In Which I Decide To Pack Up Everything I Own in A Week and Move

Long story short, the people who own the house I've been living in wish to sell it and I do not wish to live in Indiana for a whole 'nother 12 months, so with three weeks left on my lease, I'm shoving everything except the cats and some beer into boxes to put it in storage because I've got a six-month lease on a 1BR apartment. Blogging will be light to non-existent until I get settled, but I will be blowing off steam on Twitter.

I'm also taking a lot of pictures of things I will have to deaccession. My mother has been trying to throw away my grandfather's La-Z-Boy for ten years, and she will probably finally get her chance--but not until I get some more photos of the cats sleeping on it. I felt safe in that recliner, until one of the springs popped out of the bottom (probably in the 1960s they did not design furniture to hold fat people). Mostly, it's a strange sad "This is Your Life" in artifacts...a Krating Daeng bottle that I have at at least ten years and have moved at least six times, a half-dozen blank books that are still blank, a whole ream of software test plan print-outs that were too low on toner to use but the other side was blank for scratch paper! I should probably be boxing now and sorting later, but it's so crazy.

My dad says the lease thing is God kicking me in the ass so I do something different--and yeah, I have been stagnating.

In Which I Almost Admit I Have A Problem, But Decide I Don't Have To

My company is having a clothing and textile drive for a local organization that teaches "women in need" to sew and work retail--they sell the usable clothing and make stuff to sell from the rest. The organizer assured me they would take anything (FOOLS! I'll show them ALL!). I said "AHA! I can move out all those apparel fabric remnants and assorted used home furnishings I've been collecting for 15 years because I could make something from them some day and I'm starting to think it's never going to be someday!"

Do I even have to type the rest? I started opening boxes I haven't opened for at least three years, and immediately went "Oooh! This is awesome! And you can't buy fabric like this anymore! I could totally (if I bought some stabilizer and some different thread and took a week off work) make something from this! And this is real matelassé from that church rummage the year I taught that textile lab, I may never be able find affordable real matelassé again! I love this color, and it will never come back into fashion again..."

(I also have an ugly shirt I bought at a mall last summer because it was real swiss dot, with the dots woven in instead of glued on. Yup. It was $7; you couldn't buy a yard of real swiss dot for that in 1999....)

So my new goal is to move out at least half of it, and when the rest is still here unused when next year's clothing and textile drive rolls around, re-evaluate. The matelassé may persist, but the knit velveteen is already gone so I'm declaring victory.

Caturday

Today is National Margarita Day (break while I lol at this sort of thing needing an "official website"). Also the first warm sunny Saturday of 2014. So of course, I spent it at work, after working long past beer o'clock last night.

But this is a bragplain; my stuff is righteous, my boss brought in lunch, and I scored an afternoon off in the middle of March, date TBD, when unlike today it's not too muddy and floody to do anything. Bwahaha.

Jetzt...trinken!

How Cold Is It? Hoosiers have stopped laughing at my hat.

This is my Wisconsin hat. I love this hat with the reckless, unreasonable love normal women reserve for shoes. I love the fur. I love the earflaps. I love how I feel when I wear this hat: warm, snuggly, smarter than the hatless idiots bitching that the HVAC in The Room With The Blue Ceiling must be broken because it's not 65°F 24/366.

The last two winters I've not needed to wear it--there has been no winter in Indiana when I have lived here. I wore my hat to work once last January--sartorial comfort food since it wasn't cold enough to warrant more than a knit cap--and my cow-orkers laughed at it.

LAUGHED. AT MY HAT.

They're not laughing now. Several of them openly admired it last week, when the highs were single-digits and I was toasty warm.

This morning it was -10°F when I woke up and warmed up to -8.0°F while I was drinking coffee; time to go to work. In my hat.

In Which I Do Not Complain