Mixed Emotions

This whole move thing has me filled with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, I will not miss the noise of the street behind the apartments. This street is more like living next to a raceway than living in a residential neighborhood.

The only time that street is quiet is between 2:30 am and 2:45 am any other time it’s an endless parade of cars zipping along, motorcycles, and modified drift car wannabes roaring by, and various larger trucks rumbling along. 

Sirens and ambulances scream by at all hours of the day and night.

After a while you start to ignore most of the road noise.

The Apartment complex is an older one and has older people in it. Ambulances and paramedics roll up at least once a day to cart some unfortunate person off to the hospital, or the morgue.

This is a plain no extras complex and it’s showing it’s age. The walls are paper thin and the windows single pane. You can hear everything. People having conversations in the parking lot, some of the younger folks are still sexually active and so you hear them pounding away on creaky beds. The tenants that are hard of hearing will let you enjoy their movies, music, or operas at all hours of the day and night.

It’s not restful and it’s hard to sleep.

We’ve just had 4 weeks of tree removal. They came through and took out all the grand eucalyptus trees that provided shade and put a sweetness in the air. Now we’ve been dealing with plumbing issues and the sidewalks are all torn up with the attendant heavy construction crews coming in at 6am to haul away broken concrete jackhammer up more sidewalks and generally yelling across the parking lot at each other. 

It’s been a dusty noisy environment and parking is a nightmare. 

All that being said, this was my place. Things remained where I put them and I was in complete control of my little space. It has been home to me and I’m not really looking forward to sharing my space with another person again.

The plus side of the mountain hose is that it’s quiet

I have a monumental cleanup task waiting on me at the house in the mountains. Part of that task is a creation of my own in that I haven’t been there with enough energy to clean out the stacks of frankly un-necessary paper left in my office on my desk. I’ve already had trouble putting my stuff back in the house because the other person that lives there is a major packrat.

Before I got this place, I had been feeling compressed into smaller and smaller space. My absence has compounded the problem. I can’t get to my workout bench anymore, There’s no way I can get my motorcycle out of the garage and I can just barely fit my car in the 2.5 car garage. The basement storage area is a fucking disaster with barely a path between junk that hasn’t seen the light of day in 10 years, longer if you count the time pre-fire. I know I have stuff in the basement that needs to find it’s way to the trash heap, I can’t find my stuff that needs to go away, because of all the other stuff that’s been stacked around it. That all has to change, and it’s going to be a battle.

This is a battle I’m not looking forward to.

There will be hurt feelings  and passive aggressive anger and I’m sure it will be an unpleasant time. But I need to focus on trimming down all the shit because a longer term goal is my future. If I find a position with a company outside of California I want to be able to make a clean break of it. I want to take all my shit from well defined areas and put it in a truck and be done. I don’t want my stuff in 3 or 4 different places I want everything in one place Easily accessible, defined, labeled, and movable.

The storage facility I just rented may provide a space in which I can move, sort, trash, and store my stuff.

I suppose I’m getting to a point where I don’t place the same value on sentimentality that I once did. Things don’t matter all that much to me, Stuff is an anchor that makes it hard for you to move literally and figuratively.

I’d like to be able to haul anchor and go. I want simplicity