Shining.

Apologies to those of you reading Misspent Youths. I entered the dates wrong on a couple of the recent entries and they failed to post as expected. I’ve fixed that. The pages should post on Tuesdays as scheduled from now on. (Thanks to Nick for pointing the problem out.)

I’ve also cut the prices for Misspent Youths 2 – 5. I’m more interested in having people read them than in trying to make a profit on them. Clearing out a little space in my overstuffed apartment would be nice too. I’m going to be adding a listing selling all four issues for $10 once I’ve got my home computer web-enabled again.

I finished In The Days of the Comet last night. The earth passes through the tail of comet and a green gas puts all living things to sleep. When they awake, what happens? Is the world overrun with zombies? Do all the animals start talking and hunting down humans? Does humanity gain awesome psychic powers?

Nah.

I don’t know what happens to the rest of the animal population but humanity wakes up and … is Enlightened. Everybody gets together and starts building a socialist utopia. The hero rejects his lover and then, as he becomes more enlightened, his limited picture of love expands enough to include her as she is. Happy ending.

– I seem to be losing weight. Or at least getting thinner. I’m tucking in my shirts and tightening my belt because my pants have been looser lately. I haven’t had a plan for this. I suppose I’ve gotten a bit more exercise what with all the lifting and shifting involved in moving. And I think I’m eating less now than I was at this time last year. But it’s just something that’s happened rather than something I set out to do.

– I’m recovering from a cold. Happens the same way every time. First I get a scratchy throat. That lasts a day or two. Then my nose gets very productive in the snot department. That’s another two or four days. Then I feel mostly okay but I keep coughing for the next week or two. I’m in the coughing phase now.

– I’ve been reading H.G. Wells lately. I’ve got a collection of his science fiction novels and I’m going through the ones I haven’t read before. So far that’s The Invisible Man, First Men in the Moon and Food of the Gods. I’m surprised by Wells’ sense of humor, especially in the latter two books. The Invisible Man is a little dull – perhaps because I knew how the story would turn out and perhaps because not much happens. Griffin, the inventor of the invisibility process, is a pathetic sort of maniac. Being invisible requires being naked and being naked in the English weather is really uncomfortable. He spends a good amount of his time trying not catch cold. Moon and Food are more fun, partly because I was less familiar with them and partly because a lot more happens. Food especially was a surprise since there haven’t been any (anywhere near faithful) movie adaptations of it. In The Days of the Comet is next.

– My work is moving. Bleah. Moving myself is annoying enough. Moving the place I work … very low on my list of enjoyable activities. The good thing is that once we’ve moved we probably won’t do it again before I’ve moved on to another job.

Nizzibet loves the new place. I’m sure she’ll love it more when everything is unpacked and organized but even in its current state of chaos she finds the apartment cozy and restful.

Paliki, almost surprisingly, also seems to enjoy herself. She’s spent the last 12 years as an indoor/outdoor cat. The last few months at the old house she was much more outdoor than indoor. She’d show up in the morning, eat, go out and then find a place to sleep until dinnertime, come in, eat and then she’d go out until morning. We didn’t put her out, she went, she ran. We’d usually have to call her to come in. She’d often stalk back and forth in front of the open front door, meowing, not going away and not coming in. She didn’t seem to want to interact with us much. We were worried that she’d freak out being trapped in this relatively small space with us.

Maybe it’s a matter of finally finding a space that fit the cat. There’s no competition with other cats here. She’s past her hunting and climbing days. She mostly slept when she was outside. There are lots of nooks and crannies to hide in here. And she gets petted. She loves to be petted. She’s always loved to be petted. I guess she’d forgotten how much she loved it in the last few months.

During most, if not all, of our sojourn at 8046 Earl NW there was a light on. Nizzibet liked it that way. The house had multiple rooms and odd corners and an upstairs and downstairs and was full of stuff to bump into and trip on. Nizzibet liked to have a light to guide her and wake her up.

Last night I left a front door key on a kitchen counter, wrote a note for the landlord regarding stuff that still needs to be disposed of and turned out all the lights on my way out the door.

Peace and thank you to everyone we shared the house with over the last decade –
Paliki
Scary
Chainsaw
Shep Hendrix
Pia Guerra
Ryan Proctor
Helen Ingersoll
Jason Oxrieder
Jonathan Williams
Lori Alexander

So it goes and it goes ever onward.

There are many ways to get rid of unwanted things.

One way is to simply throw them in the trash. This is good for things that have outlived their usefulness or just don’t work anymore (like old computer cables or mismatched tupperware). It’s also a way to get rid of small items that you don’t want to spend time trying to find a new home for (like packages of nails or screws or fish food).

Another way to get rid of things is to sidewalk them – put them out next to the sidewalk with a “free” sign on them. Interested parties can then simply walk off with the items they fancy. This works for larger items like chairs or shelves or potted plants. It’s not so good for very large items like couches or mattresses. It can be especially bad for couches or mattresses if they get rained on. Nobody wants a soggy place to sit or sleep.

A third alternative is to list your items on Freecycle. You say you’re offering something and interested people let you know they want it and they come take it off your hands. This lets more people know you have something available than if you sidewalked it and it keeps items out of the rain until they are picked up. It’s not a perfect system – people are involved. Sometimes they decide they don’t want an item after all. Sometimes they say they want something and then keep not showing up for arranged pickup times. But heck, you get to get rid of stuff. Maybe you could sell it but, if you’re like me and you got most of your furniture for free, giving stuff away is fun. (And the amount of money I might make selling the stuff is minimal at best.)

The house is almost empty. I’ve got to do some touch up painting on Sunday.

The cat moves to the apartment on Monday. Monday and Tuesday nights will be cleaning days with Wednesday held in reserve if absolutely necessary.

At the same time I need to spend a little time every day getting shelves set up and having books tossed on to them. Yay!

The move is not completed. The old house still needs cleaning and there’s furniture that must be sent to new homes. The bookcases and the zillions of books that live on them? Those got moved this Sunday. Many, many, many thanks go to Jeff and Teresa, Maya and Terra, and Jason and Emily for all their help. The move took about four and a half hours.

The second bedroom at the apartment is filled with boxes. Getting to the closet is a job for a chimpanzee. The porch is a full of bookcases stacked two high. I’ll be alternating mating books with shelves at the apartment with doing the final empty of the house throughout the week. Sometime in there we’ll need to kidnap the cat, get her flea dipped and then bring her home. She’ll LOVE that.

Haymaker

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.

You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.

Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.