1 October 2003

I had a clean inbox as of bedtime last night, and I have one again now. If you wrote to me and expected a response and didn't get one, your e-mail was probably lost, and you should let me know. Partly it's that I'm trying to stay caught up on that kind of thing before I fall off the electronic face of the earth for awhile. The other part is that a view lines of e-mail is a nice diversion in between wrapping, boxing, and labeling. It's not as much of a commitment as writing a scene of a story, or reading a chapter or two of a book, and if the topic under e-mail discussion is a long-term thought-provoking one, it gives me something else to think about while I'm wrapping, boxing, and labeling.

It's nice. Baseball also seems to work all right, right now. All three of yesterday's outcomes were as I had hoped. (And I'm very glad that Thomas doesn't take a "Love me, love my Braves" attitude to the world.) And I finished The Blue Sword, after having infected Mark and Michelle with the desire to read it, and started The Young Unicorns, and picked at some short stories.

If I finish a story today and send it out to F&SF, and if they have their alas-o-gram quick response, it can still go to my new house. That's how close we are to moving. (Also how close I am to done with this story, if packing doesn't take up all of my time.)

There still seems to be a moratorium on response letters for me. I'd send the stories back out if only I heard back on them. Really and truly I would. I'm ready now. It's all right. And if I didn't have time, I'd just put it on my list for later. It's a good list, quite serviceable in many regards. Sigh. I'm still getting junk mail with my name on it, so I know it's not that the mail has already started delivering to the new place, or that it's getting held up entirely. It's just that nobody is reading and rejecting or accepting my stories.

I packed the last box of books yesterday. Number 44. There are still some books to go in with other things, but boxes just of books are forty-four in number. Plus the books in our backpacks. Plus the books we'll pick up at the folks' house. Plus the books already left at Cal and Bobbie's. We will have, in short, a fair number of books. This is all for the best etc. etc.

Mark and I got the power of attorney stuff taken care of, so even if the papers don't arrive here in time, we can have this house. We went to the bank, because his old bank had a notary public. Our current bank had no such critter, but the One-Hour Photo place across the parking lot did. That struck me as odd somehow, but we took care of what we needed to do and got the power of attorney papers turned back over to FedEx, so our closer should have them tomorrow. Couldn't really have done any better than that.

I don't know for sure when I'll be packing this computer up. I'll have e-mail on one of Mark's laptops until we leave, pretty much, so that's not the question. It's just having this computer with all the templates and setups and stuff. I'll let you know when I've packed it. It'll go on the main journal page. It might be tomorrow, or it might be Friday. I doubt we'll wait until Saturday morning, but I suppose it's conceivable. (The monitors are going in separate boxes, but my computer is going in with Mark's, and there's no sense to packing one and not the other, so if he isn't packing his, I'm not packing mine, either.)

As I noted in an e-mail a couple days ago, we've gotten to be Crazy Eddie's around here. Everything! Must! Go! I've been trying not to make things unlivable here, but that's really not realistic any more. We have walls of cardboard boxes everywhere we turn. We are hemmed in by possessions. We have confirmation numbers and itineraries and maps and directions; we have a bag full of CDs and we have clothes picked out for the next week and then some.

Tomorrow we get a C.J. The day after tomorrow, we get a U-Haul. The day after that, we get Zachary's. And the day after that, we get out. Most of us do, anyway. I'm still fussing about leaving the right stuff with Mark in the right quantities. Making sure things are going to be moderately okay for him, as much as I can. There are about twenty million things going on for all of us, but particularly for Mark. And there's really not much I can do to fix that besides being a sounding board and a packing machine.

We're out of my white cranberry peach juice, and I'm not going to get more here. So it's Timprov's regular old peach juice for me: kind of sweet, after what I'm used to.

We're doing logistics now, planned meal stops where possible. It doesn't seem like Nevada should get to be the exciting state in both directions, but we were thrilled to get there on the way out (because Utah had finally let go of us), and I'm pretty sure we'll be thrilled to get there on the way home. And Wyoming is just a black hole when it comes to stopping places on our way. So. A bit at a time. And now it's time for more bits.