A beach free of footprints

I’m a little lost this weekend. It’s the same old New Year blues that hits me as predictably as the battery on my camera running out just before the cats do something that absolutely needs to be captured for posterity.

This time of year is a beach fresh at low tide. The water has gone out. Nobody has walked on the sand yet. There’s shells and pebbles and seaglass scattered about. The temptation is to wander aimlessly, gathering what things happen to come within reach until the tide comes back in and the cycle starts fresh. If I start off aimlessly though, I might miss something important. So I’ll scan the span of the new year’s land, and I’ll look for the conches and driftwood and tidepools. The time for planning and resolving comes later, after I’ve learned a bit about the lay of the land. I just have to remember not to take too much time doing it though. That tide starts coming back in faster each year, and I want a chance to walk where I wish, and see what I want before the cycle of the day and the pull of the moon starts the whole sequence over again.

I stopped by the liquor store today and picked up seven boxes to start packing stuff. Not a lot of boxes, I know, but that was all the boxes they had that were worth taking. Besides, it was raining, and I didn’t feel like making a lot of trips back and forth between the booze store and my car. When I got home, I packed all seven boxes full of books. Books are good things to move first, because they are naturally stackable. I’ll be able to take them to the new digs after work tomorrow, unload the boxes, and then bring the boxes back home and repack them with more books tomorrow night. I’m hoping that by doing this I’ll have moved virtually all my books by the end of the week. Next weekend I plan to start moving stuff in earnest. I want this move to go as easily as possible, which means getting as much done in advance as possible. I worry that the January weather will not cooperate with my plans, and that I’ll be prevented from making evening or weekend runs to the new townhouse for at least of a handful of days leading up to the move on the last weekend of the month.

The first load of books packed left about a third of my downstairs bookcase space empty. The Little Grey Shit immediately had to check out the now accessible shelves, and spent perhaps half an hour jumping up and down to the various empty niches. Clueless was intrigued too, but more by LGS’s activity than by the open shelves. At several points I looked over to see LGS on an upper shelf with CW on the shelf under her, looking up and trying to bat at her. I may feel a little aimless this weekend, but the cats have their agenda down pat.

I spent a lot of time wandering shops today. It was, for the most part, aimless ambling, and not the club-it-over-the-head-and -drag-it-back-home shopping that I usually prefer. I really wasn’t shopping today so much as visiting museums of modern culture. I don’t have the money to do impulse shopping, so on the face of it my potential foray into post-Christmas commerce probably wasn’t the most intelligent way to spend the last day of my three-day weekend. But the Socialist is now solidly into his vampire schedule, and I wanted to spend the day among people, even if I wasn’t socializing. (Rereading that I realize I made a very bad and totally unintentional pun. Do not feel obligated to laugh.) I stopped at the local Starbucks and spent an hour nursing a sugar-free mocha latte while reading my new Stephen Donaldson book. I went to a local shoe warehouse and made a game of trying to find all the shoes in my size (6 1/2 D). There were two pairs, in case anyone wants to know. I went to a couple of discount clothing stores, and ended up buying a really nice harlequin diamond print blouse for a price that was low enough that I don’t need to worry about what will happen to it if I wear it to work (bad things tend to happen to good clothes at my place of employment). I stopped by a local crafts place and looked for a beginners book on knitting, but didn’t find one.

LGS has evidently tired of the newly emptied bookshelves and climbed into my lap to curl up and fall asleep during the last paragraph. Having a cat in my lap can make me feel centered as few other things do in life. I make life too complicated. The hell with metaphorical footprint-free beaches. It really does just boil down to a cat on the lap.