Moving Along

Did you notice there are two lesbian couples in the NYT’s wedding announcements this morning? (This is how I start Sundays: flipping to the back of the Styles section and counting the gay wedding announcements. Then I read Modern Love and feel superior or jealous, depending on the essay.)

Yesterday we turned a corner. Now we are far more packed than unpacked. Our food choices are now dictated by what can be grilled or microwaved (which includes coffee, as we each boil water in the microwave and pour it over our own Peet’s blend, for our regulation daily cuppas).

I even did some long-overdue hardware switching-around and gutting, yanking hard drives from old computers so that we could send them off to recycling this week. For one insane moment I thought about installing a second DVD drive and extra memory in my desktop… one of those projects Satan put in my head to create mischief. That’s a project that sounds perfect for the week after Christmas… if we aren’t on vacation.

I put my miniature rosebushes on the street with a sign that said FREE ROSES, and in fifteen minutes a woman who said she was building a meditation garden had whisked them away. I don’t care if they’re going to a crack house; I’m just glad someone felt the need for them and that I could check off this task. She even took Spidey, our five-year-old spider plant that had survived a rough beginning (I found it in a giveaway box on Castro Street, put it in the trunk of my car, and forgot about it for three weeks… and yet it survived) to become quite the dowager of spider plants.

I don’t get romantic about plants, for the most part; it’s fun to tear them up and replace them. But I found Spidey when we were walking down the street with our friends Jim and Joch, and Jim recently died. So I kept myself busy in my office when the woman took Spidey.

We had intended for Friday to be a wheeee! FUN day, but we ran into a wrinkle with the sale of the condo that required much running around and letter-writing and calming of waters. So our wheee! FUN that day was the delivery of the thesis to the MFA office at Lone Mountain, followed by a trip to a shredding facility in Berkeley (which is fun: it’s astonishing to watch boxes of paper chewed up in seconds by a huge machine), bracketed by trips up and down the peninsula, which at least gave us time to talk.

Today we are exploring the secular lifestyle (something Sandy can only do between jobs or on vacation) by going to brunch for the third time in as many weeks. That will be followed by refined, nuanced packing, such as finding a box for a pile of lightweight, large items that won’t fit anywhere else; improvising boxes for a CD player and VCR (I never toss electronics boxes, so I’m puzzled where these went, but I’m sure they’ll show up right after I’ve packed the items); riffling through two large and mysterious piles on my desk and dumping them into boxes labeled “Stuff” (just to make sure this move isn’t too smooth–don’t want to annoy the Moving Gods).

I have one essay I’m trying to finish this coming week, so this blog will be scanty… probably all month. I have one more post about the MFA and then I’m going to take a shower long enough and hot enough to melt the tiny gremljns in my shoulders.