All About Stuff

I think I wrote earlier in this blog that we have decided to move to a new house. We've been living in a lovely older house on a very large lot for the past 15 years or so. At the time we moved into it, it was a great adventure. Our two previous homes were brand new when we bought them. We eventually felt we wanted a change from suburbia to the city and to an older home and neighborhood with all the charm and character we did not have out in the burbs. We had great fun going through the big old house and updating it. I became an absolutely crazed gardener. It wasn't unusual for me to work all week in my business and then spend 12 hours in the garden over the weekend. It was a showpiece. We certainly did fulfill our part of The Gay Agenda regarding the requirements of taking care of an old house!

At this point in our lives we have decided to downsize. I sold my business last fall. Ed is seriously planning towards retirement. I'm still working out of the house, but my pace is a lot slower than it was running that business.

We started out by looking at condominiums in our neighborhood and also downtown. We quickly found out that condos in our neighborhood are ridiculously expensive compared to most of the city and downtown even more so. But then we found a little garden home community just 3 miles away from the house where we live now and fell in love with a house in there. It's a bit smaller than this one, but not by much, and considerably larger than the downtown condos we looked at with prices 3-4 times higher. And to make it even more appealing, the homeowner's association takes care of all the yards, front and back, including the planting and maintenance of all the flower beds they've installed liberally all around the yards. And if I want to continue as a crazed gardener, I can do as much as I want in addition to what they've already done. And, of course, I don't have to do any it of if I decide not to.

The move is 2 weeks off. For the past few weeks we've been going through this house and taking things to the new one bit by bit and deciding what's not going to come with us. One of the things we have loved about this house is a huge storage area. We have really loved it. Our project this morning was to go through it and decide what goes to the new place and what doesn't.

And right now there are about 25-30 lawn and leaf bags sitting out in the alley full of things we don't need, much of which we had totally forgotten about (including 2 dead laptop computers and a dead desktop system).

As I marvelled at the amount of stuff that was stowed away in that area, much of it totally forgotten, I remembered one of my all time favorite comedy routines, George Carlin talking about Stuff.