No, not ipods. PODS. Giant white leggos that you use for moving. So far--and this is with the thing one third packed--the biggest innovation in moving since the dolly. They bring it out, drop it on your lawn/driveway/etc, and you just--move stuff into it. Then a giant truck comes to pick up your leggo and carry it off to destination.
It. Is. So. Cool. And not just because it lets you move everything at ground level. Also, it's just cool. Seriously. Giant leggo in your driveway. That never stops being funny. No, really. We've had it three days and I've giggled every time I see it.
Anyway, a vague kind of heads-up--barring some incident involving religious epiphany, death, or something very screwy with the signing of the papers (which, believe it or not, has already happened *once*, hence this message didn't go out in early April, mid-June, or early July), there is some slight chance in an interruption of service whilst we move from Location A to Location B, the second of which will probably put Child in School That Does Not Smell Like Socks. Pretty much, my computer isn't being packed until teh car is actually in drive and moving, and I'm trying to overlap utilities and telephone service so tehre won't be *a single second* that my addiction can't be fed--but still, something horrifying could happen. I could fall over in heat exhaustion from carrying things.
Progress
I bought a really unnecessary number of those Wal-Mart box things, the plastic ones, under the impression that there really isn't a time you're going to say "My God, I have far too many of these convenient, stackable boxes to pack up things with." Well, not surprisingly, three of them went to my clothes immediately, and one to my notebooks. Another holds a really disturbing amount of computer equipment--I really never give away my computer pieces, I just keep them on the off-chance they'll come in useful for something, old CDs, old tapes, a ton of stuff Dax downloaded for me on disc, a really creepy number of completely unidentifiable cables and power sources, and what could be a disassembled printer circa 1999. Keep in mind it took me *four years* to get rid of a flatbed scanner that didn't work, because I kept thinking eventually I'd give it to Child to disassemble, since he has such fun with screwdrivers and destruction. So printer pieces? Not a surprise. One DVD player, also way too old to be useful yet unable to give up. One CD/RW that I replaced with the DVD/RW. One CD-ROM that really has no reason to exist, because even I can't figure out what on earth it could be good for. Another box or two holds a ton of disassembled toys. Another one is already in there and holds--oh, yeah, *more clothes*. There's another one around here, but I'm not sure what I have in it. Child's bed has been disassembled and its horror PODded up in all it's five billion parts. We keep staring at my bed for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it was professionally assembled and we have yet to figure out how it's supposed to come apart.
You know, even writing this is mindnumbingly boring. Moving is boring. Also, stressful, becuase no, papers aren't signed and that stresses me muchly.
The Notebooks
My Notebooks are the thing that go where I go, pretty much. If someone said, deserted island, but with internet connection, my computer, Child, adn that box would go with me. I haven't used them for their purpose in about seven years, around the transitional period betwen long hand writing to typing, or when it finally sank in that typing is a *lot* faster than anything I coudl do wiht a blue pen.
The first story I ever wrote isn't in there, but I can reproduce much of it by memory. The second isn't either, or the third, but the first novel is, and its countless revisions as I grew up, its sequels, prequels, my vampire phase, my sci-fi phase, some fantasy, a very strange Phantom of the Opera sequel, back to sci-fi (giant ships, destroyed worlds, occasional hot aliens; you know, the usual), back to vampires (seriously, that one I never got over in any meaningful way), some historical fiction, some history, and more genealogies than I can count. I spent entire summers doing nothing but sitting at my gradnmother's desk with a few reams of notebook paper, college rule, and a new package of blue BIC pens, writing and rewriting, trying to perfect a single scene. There's one notebook, three inch binder, that is nothign but the same twenty pages in infinite variation. And I had blisters from the pen that I wrote through, turned to calluses, turned to a permanent purple indentation on my fourth finger, right above the top joint, and the tips of my first and middle fingers, and the skin above the webbing of my thumb from the six-sided plastic. I remember my English teacher looking at my hand once while I was doing ten minute writing exercises and hit the second page when most people were on the second paragraph. Just checked--all of it's gone now, but twelve to eighteen, I bit my fingernails down from both nervous habit and because they got in the way of writing *fast*, and those calluses were years going away. A little has changed. Now I cut down my nails when they start slipping on the keyboard. They never get far past the tips of my fingers before they frustrate me too much.
In between writing, I used to sit with encyclopedias and books from all over the state I'd get from the interlibrary exchange and soothe myself by carefully charting genealogies in six hours shifts. It's probably the one thing that embarrasses me and that I can't explain *why*. The repetition and studying was soothing and mindless, and I'd do it for hours at a time, and I'm not even sure why I needed to do it, but I did need it and God help you if you interrupted, because it was so not pretty and always ended with this kind of quasi-temper tantrum. It was also the only thing I couldn't do at school--you can explain away a lot of things if you're caught in class, but that was way too noticeable, and seriously, at seventeen, there was no way that wouldn't get me a glorious fifteen minutes of misery in the hall after. A lot of my restlessness can be traced back to when I stopped doing it, and I wonder sometimes if it was my natural way of stopping before I burned out writing something.
Most of the stories are *bad*, but I can see the development of my rhythm there, and how I learned to characterize, and the way I started shortening words when I couldn't get it out fast enough, and I can even remember when I consciously made my handwriting *tiny* so I could get more words per page, then bigger when I started being able to remember to put notebook paper on every shopping list and so didn't run out. Switches from first to second to third person pov depending on the time of day or what I was trying to say. It's a learning process that's easy to follow, almost a click I can see halfway down a page, when I figured out something new, when I realized I could do *this*. The transition between the day I wanted to tell a story and the day I wanted to build a world, and the day I realized I could do both at the same time.
In retrospect, it's kind of weird. There are things I don't get where they came from or why--first sex scene, that's a trip, and I even remember reading romance novels as probably one of the most amusing research project ever. Not just one. A dozen different authors, trying to fit together a coherent picture of how this whole sex thing worked, minus the really freaky euphemisms--seriously, if you've read Virginia Henly, you know what I'm talking about. TV wasn't good for that. Everything looked awkward and embarrassing and uncomfortable and *strange*, and back then, I hadn't really absorbed the fact that while you're doing it, you really don't worry about what it *looks* like.
The break is over. Also, the temperature has reached fried egg.
*sighs* I am so not doing my bed today.
I hate that POD.