Moving Blues: What Fresh Hell is This?

What was I thinking?? When I bought all these books, did I think I'd be in this house forever? Well, yeah. Maybe I did.



This is only one bookcase out of the 21+ in our house. We have bookshelves in every room, including the bathrooms. And see those knick-knacks? I have more of them. A LOT more of them. Now I tend to do my collecting on Pinterest, but the books? Well, despite having a fully loaded Nook, the to-be-read pile keeps growing. Not that I'm complaining - a house full of books is my idea of heaven. With one minor exception:  when we're getting ready to move.

I'll be packing book boxes for the foreseeable future. Before long, our house is going to look like a bookstore warehouse.



Okay, perhaps I exaggerate, but not all THAT much! I've already donated about a dozen big bins of garden books to a local arboretum, and my husband has donated an equal number of his religious books to a variety of local churches and church scholars. We've brought so many books to Half Price Books, pretty soon they'll bar us from the door.

My husband and I are taking this one day at a time. (At least I am. I think he's pretending it's all a bad dream.) The house is in chaos, and several days after having our kitchen cabinets refinished, it still reeks of varnish. Our son came down and, on a brief visit interrupted only by a baby shower for our grandbaby-to-be, he cleared out half the basement. Unfortunately, it's a freaking big basement.

Today I decided to tackle the corner of the basement devoted to Christmas decorations. I'll refer to this in the future as Christmas Crap, or CC. I started collecting ornaments the year we got married, 1971. This grew to a family tradition - everyone got at least one new ornament as part of their Christmas present. The collection doubled in the years we lived in England. Who could resist the fabulous ornaments from Harrods and Liberty of London?

We have ornaments commemorating most vacations we've taken, not to mention ornaments the kids made in school, ornaments with pictures of our many pets, the famous "poop" ornaments (cinnamon and dough - my kids named them, not me), and every cute ornament Hallmark ever made. If I haven't said it before, thank God for Pinterest. From now on I'll pin the damn decorations instead of buying them.

What I'm saying is, we have a lot of Christmas decorations, not just ornaments but all kinds of Christmas Crap. And did I mention the trees? We have the humongous tree that takes half a day to put together. We have the tall skinny tree, the rustic-looking tree, the pre-lit tree in an elegant pot, the holographic silver tree, the hot pink tree, the frosted tree (it's only  foot tall) and more small trees than I can list here. And wreaths. Lots of wreaths.

Which brings me to the reason I'm writing this blog. I've spent the last couple hours hauling up bags full of Christmas stuff that somehow got wet and mildewed. (We've never had a flood, so it's a mystery to me. Super Soaker fights in the basement, maybe?) My kitchen is full of bins I'm sorting - one bin for the Salvation Army, one for my son (whether he wants the ornaments or not), one for my daughter (start cleaning out the closet now, chica), one bin of decorations friends might want and, finally, a keeper bin. Maybe two.

It's not as easy as I thought. I'm also progressing much slower than I expected. And I'm feeling a little ill at the thought of the bins and bags and tree boxes that are still in the basement - 15? 20? Please tell me there aren't more than twenty bins down there.

This is how bad it is: I started this I'll-sort-out-the-Christmas Crap project when I got frustrated with the story I'm revising. (For some reason, the more I write, the slower I get.) So how bad is it? So bad that I'm blogging instead of sorting pretty little ornaments.

So bad that I'm going to let those bins sit there awhile and go back to revising my story. That's right, I've found something that makes writing seem like the less stressful alternative. Now I think of it, there's a reason we've lived in this house almost twenty years. It's taken this long to recover from our last move.

Moving - at least, the getting ready to move part - sucks. Only one thing makes it bearable, and that's the thought that in a few months we'll be living a whole lot closer to our granddaughter. For that, I'll even plumb the depths of the basement again.

But not today!