Bags given away: 3 1/2, plus three coats given to teenager who lives down the block

Bags of trash: 2

Boxes: 15

Sneezes: Endless

Hope: Waning

Not done by a long shot. Ten of those boxes were books that belong to Navy Buddy, who is being released from the Navy at the end of January and cannot pick them up until then. The movers want us to label boxes according to what room they go in, so I'm putting his initial on his boxes of things so that I know not to unpack them. I'll probably have at least five more boxes of his books before we're done -- and all that is after I thinned out what he brought to me, which sometimes included three copies of the same damn book. Two of the boxes were Dante's books out of his bedroom, one box came out of our own library and one box was full of magazines that I cannot bear to part with (fashion! sigh!). The other box has electronics and video games in it.

Then I quit for a while. So what's been cleared out? A corner of the entertainment center, the space underneath a side table, one large bookcase, a small hutch, the stacks of books on Dante's bed (has a shelf for them) and Dante's tiny closet. At this rate we'll never get moved out, at least not until NEXT Christmas! My moving date is January 8. I'm really considering not going to visit people next week as we'd planned in favor of just packing and packing and packing and packing .....

The bags of trash were mostly broken odds and ends out of the recesses of and secret trash hidey-holes in Dante's bedroom. It's a tiny bedroom, but I still got two trash bags' worth of tiny, broken bits of junk. Where on earth does he FIND such things?! We sure don't buy him anything like that. For those interested in finding boxes, if you go to your local grocery store in the morning when the delivery trucks have gotten there, they'll usually let you cart away all the boxes you want. Even if they have already broken the boxes down, you can still tape them back together.

Oh, and JP, I saw that you called. I'm not avoiding you. I'm just traumatized.

-- DV