Winter makes you do strange things.
So, I'm moving. For the 4th time in 9 years, and the 6th in 16. That's right; I just can't stay in one place too long. What's hilarious is that like the last time, it actually feels like it's going to be temporary. I have no real way of knowing, and maybe it won't but....it doesn't *feel* permanent. But it's still an upgrade, and since it's in the same building and I got a good deal on it, it's totally worth doing.
How *much* of an upgrade it is in question. The place is bigger, but not quite big "enough." Whatever that means. There's no garage, so I'll still be working on the car in the street. No dogs allowed. Lots of neighbors, so I still have to be careful about blasting music.
It also doesn't address the possibility that I need a wholesale change of scenery. But that's a much bigger question that I can't seem to answer while I'm up to my neck in crap. So as I gain enough room to, like, walk around, have a living room and host a salon, get cameras off the closet floor and into a cabinet, etc., maybe some of that other stuff will come into focus.
So what does that leave? The main thing is that I'm finally going through a variety of junk that's accumulated, touching and making a decision on pretty much everything I have. There's a lot of reacquainting (with things I haven't been able to use for years because I didn't have the space, like an actual couch, on which people can sit and watch baseball and discuss things), and disacquainting.
The latter is the most important. There's stuff that I've gathered (or refused to pitch) since the last move in 2003, of course. But there's also a ton of stuff that I simply put aside when I moved out of my last house. Stuff I couldn't have "dealt with" even if I'd wanted to, because I just didn't have the energy at the time, and the prime goal was simply to get the transporting of it over with as quickly as possible. I had no idea--none--that a lot of it was going to languish in a storage box for 6+ years, but there it's been, sitting unexamined in the dark. While I paid to keep it out of the rain, but also to keep it around just so it'd be there when I got to it.
As it turns out, I'm throwing most of that stuff out. And of course *could* have thrown it out before. (Actually the proper term is "freecycing", which is as time consuming and creepy as it is virtuous.) But almost all of that crud that I haven't looked at in 6 (or 10 or more) years? Gone. Or will be. Which means that the storage unit is going to be out of my hair.
Going through all that stuff is also a long trip down memory lane. And memory lane is always bumpy to some degree, so that's been a strange experience. Not the quite the unalloyed misery that I expected, but...not awesome. But in the long run, it's good. Also incomplete, and it probably raises as many problems as it solves, but hey. It's progress that wasn't happening before I embarked on this mission to move 100 feet away.
The whole thing often feels like little more than stirring up mud at the bottom of the pond, and I'll just wait for it all to settle out again and be like it was never disturbed. But I think/hope it'll turn out to be more like dredging a channel. Making it possible for people, activity, events to come *in* is important.
But carving a path through (some) muck--physical and mental--and trying to get *out* to open water and whatever is on the other side of it, is absolutely vital.