Moving

While most of you were eating turkey (ok, I ate turkey too) I was packing up 8 1/2 years of STUFF, getting ready to move out of this teeny tiny apartment. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I'm upgrading to a 2 bedroom place. Now I don't think of myself as having that much stuff, but hey, after 8 1/2 years, things seep out into the corners and into the nooks and crannies, and they just accumulate. It's like stuff expands and does cellular division and multiplies like a virus. And I've got a full carload of stuff to be taken to the Salvation Army. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to decide if you should keep something or throw it out if you know you have to carry it down one flight of stairs and up another only to find a new place for it. Those shirts from the 90's you absolutely loved and think you'll wear again? Uh-uh. Really, people. Paislyey was a bad idea in the 60's, and it was a bad idea when it came back in 1993, and it's a bad idea now and in the foreseeable future. Anyhow. It's not as bad as I thought, it's just that seeing it all on my living room floor makes me a little tired and not as excited as I should be. I'm thinking about hiring some young men with musclely forearms and names like Joe or Frank to do the moving. Or not. It's not that much stuff, really. That's what I keep telling myself. Here's what I'm dealing with:

Oh and the books. As a lit major I've kept tons of books and unfortunately, underlined in the vast majority of them. I had this great system of underlining pretty passages in blue ink, and paper-worthy passages in red. This makes for un-re-sellable books and a great library. And when I say library, I mean multiple bookshelves worth of books. Classics, many of them. And I gotta part with them or move them, and as a lit major, you'd have to understand I'd rather move them than part with them. This means multiple trips. Seeing as I'm only moving blocks away, I'm willing, no matter how begrudgingly, to take the 2 or 3 trips, to move them. The things you do for art, people.

And speaking of art, tomorrow at 10 I have taiko, which means that I have to dig through that pile of stuff!! and find my shime and bachi bag. And for shame, this week has been so busy with packing and work-related catastrophes that I didn't work on taiko stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to get through a mental version of Kai to Ryu over my Frosted Shredded Wheats + tortilla. But really, I have good excuses. One of my co-workers got hit by a car while crossing the street (she'll be ok) and another's husband had to have a bizarre infectious growth removed from his belly (he'll be ok too), leaving only me and the other girl to cover for the admission office during a particularly important deadline. Plus the database went down for 2 days and we spent a day recovering all the work we had done the previous friday. Good excuses, people.

Oh, and just for entertainment's sake, I'm enclosing a picture of the carrying case of cassettes I decided to toss. Remember cassettes? The data was stored on electro-magnetic tape and played back chronologically, rather than digitally. If you remember the rotary phone, then you probably remember cassettes. Or if you know what I mean when I say that back when you were in high school and had a crush on someone then you made them a mixed tape. Someone told me about a year ago that the last blank tape rolled off the assembally line, only to go the way of beta (as in video cassettes, remember?) and giant floppy disks (back when they were actually floppy) and dinosaurs, and other long-dead things, like cukoos and shoulder pads. Here is my last stash of cassettes. Classics, each and every one of them. Long ago purchased on cd, and now transferred to mp4 format, or else forgotten, like all those really bad mixed tapes: