moving | Richard Parks

That’s the way a friend of mine described it–that in between time when you’ve arrived at your new place but the movers haven’t caught up. So we have lights and heat, thank goodness, but almost no furniture. Still living out of suitcases, eating off paper plates, and sleeping on an air mattress.

I’m typing this on a Linux laptop. It’s not my regular workstation, but the thing is, just right before the move, as in literally days before, my regular workstation decided to die, and unless I can mount a successful rescue, it took all my files with it. Backup? Of course. Problem is, I have apparently managed to lose it. I don’t know if it’s in one of the boxes on its way here or is gone forever. I do not know how I managed to do something so completely asinine as to lose a very important backup. To be fair, I actually have two, and I do know where one of them is. It’s just going to be more of a pain to restore, but it exists, so eventually everything should be back in place. My new computer is ordered and in transit. Assuming everything else arrives some time this year, maybe I can get myself back together. That would be nice, since I have a hell of a lot to do.

I hope we love it here, since I don’t plan to move ever again.

Probably the worst thing about moving is trying to be two places at once. Physically I’m still in Mississippi. Most of the packing is done, most of the painting is done. The last thirty+ years of our lives reside in boxes in storage, just waiting. If nothing odd happens, in less than two weeks I’ll be making the trip up to New York to close on the new house. Mentally, at least half the time I’m already there. There’s a lot to do before we can move in and part of the reason I’ll be there is so I can be be working on that, but that’s later. Mentally I go over and over it all, trying to plan the best strategies for getting it all done as quickly as possible.

And all that is just half the battle. The rest is realizing that neither of us has much clue as to how to survive a winter—a real winter, as opposed to the cooling-off period we’re more familiar with– and have we taken leave of our senses? Probably, but still going. Helpful people have been helpful—snow boots, yes, warm overcoats, yes. Gloves. Snow tires. What a concept. Oil furnaces. Pellet stoves. Clearing the ice berms. How to shovel snow. Where to shovel it to. What has to be shoveled. What doesn’t.

Factor in that Yamada Monogatari: The War God’s Son will be hitting the stores right around the time I’ll be hitting the road.

Zen says “Be Here Now,” and I ain’t. A good bit of the time I’m a thousand miles away. Which is unfortunate, since there’s still a good bit to do here before I’ll even get a chance to work on everything there. It’s disrupting and stressful and I’m not sure how much longer I can keep it up. If all goes well, the time will run out before I do. Here’s hoping.