games rigged.

Anyway, the goals for today:

Finish Halloween costume

Go to the post office to try to track down my friend's missing birthday present

Make pumpkin cheesecake bars for party

Eat the last of my meal prep (this would actually be huge as I'm historically bad at eating leftovers)

I mostly used the shop vac to vacuum the walls and inside wherever I could get. Thank goodness for masks bc I encountered extremes of dust that I've never seen before. We moved the piano for what husband is pretty sure was the first time in ~25 years. Just masses and masses of dust. I vacuumed the walls and they changed colors.

Meanwhile husband and our partner managed to nearly empty out the half finished bathroom upstairs that was literally filled wall to wall and floor to ceiling with decades of collected stuff.

I was going to try to do laundry while we were there but with the amount of dust in the air I didn't feel comfortable bringing clean laundry back out of the house. So after husband naps and I rest, we'll have to do laundry tonight (I would put it off but I was originally intending to do laundry on Sunday but it was raining and then yesterday was obnoxiously hot and now I've run out of essentials 😞)

And the thing I hate most about it isn’t the digging, or even the moving one large pile of stuff [1] to another location. It can be remarkably satisfying to get those huge piles of dirt up into the truck and away, or the replacement material into the holes.

No, the thing I hate most is the thing you have to keep doing where you have to consolidate the dirt to make the rest of working easier. You don’t get the satisfaction of doing something substantial. You just get the effort of knowing you’ve moved a ton of material 2 feet to the left because the truck is going to have to back up here and you need that clearance (the truck that will be arriving tomorrow to haul the dirt/rock/debris away) or because you need it in a slightly more compact shape to cover in a tarp.

[1] Note, a cubic yard of loose dirt weighs about a ton. A cubic yard of compacted dirt weighs 1.5-2 tons. So each hole had twice as much surface dirt to deal with.

i need city & state recommendations. i’m planning on moving soon [soon as in i have plenty of time to figure things out]. Rep your city! 🌃 Give me all of the details.

I’ve been moving into a new place since last Saturday, and it’s killing me. I know I never mentioned it last week, but last week I was still in a state of numbness from having lost my best friend.

I’m in a smaller yet nicer and more newly renovated unit in my same townhouse complex. But let me tell you, moving your entire life 200 yards is just as difficult as moving 200 miles.

I hired local movers to get all my large furniture over here (including my ~1.2 million bookshelves), which helped greatly, but because of having to fly back to NY at the last minute last week for several days, I had neither the time nor the money to properly pack all of my books, clothes, dishes, cookware, etc. So I have spent this whole week just tossing it all into small boxes and canvas totes, throwing those into my car, and driving them three buildings over, then shlepping it all up the stairs into the new place. It takes WAY longer than you would think.

Needless to say I am physically and mentally exhausted, and I still have ~500 books to get over here, as well as the rest of my office equipment. And then clean the entire 3-bedroom unit. It might not sound like a lot, but for one person doing all the labor on a lethally hot and humid Florida day, it is.

I’m honestly not trying to bitch or complain; if anything, keeping so busy has given me a bit of a respite from thinking about losing Steve. I know that as soon as I get settled in and my brain quiets down a bit, it’s going to hit me all over again, and I’ll have to deal with a second round of more contemplative mourning.

I’m really only posting this because procrastination is my superpower, and it gets me out of the sun for a few minutes.

Also because a couple people have asked where I have been and I realized I’d never said I was moving.

The cats have been in the new townhouse since Tuesday, and they’ve bounced between various stages of WE HATE THIS and OMG YAY THIS PATIO IS SO BIG and WHAT WAS THAT NEW NOISE?? and SO MANY NEW HIDEY PLACES TO EXPLORE and TODAY WE DECIDED TO BE SCARED OF EVERYTHING, ESPECIALLY THE FRIDGE.