Taxicab Depressions

I mentioned before that I was moving at the end of February; it turned out to be the end of March. My ace real estate agent wife found a nice 3 bed, 2 bath, 1800 sq ft house in a really great neighborhood at an excellent price, that has a 17×15 “utility room” with the water heater and washer/dryer hookups against one wall, and a 17×11 detached wooden shed/mancave, with a shingled roof and a newfangled window unit air conditioner with a remote control. It blows really cold on “Energy Saving” mode. Now we have a bedroom for us, a bedroom for my daughter, and an office for my wife with a door that closes.

Alas, I have been banished to the laundry room and the shack out back, but I’m OK with that. Sharing my office space with the washing machine is a small price for 442 square feet of “my space” to put my tools and crap. The newer 16 SEER AC unit blows really cold in here, closest to the air handler, and the spare fridge with my beer is a short six-foot coast in my wheeled office chair, no need to get up. I need some room; not only do I have a lot of crap of my own, but when my old man died, the bulk of my inheritance was a shitload of tools, things I’ll probably never use… tap and die sets, pulley pullers, angle grinders, cut-off saws, all sorts of crap. But even with all these brutal tools, my Dad was into making dollhouses, with scale, functional wood cabinets and four-inch tall dressers with drawers that opened, so now I also have all sorts of tiny little files and chisels and a 6×6 inch table saw. I have a lot of things I can’t even identify… I’ll pick up some odd-shaped metal object and say out loud, “What the hell is this, and what does it do?”

I have tools to fix tools, and for the first time, I have a place to put them that isn’t a garage stuffed so full a car can’t get in… pretty stoked about that.

The rental we were in had a pool, which is nice on a hot Florida afternoon, but I have learned that a pool is a part-time job all to itself. I’ll miss it, but I’m grateful to have that time back. I am working on a real essay, one I hope to finish in a few days, but again, I can’t promise that. There’s still boxes everywhere, I have to lay some flooring in my daughter’s room, the yard is a disaster, just terribly, terribly disorganized. I can’t locate a box that contains framed photos and a clock radio, we seem to have mysteriously lost our large crockpot, and I’m using things like this for a doorstop.

But I am trying. Stay with me…