So the movers showed up on Monday and boxed up our house:

(That guy, over on the right? That’s Darin, working throughout the chaos. He has focus.)

The movers came back on Tuesday and took everything:

Sophia, Simon, and I were not there through this hilarity. We were at Disneyland:

Darin stayed at home and—yes, you guessed it—worked through the entire nonsense of movers taking all of his stuff away. How he does that, I have no idea.

We’ve spent the last several days working our way up the coast, stopping in Santa Barbara and Monterey. Now we’re in the Bay Area and I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet. As in, we’re here now. Every so often I find myself on the verge of crying and I find myself shaking it off. Crying about what? Yes, we’ve left a lot of friends and a great area to move to a great area with a lot of friends.

I’ll save the crying for after a few days of having the kids all to myself with no breaks.

I also saw the house today—Darin drove me around the neighborhood and then we stopped at the house. The owner was there, washing his car, and he gave me a tour while Darin stayed with the kids. (The guy’s a career cop, and he’d noticed us driving by before, on a day when there were lots of cars driving around because of the incredible number of yard sales. Spooky.)

I love the house. I love the neighborhood. Darin did good.

But I’m completely knackered and this is the easy part, because Darin and I have gotten to tag-team the kids all week. What happens on Monday, I ask you, when it’s me and two kids and Darin’s off in the office taking it easy?¹

Well, we have plenty of errands to do, that’s for sure. I just have to remind myself that this is a big adventure.

¹ For some definition of “easy” that encompasses “Suddenly becoming a manager of a giant, high-profile project at a high-profile company.”

A few weekends ago Michele and I took a one-day course at UCLA Extension entitled “Finding and Working with the Right Literary Agent for you.” Since the total amount of novel-writing I’ve done in the past three months approaches zero, I looked at this primarily as a reason to get together with Michele and think about writing some. I didn’t expect to learn anything.

One of my nervous tics during a class like this is to observe other people in the class and do character sketches of them, describing their persons and personas. I always focus on the Loudmouths, the ones who believe they’re in a seminar of one and try to hog the teacher’s attention. And the prime Hog this time was a character all right—at one point, while the Hog was going on and on about something in her nasal, grating voice, I leaned over to Michele and said, “Do you know the character Pat from Saturday Night Live?” (Sadly, she doesn’t.)

Anyhow, as I was attempting to observe “Pat” surreptitiously to write down her description, I realized that I couldn’t see her very clearly. The only way to see clearly enough was to squint, and there’s no such thing as surreptitious squinting—go ahead, give it a try, I dare you.

I guess moving has been good for me. I’ve woken up and smelled the espresso about needing to get back into shape, and that day I got a wake-up call about my eyesight.

Which was disappointing to say the least, given that six years ago I had LASIK surgery. Now, it was something of a medical miracle that my eyesight could be corrected in the first place, because I went from -12 diopters with astigmatism (which is the technical term for “blind as a bat”) to 20/20. Well, 20/25, but close enough for government work.

I went to the optometrist (where I haven’t been since 1998, it seems) and got my eyes checked: they’re at -1.25. I got myself a new pair of glasses yesterday and yup, I was in serious denial about how bad my eyesight had gotten. I must have been straining my eyes really hard to see clearly. I could read signs a block and a half away, whereas before I had stopped trying to read them.

All of my old psychological wounds about wearing glasses have resurfaced—I got called “Four Eyes” more than a few times. I suppose I can get contacts again, even disposable ones this time, which I certainly couldn’t get with a -12 prescription. My inner moppet is screaming, “NO! They said no more glasses and no more contacts and I don’ wanna!” I look at Fia and Simon and wonder if I’ve cursed them with my eyesight. If in a few years they’re going to have to start braving the Four Eyes label.

Evidently Apple covers LASIK now, but do I really want to have that procedure again, if my eyes are just going to keep changing? Is this just vanity on my part? Or should I just get the contacts and be done with it?

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.