Okay! It is 24 hours until our massive move, which is a whole 40 BLOCKS, WOW. There is nothing left but my room. My closet is not really a proper disaster, but it is sort of an odd shape and I cannot see everything that is in it. I am kind of wondering what I will find. Sex toy receipts? Shirts from 2004 that were kind of a bad idea then, and have only got worse with age, surely? There is a black lace thing that looked really boho and cool in the store with a camisole under it, but when I came home it morphed into something Prince’s keytar player would wear in, like, 1991. How does that happen?

My room was supposed to be done by now, but I was sabotaged by packing the girls’ room yesterday. They gave it a “thorough” cleaning last weekend, and I was so busy with other things I took a look and it looked good, but I was probably in such a hurry that it was good in like a “El Camino in a sandstorm” way. If I saw one in a sandstorm, I might think for a minute it was a real car.

I had my moving crates and the objective of paring down their bookshelf by half. Their shelves are a mix of really great classics and comics, as well as the DARK SIDE which is things like those Candy Fairy and Rainbow Fairy books, childrens’ literature that is written through what I imagine is a combination of algorithms, phrase-generation software, and depression in a giant hospital-green room where other similar childrens’ series are being cranked out for a fraction of a cent per word. It is like these things just grow on your shelves like a fungus. “At least they are reading” is only an acceptable defense of these types of books when every other piece of age-appropriate literature has been burned. I am convinced that a diet consisting only of these books will certainly result in a batch of Thunderdome plane crash nitwit children talking about tomorrow-morrow land, a happy place where you can always find the next book in the series.

So, ahem, these types of books were siphoned out for the thrift store. I had my trash bag for broken toys and a bag for recycling all the four million pictures and origami swans and birthday cards from three years ago children enjoy hoarding. Then I started encountering the little bombs here and there. At the top of the bookshelf there was a tomato pincushion that Franny had found in the street on the way home from school, and it was surrounded by dozens of rusty pins (the tomato was wet when she had brought it home, and I kind of pretended none of it was happening, really. Soggy street pin tomato, ugh.) Of course I stuck my hand into the pile of pins when I reached up, and they rained rusty pinny death down on me. Was this an ancient temple or a kid’s room? What next, floor spikes?

Seriously, though, other than that it was not too bad. There was a huge amount of broken stuff, which always amazes me. I think my last contract sapped my energy so much I was not doing regular toy sorts like I used to, so things had built up a bit. One thing that always gets me is the drifts of kid crud that can happen behind dressers. They build up little worlds on the edge of shelves with small dollies and scraps of paper and wee tea sets and animals and a table that is the thingie from the middle of the pizza box and the shelf gets bumped later or there is a fight and it all goes flying into the beyond, to be found and swept up later by me. It always looks the same, too, and seems to be composed of the same stuffs: glitter, loose hot pink boa feathers, plastic play coins, doll leg, 7 Legos, doll house teapot (sans lid), paper scraps, Kleenex with blood (?) on, funky tattoo bandaid, quarter machine rings, googly eye. I think there is some pink fake-fur covered planet somewhere that has this girl crud as a planetary ring.

Wish me luck. Pictures soon. It is a sweet house.