Rinse, repeat. Long post I know!

Moving is a special blend of unpleasant manual labor, nostalgia and, when you’re cleaning out your storage closets, ickyness. The tedium of disassembling furniture is lightened by the joy of finding an old photo album, which in turn is ruined by the finding of a pissed-off spider living under the old photo album.

Our closet exemplifies Pareto’s law of crap expanding to fill the space allotted to it (yes, that’s exactly how Pareto put it). Clothes that haven’t been worn for 5 years, kitchen supplies that haven't been used in 10 years, gaudy stuff whose brightest moment was when they were opened and that brief moment of joy at having something new is now "what was I thinking?!" before being consigned to the back of the linen closet forever. Though this time the term linen closet refers to trash bag. :P

After a few hours, I felt we’d made some serious progress. Things had been moved! Other things had been moved into the places where those things used to live! And I had taken apart an bed and night table (p.s. why don’t multi-headed screwdrivers come with an allen wrench head?) The closets and apartment is now (slightly a lot) less live-inable than before but it is musky with the scent of progress. Not that I live in the closet of all places, but some days it's tempting. The world is a scary place!

And dust. Did you know that an apartment is a good home for dust? It is. This morning, I woke up feeling like we’d slept in a highway construction zone and went through half a box of kleenex before my nose stopped running. I didn’t want to think about the micro-organisms living in my nostrils, until Mom gave a red-eyed mutter about the damn dust-mites. Achoo.

We are down to the short strokes (and apparently, that’s not a dirty reference, because I heard a judge use it!) A lot of the main packing is done (well not really, but saying that to make myself feel better. It works, try it!) - kitchen, sorta.. (we are almost down to eating with a strainer spoon and some BBQ tongs), wardrobes (no, I will not tell you how many pairs of underwear I have left out to get me through the weeks.) and closets (many a good spider has lost a home tonight. Why they were really in there at this point, who knows. Running from the spray and flailing, er, failing, is my guess?). As the great Gladys Knight said, we have gotten right down to the real nitty gritty.

The nitty gritty is the small stuff - going through random papers you find here and there that were once deemed important documants, ie: past grocery lists, getting rid of those last few grudgingly-admitted fashion errors (bye bye three-button-cuff dress shirt), taking apart my desktop computer so I can just place it... somewhere. Unfortunately, it’s work, but it doesn’t look as glamorous as getting an entire room into a box. Still, we’re getting there.

Among the more interesting challenges is eating down your food. The menu gets downright fascinating. By the way, does anyone have a good recipe involving potatoes and a turkey carcass? I mean soup is nice and all, but after that being all I could eat... sigh.

BUT I have new shoes! Yay shoes! I'm glad of it, the world seems a whole lot brighter when you don't have cold water seeping through the holes in your footwear. I picked them up for about 24 bucks at Giant Tiger while wasting time til check in at the hotel. We stayed in the Travelodge til the spray cleared from the building. Since then I've also been getting sleep! I've also been able to finally eat solid food after 2.5 weeks! Mind you it's very very light stuff but still! Progress!

I did get more hours for work as well, which is good considering the extension I presented them with. I swear their eyes lit up like a Christmas tree on the 4th of July when I said I could stay a tad bit more. There's a catch on that, they don't really want me there per say, they want my ability to draw donations for the Easter Seals campaign that's going on til the end of the month. They're upset they're losing their best (they said that, not my) to "some guy."

Also, saving the best for last of course is... my plane ticket is official. Set in stone. The fat lady has sung! It's set for the 24th at 7:40 am from here to Toronto, then a smaller air craft to reach Kingston. Then I'll finally be home. It'll take me a week or so to even attempt getting into my bf's sleeping patterns from 9-10 pm bedtime and 6 am wake up. After that issue of trying to settle into things I'll be in search of a job. Hopefully the Canex since it's close to home and I know how to get there, considering it's a 20-30 minute walk into the city itself. Thus it's time to rewrite my resume! I'm so giddy it's really not even funny, but I can't help but to giggle anyways!

Anywho it's about that time I start pulling myself together for work in a while. It's only 4 hours tonight which is alright, gives me time to do stuff tonight. Until next post!