July 14^th, 2008

Well, my wife and I move out of our little condo the day after tomorrow.

I am going to miss that place, I suppose, but I am too busy to really think about it right now. Busy because there is all the regular plans to make and follow through on:

• Packing up
• Arranging movers
• Changing address with telephone, utilities, insurance(s), banks, workplaces, Internet, cable, and much much more!
• Storage of *stuff* for 3-1/2 weeks.

That last item is the tip of the iceberg, really: We are becoming what I call "Bedouins" for the next 24 days while we wait for our new place to become available to move into. It's really hard to coordinate life in general when you have No Fixed Address, so paperwork relevant to our lives for the next few weeks travels with me in a large legal binder. If I lost that I would ... look for it until I found it. Losing it is actually not an option.

And the cheap motel where said wife and I will be holed up in for the next 3-1/2 weeks, while having a bed and bathroom, will offer little else in the way of home comforts. We've been talking about it in terms of What Fun We Will Have During Our Forced "Vacation" and, at odd moments here and now, I can almost imagine that to be true.

But then, late at night, faced with my thoughts, and with only myself to be accountable to, the dread starts: 24 days of thin walls and hot motel rooms ... trouble sleeping with noise of parties, traffic, angry couples, other peoples' sexual activities ... ugh, my heart fills with dread.

But, the wheels of moving out of our condo and temporarily living in that rat bag cheap roach motel are so much in motion that there is no turning back. Like losing those papers, changing the plan is not an option. And it beats spending three and a half weeks waiting for our new home in any of these following ways:

• Living on a park bench, wrestling with seagulls for bread crusts. (Those seagulls are nasty tenacious little buggers—ever seen the way they hone in on food? And there would always be the risk that, while we slept, they decided to perceive us as food.)
• Couch surfing from sister to parents to friends to other sister to other friends to parents again. (Been there, done that. And my college years are long over.)
• Living at work. (I tried that in the 1990s and it has a surprisingly small positive effect on my career, despite what workaholics think.)
• Cryogenically frozen for three weeks until our new home is vacant (besides, that technology hasn't been perfected yet, and it's not a safe bet that they will have solved all the problems in the next couple of weeks)
• A three week drunken bender. (At first blush this might seem like a great solution, but the hangover at the end wouldn't be worth it. Besides, I do have to work most of those days.)

So there you have it. None of the alternatives are worth the trouble. Cheap flea-and-cockroach peeling-paint third-world hovel paint-peeling wallpaper-sweating stinking hot hell hole neon flashing motel with peeling paint and low-speed wireless Internet and only a basic cable package is our fate starting in two days and extending far into the mists of a dismal depressing stunted future.

Oh woe is we.

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