The Lost Week and Decisions Made

I should never travel. I always seem to lose time when I get home again. In this case, it was about a week of what we used to call "least damage mode" -- i.e., trying not to do anything that was going to have to be redone once we woke up again.

So now I'm awake. In some ways, we have made progress on the "getting out of Dodge" front. The other day, I mentioned that the Wizard and I decided to move to the Eastern Time Zone. Most of the Wizard's consulting gigs are in Eastern or Central time, so this makes some sense. Next I made a list of states in the Eastern time zone, eliminated many of them (thanks to many years of having lived in the deep South, I have no desire to go back there again), listed commercial airports in each state and the airlines that flew out of each airport.

Friday night over dinner, we went through the list and winnowed it down. The short list was:

-- Boston/Providence
-- Pittsburgh
-- Philadelphia
-- Baltimore (mainly because it has an American League baseball team so we could see the Red Sox on the road)

On Saturday, there were more discussions. By the end of the day, we decided to return to the devil we know rather than starting all over again in a new town. So it's back to the Boston suburb from whence we came to Dodge almost 7 years ago. Probably. 99% sure.

First, we still have to decrapify and do something about carpets, not to mention many smaller tasks around the house and yard. So I hit the boxes with what I thought would be renewed fervor today. Of the 37 boxes that had been in the front hall, only 3 remained:

I thought I could get through all of these boxes today, but I guess I didn't count on falling asleep while wading through them. One was full of files that I thought would be a snap:

However, the file folders happened to be stuffed with offspring-related stuff -- school papers, reports, newspaper articles, cards and letters. I sorted the stuff out by offspring it related to, but they are each going to have to go through this stuff as well. And two of them won't be around until the end of March. I honestly don't know whether they want to keep any of this. I know I don't have anything from my early school years and I have never felt the lack, but I don't want to make assumptions about what they may or may not want to hang onto and lug around for the next 30 or 50 years.

In short, I only got through the one box and the vast majority of the contents of that box went back in for later sorting by the interested parties. Not much progress there.

The front hall, however, is now box-free:

We also ignored the Superbowl today in favor of playing Clue:

We thought the new version of the game is more confusing than the older version, but we liked being able to poison people. We think the makers of Clue should give us some blank weapon cards, however, so that we can kill people in new and inventive ways -- like stuffing them out an airlock or running them over with a car. Hmm.... kind of a bloodthirsty afternoon, all things considered.

One last thing, an updated shot of the Drama Queen's sitting room:

The trash continues to multiply.