Some Time

      I move in two weeks. So far I have tried to pack things that I don't need for my immediate survival, like stuff I never use. Instead of throwing it away. Who knows why. I have marked out the dimensions of my shipping container on the floor in the living room and experimentally put some stuff in the defined space. I think everything will fit. Some of it goes in the car, and I think it will fit, too. We'll find out, won't we?
      California is on fire. This is what CNN tells me. I realize CNN has a slight tendency to hyperbolize the news. My only concern there is if the smoke from the wildfires in North California will be a health hazard--I sit not quite squarely among the high-risk population of old people with heart and respiratory problems. I read that hot dry summers and more wildfires is the "new normal" for California, so perhaps this will be my first and last summer in The Valley and I'll have to move to some place with better air quality.
      I found this interesting: one climatologist said that what's going on is California has been having a wet century, but now that's over and it is returning to its own norm. So, not the new normal, but the old normal. Not that that makes a lot of difference.
      I want to write something witty, even pithy, if possible, but not acerbic. But I don't think I have it in me this morning. I woke up with a headache and now I want to eat breakfast, but I'm going out, and had to kill some time to let the rush hour subside.

Closer

      I'm down to three weeks. Panic has not yet set in, but it's tendrils are creeping outward, into my consciousness. Soon I will act. The trick, in old age, is to know how much to move that process forward so as to leave me enough time. I have been packing things ahead of time. Things I don't need. (Yeah, I said that. I should take the same stuff and throw it away.) There is a couch to give away, and two more oak antiques to take to the consignment store. I'd like to take the china cabinet with me, but I doubt it would survive the move. 

      There are two nightstands to surreptitiously move to the dumpster area in the middle of some night. Possibly more there. There is a floor lamp whose time has run out. 

      The jury's still out on the mattress. Do I want it? If not, how to dispose of it. Theory: foam mattresses have gained in popularity only because it is impossible for one person to move a regular mattress by themselves. I dread even having to rotate mine. And why should I have to rotate it? It's not like it's a set of  tires. Or is it? These are the kinds of questions that the regular mattresses elicit.

      I'm excited about the move. I already know four people in Chico, and several more in nearby parts of California. I am planning road trips. 

      I should go now. This is the week I should start in earnest. 

Panini's Concerto in Dmaj

I did a weird thing yesterday. I sold two of the four guitars that I said earlier I intended to keep. They were the two most valuable, in terms of dollars, anyway, and one of them was the one I played all the time--I had it not in the case but on a stand in the living room. The Martin OM21.

Truth be told, I was sitting here thinking, I don't need all these guitars. Maybe one acoustic, and one electric. But in the culling process I had to choose between it and the old Alvarez that I bought brand new in 1972. I couldn't sell that one off. It is not a "great" guitar, but it does OK, and it seems like it's part of me.

I said earlier that acoustic guitars, in cases or not, are incredibly cumbersome to store or to move, and to get rid of two will make my move next month much easier. I will move three, now, one of them my son's, and two of them electric, so not so bulky.

The weird part is that for weeks now I feared I would have to do this, and I dreaded it. The reality is I feel relieved. A Feng Shui thing, I guess.

Next item on the list, a ridiculous panini maker. Unbelievable how bulky and cumbersome IT is. Much easier to shed, since I sort of forgot it was in the cabinet anyway. It has NEVER been used. It's a dandy. I'll probably have to give it away.

One Month

I'm getting kind of sloppy. Right now I have no milk in the ice box, so I'm drinking coffee black. Ech. I'm still a month away from moving out, but I'm somehow already in that mode where I don't want to invest anything in this place anymore. I guess that includes going to the grocery store. 

I am in a weird spot, moving-wise. If I sell off the furniture, I am very close to being able to move with just the space in the back of my Ford Escape. That would be ideal, but I may not achieve that. But, why pay U-Haul about $1,600 to move a shipping crate from here to Chico when it's only about a third full? I'm like a guy trying to go null in Spades but I might not make it.

I have too many guitars. This is annoying because I only really want two of them. Another one of them is my son's, and one of them I intend to give to my son, and one of them is just a broken guitar which I fear is worth too much to either throw, or give, away. Oh, and one of them is the first good guitar I ever bought, which I've had since 1972 or something, and while it's not that good, it does OK, and it has a lot of sentimental value, even though I almost never play it. So, OK, I want three of them. Two "players" as we musicians say, which is sort of a sly admission that some of the guitars we own are there just because you can fall into the collector mode, like a miser who hoards dollars without really intending to spend them. 

Guitars in their cases are amazingly cumbersome and much bigger than you think they should be. Two guitars can sort of eat up a closet floor, for example, and you're lucky if you can fit them in a car trunk. This is problematic. Plus, you don't really want to ship favorite guitars in a U-Haul shipping crate. I wonder if I could mail them to myself. I don't know.  Dammit. 

I went on a date yesterday. That was kind of weird, even though it was only kind of a date. Dating is expensive. With all the changes in societal norms and relationships between the sexes, it seems like dating is somehow wrong, now. At least, dating in the sense that we used the term "back in the day."  This deserves some thought, but I've got too much going on right now. 

Boring & Tedious

Things are likely to get boring and tedious around the old Blogorahman stomping grounds, here at the Busy Bee and whatnot. I have noticed that sometimes my own blog is a great source of information for mainly myself--like a diary, maybe, or I should probably say journal since I'm not a high school girl. So to that end, I decided to keep posting through my moving process as a sort of log. Well, that's how the term blog got started, anyway. So, a web log, or a wee blog.

I am making progress on the move. Not so much in the form of packing, per se, but the thinning out process. I found homes for some large furniture, and I donated lots and lots of clothing and books, and just now put up a Craigslist ad for the living room furniture, which I have had for so long I don't remember what I paid for it. I found a home for Arthur, my pothos plant. I thought about  moving him with me, but then I figure it might be a shock to his system or something and he'd be better off remaining in the same USDA Hardiness Zone.

I took books to Half Price Books and endured the usual insultingly low offer on my books. I took the ten bucks, but the second box of books went to Goodwill. I left a scathing review on Google Maps. Not that anyone cares. I left a good review at Metro Ford where I bought my Ford Escape. I know how that works, so every answer was in the superlative. This, only because the salesman and the manager (who did the actual haggling) were both professional and friendly and refrained from the usual plaid jacket high pressure theatrical sales techniques. Unlike a Honda Dealership that shall remain nameless (O'Neill Honda, Overland Park, KS) where the sales staff and management were a bunch of yo-yos. They could have easily sold me a Honda CRV. All they needed to do was not be total jerks. But, no. They just couldn't pull that off.  Too much of a stretch.

Put in my 30 days notice here at the loft. It feels very good to know that soon I won't have to listen to these damn air conditioner compressors. Got my ear "tubed" so I can drive over the mountains. That also means I can't go swimming, but that's OK since I never go swimming. I can, however, take a drag off a cigarette, hold my nose, and blow smoke out my right ear. Unfortunately I don't smoke anymore, but it's good to know I have that option should I ever need it.

The sun passes Missouri and Kansas
and races toward California.

III

The average life expectancy for humans throughout our history has of course varied. In the year 1300 in England, it was about thirty years. I'm sure that in even more primitive times, it was less.

I was shredding "important" documents the other day in an effort to thin out the sheer volume of crap I will have to haul with me to California next month when I noticed that there were no documents prior to 1980.  That is the year I got my job at the phone company--the one I stuck with for thirty years, during which time I married, had a kid, bought houses, cars, and did all the other things you do when you plug yourself into the Golden Age American myth. When my wife passed (a brief battle with a very aggressive cancer) and my son grew up and himself moved out of town, (Seattle!) I found myself adrift, and spent a couple years trying to keep myself vertical in all the bobbing around, and figure out the proper thing to do at this point.

This is when I decided to move to California. That's where I'm from, the too-expensive Bay Area, which is so expensive I understand I can't move back there, but close, and I zeroed in on Chico, in the north end of the valley.

But to get back to the shredding, why were there no documents prior to 1980? It is because that was another life. During those thirty years, I was born, grew a little and then was a kid running around in eternal summers between school years, then working after school--I had 22 jobs before 1980. I loved it. But it was another life, and a very much simpler one, hence the lack of documentation. I don't remember, but I'm sure I just threw everything away, or it didn't survive one of my moves.

I have lived two lives, then, I figure, each of a duration about the same as the average human life expectancy throughout history. When the second one was over, it caught me by surprise--one day I looked around, realized it, and thought to myself, you still here? It's like you're at a party, but the party's over and everyone's gone, but you're still kind of hanging around, and you think, oh, I guess I better leave. So. This is why, in a very real way, I feel like I'm starting a new life. Such a cliche, but, you know, they don't call 'em cliches for nothin'.

The Color Song

Display of lawn chairs for sale at Planter's Seed Co., River Market, KCMO

The song we learned in the first grade went like this:

Red and orange and green and blue,

Shiny yellow, purple too.

All the colors that I know 

Belong in the rainbow.

So when I happened to walk by Planter's Seed Co. yesterday and saw this display on the sidewalk out front, I stopped short. Whuh?? The colors were out of order, but they were all there! 

This was the second of a string of three synchronicitous happenstances I experienced in the last three days. I heard the Credence Clearwater song "Green River" on the radio. You never hear that. It's my road trip song, and I usually start out road trips by putting the CCR disk in the dashboard player, and go.

I saw these chairs. The color song always makes me think of my childhood in California, and connects me to the inner "little Roy."

Weird. Blog post about shredding documents.  Saw that this morning. I'm doing that. Shredding documents from 1980 to present.  At least the ones they tell me I can do without. As I sat there feeding them into the shredder, it seemed very symbolic to me.

These things happen in short strings of maybe three or more. Perhaps I stretched a bit, but, hey, that's how that works. Anyway, that's where my head is at. And where my head is, the rest of me can't be far behind.

Whee Yippee OMG WTF Here We Go Again

I hope all is well with all of you. Just a short note to try to explain why I am such a waffling idiot. No? (Yes. I am, but any satisfactory explanation would be too impenetrably convoluted?)

Anyway, as of some time a couple days ago, I've decided to go ahead and move to California after all. I know no one particularly cares and God knows I have dramatized and agonized over this issue to the point of actual physical discomfort. I was just living my rather boring existence, socializing with a very few friends and accomplices, exploring new restaurants, etc., etc., etc., when one day my son moved away, (or, will really soon, like, tomorrow,) and suddenly my brain snapped into the awareness of my state. Maybe not total consciousness but something inching toward that end of the spectrum, which is sometimes all one can hope for. WTF, I thought to myself. Reality, or anything inching toward that end of the spectrum, is so jarring sometimes. More so for the creative person whose dissonance has been stretched like an old rubber band.

I don't care to continue with the rubber band analogy.

Mentally, I counted the reasons why I should stay in Kansas City, quickly reaching the total: zero. Number of issues to be resolved before leaving town: somewhere between zero and three.

Full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and I'm wearing sunglasses. Check. I'm on a mission from Gad, even though my car doesn't have cap tires, or a cap engine.

Living here in the Midwest all this time has done one thing for me: I can now do a fair Chicago accent. (Note: there is no way to phonetically spell  Chicago accented words. Gad and cap are just crude approximations. For further elucidation, follow link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKmuKjpKPIo

Now, since I was bragging about all this consciousness, I suppose I should explain that I do have a little work ahead of me, which is to find dispositions for each and all of my "belongings," meaning I have too much crap. Here we go again--more later.

Amboy, CA