold my bed tonight after work and it is gone. People have been coming by here and there and getting stuff from me. Other stuff I have been putting on the patio for the garage sale. My life sure is getting seriously truncated.
Category: Day To Day
Collections Of Stuff
In going through all of my stuff over the past few weeks, I have come across things that I have just been putting into specific piles as I find them. It is amazing how many business cards I have collected over the years that were thrown in so many different boxes that I keep finding as I go through the boxes. Undeveloped film is another of my collections (I now have 27 rolls). I have come across so many little pieces of paper with names and phone numbers on them. So many people that I have thought about in the past few weeks as I come across the slip of paper with a phone number. I suppose I should put them all in a phone book or something. I have a pretty big box of photos now that need to be put in my albums. I wish I had a dollar for every time my kids said that they cannot find a pencil to do their homework over the years. I have found so many pens, pencils, crayons, markers, etc. over the past few weeks and now I have a very full back pack of them. There were soooooo many magazines in boxes. Some magazines were mixed in with books. Others were mixed in with office stuff. Others were mixed in with my bedroom stuff. Now I have gotten rid of most of them except my Heavy Metal, Tank Girl, a select few Wired and Rolling Stone, and a few good Playboy (I don’t read the articles) and they all fit in one box. All important papers are filed in my file cabinet. This whole process has been a bit crazy but really cool. I am now down to a 5ftX12ftX10ft space for all of my stuff and that seems to be decreasing daily. I now have a pretty good pile of empty boxes on the patio. Kind of amazing since I have been a packrat my whole life and recently filling a 4 bedroom house with stuff. This is all pretty liberating.
29 More Days
Time is just flying by. I am now only 29 days away from moving to Florida. Whew! I will be glad when it is over and I can relax for a minute.
More Purging
I am in the process of moving to Florida, and for the first time, I cannot take everything I have collected up to this day. Those that have known me for a long time know that I tend to hang on to a lot of stuff and as years go by my collections have grown. I remember when I was able to move across the country with all of my possessions fitting in my car. Now that is hard for me to even imagine….
Now I am purging so much of it because I am faced with a move that is more costly than I want or can afford to spend if I move all of this stuff. I started to purge back in October when I was selling my house, but I was more focused on just throwing everything in boxes so that I could paint the walls and get the place sold (whew! that was a crazy month). I had a garage sale and gave so much stuff away…most of it was the many pieces of thrift store and side-of-the-road furniture I have collected and old toys of my kids.
Now, for the past few weeks, I have been consumed with an overwhelming urge to purge. I can save a decent amount of money if I can fit all of my stuff into a smaller space for moving. Since I just bought a house in Florida and am moving across country, I need to reduce expenses wherever possible. So I started clearing out stuff that I no longer needed. In the process, I have touched just about everything I own. I have opened every box. I have sorted and reboxed. I am organizing everything. Similar things are all together in the same box and each is labeled. I have accumulated many many empty boxes on the patio in the process. Things I no longer need are thrown away or given to GoodWill or whatever. There have been tears from time to time as I go through each time capsule that I find. So many boxes of memories that would not be considered memories to anyone else…it is all just stuff…but to me, it signifies that moment in time…and touching it all over the past few weeks has kind of seemed like seeing my life flash before my eyes so to speak.
Sometimes I am surprised by the things I have saved over the years. So very many things have had sentimental value to me…I have always seemed to be afraid that I will not remember every single little detail of my life…always thinking that I need to keep all of these symbols and icons of every moment. And now I have been on a crazy spree for the past few weeks getting rid of so many pieces of junk that I just do not need to keep.
I love this urge to purge that I have become consumed with lately..it is refreshing and relieving to watch myself get organized and make choices about what to keep and to have time to be organized about it while I count the days to when my boys get out of school for the summer and we hit the road to Florida. But that is still 32 days away and it is so nice to be really getting organized and efficiently packed. And I will tell you something else…I am a pro at packing and moving my stuff now that I have done it so many times in the last 7 months.
I feel pretty good about where my life is heading…I have almost forgotten why I ended up in the desert in the first place…
Firefox
I just downloaded the new firefox browser. If you are not using it, I think you should. You can get it here
Dark Cold Winter
You know I always get a little slow this time of year because of the shortened days. It is often still dark in the morning when I wake up and it is dark when I am making dinner at night. I cannot imagine what life would be like if I lived in a place like Iceland where it is dark for 22 hours at a time and such. It seems like it would be difficult not to hibernate.
Mars Express
Europe’s mission to the Red Planet, Mars Express, is on schedule to arrive at the planet on Christmas Day, 2003.
Deception At The Scare House
When we were driving home from the halloween party, Karl saw a sign that said Scare House. Figuring it could be fun, we decided to go with the boys. So, we drove down the road and followed the signs. It was a nice neighborhood with nice houses. We got there and stood in line. We were going to go with the next group. We anxiously waited and talked about how cool it will probably be. The people putting on the show were dressed up in scary costumes for the occasion and we were getting more and more excited as we waited. Finally, it was our turn. We went inside and the first thing was a dark hallway where a scary monster jumped out at us. After this, we were all led into the garage. It was all set up with black walls and black lights and several rows of folding chairs facing a big projector screen. We all sat down and there was a warning that some of the material may not be suitable for small children. My youngest is six and I decided to wait and see how it was. I mean, how scary could it be?
What came next instantly shocked me. First there were several words that flashed one at a time on the screen. They were words such as LUST, GREED, PERVERSION, etc. Next, the lights came on and a couple of teenagers came in doing a skit about a drug deal and one trying to push drugs on the other. In his hand was a bag of white powder (I am assuming this was flour???). While this was going on, I was becoming very uncomfortable and eyeballing the exit ready to grab the kids and walk out. Those teenagers left and in came a grown man and woman doing a skit about domestic violence and the husband and wife screaming at eachother in an extremely mean way. This was when I grabbed my children and walked out. Karl arrived outside a short time later and told me that after I walked out, the son of the two fighting came in and shot the dad and then shot himself. Of course, this was all just an act or a play, but the message was not what we would expect to see at a haunted house during Halloween. We had to explain to the children that this, although the stuff they were showing was pretty scary stuff, this was not what a real haunted house was like.
Now, I am guessing that these people are trying to spread their preaching word onto us and using halloween and a bit of deception to lead people into their game. I am outraged about this. I think it is completely wrong. It is one thing to invite people, of their own free will, to come hear a preaching message, but it is another thing to deceive people. They did not offer us any warning while we were standing in line. In fact one of the women putting on the show came up and made spooky sounds around us and seemed to like our costumes and saw my two young children standing there and did not say a single thing about what we were about to walk into.
This happened in Mesa off of Guadalupe and Dobson. If you see signs for a Scare House, beware…it is probably not what you are expecting at all.
New Classes
Class started again on Monday. I am taking interplanetary geology and chemistry II. It is all very exciting. It definitely feels good to be back in school. Hopefully, soon, I can go back to school full time. I am also gearing up to get my house on the market in November. I am not going to start any more projects. From here on out, it is just finish the remaining little bit and make it look as nice as possible for selling. The next owner can take up where I left off. I have had enough. Being in graduate school is going to take up a lot of my time and I would just prefer to live in a house that I can come home to each day and feel like I am at home. Although renovating this house was a lot of fun and I learned a great deal that I would not trade for anything, I am just ready to be done with it.
Trees
Yesterday, we dug up a few small trees from Karl’s backyard. Two of them, we planted in big pots for each of my sons to grow. One of them we put in the front yard. It was a good feeling to transplant the tree and it will be really neat to watch it grow. Maybe we will drive by in ten years and see the tree grown up.