One of Sophia’s favorite books currently is There’s A Nightmare in My Closet by Mercer Mayer. In it, a little boy turns the tables on the Nightmare who’s been terrorizing him. Of course, she only asks me to read it during daytime, in the living room. She hasn’t braved it as a bedtime book.

I’ve been having nightmares of my own in regards to closets, albeit of a different variety. I’ve begun going through closets, pitching what I’m absolutely sure I will never wear again and have no desire to see again. The t-shirt from the Fall ’90 Product Intro? Gone. The corduroy shorts? Yuck.

But it just keeps coming.

I filled four black garbage bags full of clothes this afternoon. I have another two in the upstairs guest room. Plus there are probably twenty garments on hangers.

Who knew I had this many clothes? Certainly no one who knows me, since I’m definitely not a clotheshorse.

Of late I had begun making a list of exercise clothes to get before returning to walking/jogging. I discovered this afternoon that I’ve clearly made this list before, because I found the exact clothes I want.

What was scary was how many clothes still had the damn tags attached. And on clothes I would never wear. Did I buy this? Did someone buy it for me? Where did this come from?

And evidently when I was a size 6, I went nuts at the Gap, because I must have had six pairs of jeans in that size. I found sweaters my mother gave me a million years ago. (The pangs of guilt I felt as I put them in the black bags told me why I hadn’t gotten rid of them before. But still. They’re not surviving another move, dammit.)

I went through Sophia’s closets the other day. No wonder I haven’t been able to find any clothes for her either, given how choked her closet was with stuff she grew out of months and months ago. I have ten plastic boxes filled with clothes both tots have grown out of. I didn’t want to do it, but as Darin said, “If we have another one, we’ll get new stuff, okay? Let’s get rid of this.”

I still have to go through the linen closet. I’ve told Darin that my secret desire is to toss all of our towels and buy new ones for the new house, because we have so many towels that have frayed edges. We have towels I originally had when I lived at my parents’s house. These are towels that predate my relationship with Darin by several years. These are ante-diluvian towels, and I understand towel technology has improved somewhat. And if I got new ones, I could color-code them: certain ones go in Mommy and Daddy’s bathroom, certain ones go in the kiddies’s bathroom, others go in the guest bath.

The really big fluffy bath sheets will go in Mommy and Daddy’s bathroom.

What’s annoying the hell out of me about this spring cleaning/packing spree is that I don’t even know what to do with all this stuff I’m throwing out. Yes, yes: take it to Goodwill. But we’re talking several trips with a minivan. Bags and bags and bags of stuff.

I guess moving is good, because it clears out the clutter. But then the clutter just moves somewhere else.

…I’m going to explode, or something. But, you know, in a good way, because change is good.

(Who said that? I want to bop them on the nose.)

I haven’t been posting because I’ve either been too busy or too hyped up or too, well, overwhelmed to proceed.

Last week—the week of getting rear-ended and of having a rock crack the windshield and of discovering we owed taxes and had no money in the bank with which to do so and Sophia was on spring break so I had to scramble to fill up the days—was also the week Darin was away. (You’ll pardon me if I don’t mention little things like his being away when it’s actually happening.) He was up in Northern California, at Apple, doing some business stuff. I don’t know what. That part: not interesting to me.

He also spent some time looking at houses. He didn’t want to; the trip we’d taken in March had been excruciating both in terms of time spent and quality of houses viewed. Before he went up for this business trip I finally gave in and said that we should look in an area that Darin had wanted to look in from the beginning but I hadn’t wanted to because it was too far away from Apple and would be too much of a commute. But the areas we’d looked in during that househunting trip were…how shall I put this…no fucking way. It was time to think outside the box a little.

The first day he was up there—Sunday the 13th—I called him on his cell phone to ask him about something or other. Then I asked about how the house hunting was going.

“Oh wow, really good,” he said, and I could tell from the sound of his voice that the house he’d just seen was It. He looked at a few more houses that week, but he was pretty certain that the house he’d just finished looking at the day I’d called was the one. He went to see it again and was absolutely sure.

So this past week has been spent faxing contracts all over California—

“But Diane,” I hear you say, “when did you get a chance to go up and look at the house?”

If you ever need an example of one spouse’s complete and total trust in the other spouse’s aesthetic taste, just tell them about my complete acceptance of a house 400 miles away. I know what I need in a house; I know that Darin is much pickier both about houses and locations. We had talked (and talked, and talked) quite a bit about must-haves and wants, and from the sound of it this house fulfills most of these needs and wants just fine. So undoubtedly the first time I will see the inside of the house is the day we get the keys, when escrow closes. And that’s okay by me. I guess the universe put out the net or something just in time.

—and picking end of escrow days and setting up inspections hither and yon.

I called my friend E., who’s buying our Los Angeles house, during her vacation to ask her about changing the end of escrow for our end of the deal…and accidentally woke her up. At a quarter to eleven in the morning. Well, she was on vacation, after all. And she doesn’t have kids (or, as we like to call them, the 6 A.M. Gang).

We only have a couple more weeks in LA. I can’t believe it. I keep making lists of things we have to do and things we might want to do and see before we go. And the lists just keep getting longer, as the time gets shorter.