Movin' Out

Yet again, gentle readers, I come before you with hat humbly in hand, begging your forgiveness for the month-long drought between posts. If nothing else, take comfort that for once there's a good reason for my absence, beyond just Resident Evil 5 really needing to get beat or whatever. Ann and I recently had our bid accepted on a house, to which we will be moving at the beginning of next month. It's a source of great excitement for us, as you might imagine, but also more than a little stress due to the need to pack up, you know, every damn thing we own. As you might expect if you know us, we have entirely different styles of going about this packing. It will shock you to learn that I have a tendency to procrastinate on packing -- more than once in college my parents and sister found themselves helping me box stuff up on move-out day because I assumed I'd have enough time to put everything I owned into boxes in the two hours between waking up and when they got there. Not... so much. Fortunately I largely learned my lesson those first two years and have gotten much better about it since.

However, Ann comes down on the opposite end of the spectrum- we're still three weeks away from closing and it'll be even longer than that before we start moving most of the stuff, but she's already stressed that we've fallen behind. (We have not, I'm happy to report.) This has led to some, er, fun exchanges. My favorite is the most recent one, wherein she asked me when I would finish packing the last books from my bookshelves. Now, the shelves were about 98% empty at that time; the only things not packed were those books I thought I might conceivably want to read between now and then. Which I explained to Ann, prompting her to exasperatedly ask, "Can't you just go for three weeks without reading something?"

Now, perhaps you are not like me, friends. Perhaps that seems like a reasonable request to you. Perhaps right now you're thinking, "Yeah, Drew, geez... three weeks, big deal. You owe her that much. Slacker." If so, we are very different people. I'm a voracious reader (and trust me, that's as much a liability as a point of pride), and the thought of going three days without having something to read is enough to instill a sense of nigh panic in me. Three weeks? Is she serious? It turns out she was, at which point I formulated the compromise of packing my last few books in an open box and not taping it closed, that I might access them at will in the days to come. I think that solution met with Ann's approval -- the shelves are clear, after all -- but seriously, three weeks? You people only know me through the internet and you knew that wasn't going to fly. It's like she forgets who she married sometimes.

As one final addendum to my last post, allow me to offer that my quandary is over: from now on it's just a $2 tip, no guilt felt. Why, you may ask? For the simple reason that the Hair Cuttery raised their rates yet again, only a couple of years after the last time I recall them doing so. Cuts are now $15, and if you think I'm paying $18 just for someone to run a set of clippers over my head, you are crap-your-pants crazy, my friend. I do feel bad for the actual hair cutters -- I know it's not their fault their employer decided to up the price, and I sincerely hope at least some of that money is reflected in their salaries -- but if the price is going up by two bucks, my tip is not increasing to match it. Sorry, them's the breaks.