Please forgive my lapse in blogging. We’ve been moving to a new home! We’re going on Day 7 of our move. We started on Saturday and did two full, exhausting days of loading all the furniture and big, heavy stuff into a moving truck. Although my husband and I put a lot of our own brute force (mostly my husband’s, really) into getting stuff around, it’s really amazing how simple tools can do a lot of work for us. A hand truck and a furniture pad were all we used to move lots of very heavy, bulky things. Using these tools and a ramp, we moved at least a thousand pounds of stuff (I’m taking a wild stab in the dark for that number). I wouldn’t have been able to help much without them. Hooray for physics! Not that everything went completely smoothly. When we were trying to get the sofa up the truck’s ramp, my husband ended up getting pinned under the sofa for a short time. Woops.

Now, we’re doing all the follow-up with moving all the remaining little things and with the cleaning. Here’s a tip based on experience: don’t shut off water service until a week after you think you’re going to be done! Silly me. I thought we’d be done on the weekend. We have no running water over there for cleaning.

I’ll be happy and relieved when all the moving, unpacking, and cleaning is all done. The good news is that once everything is all settled, I’ll have a little bit of space that will be my very own, and the activities of my photography studio won’t interfere too much with my family’s space and activities. That’s going to be awesome!

I’m also happy to report that I tossed many volumes of class and thesis notes into the recycling bin. If you happened to read my other blog post about throwing things away, you would understand how much of an accomplishment this was. The notes had been hiding in a dark, spider-webbed corner of the garage. I have to admit that I felt a little regret as I looked through them. Part of my regret came from the fact that these things brought back memories that had been all but erased from my mind. It was just plain cool to remember. Another part of my regret came from the fact that my internal identity was, and maybe still is, so intimately linked with academic success. I can’t lie. I’m a huge nerd, and I definitely had an ego-boost remembering how I rocked this or that assignment. Yet, I don’t see myself re-entering the sciences or academia in the near future. So, this is definitely a good time to move on from these old ideas and create new internal identities, don’t you think?