Actually, “Blues” isn’t the right emotional color. I’m not particularly depressed about moving, I just rather wish it was done with.  Is there a color for apathy-trending-towards-frustration?  Let’s call it orange.  I’ve got the moving oranges.

I haven’t quite got the knack of packing everything I own up into boxes and moving it all in one trip.  This move, like our last, has been a constant stream of boxes being packed, moved, sometimes unpacked and the boxes emptied for another trip.  This is nice because it lets us save money on boxes and because it means that we’re able to take it slow.  On the other hand, it’s not especially good practice for making a Serious Move if we ever have to make one of those.

Our last move used two 10-foot U-hauls, one 14-foot U-haul, and an awful lot of back-and-forth in our little Mazda hatchback.  This move so far has taken one 10-foot U-haul, will probably take one more 10 or 14-foot U-haul for the last couple Big Heavy Things, and will also necessitate renting a van to move the TV.  We’re moving out of this apartment, a year after moving into it, with a lot less stuff, which is a good feeling.

One particular goal I mentioned here about a year ago was to thin out the comics collection dramatically, and I’ve managed that.  We moved into this apartment with 22 longboxes of comics (and three or four shortboxes of silver age or odd-format comics) and we’re moving out with eleven shortboxes worth.  A very very small part of that reduction in space was selling some of the silver age comics to a local shop.  The majority has come from opening boxes of comics, deciding what we absolutely want to keep, and taking the remaining comics out of their protective bags – complete with acid-free-backing-boards – and tossing them into the apartment complex’s recycling bin.  I’m guessing that I’ve sent about 3000 comics off to be turned into tomorrow’s newspaper, and even if we only spent a couple of bucks per it’s still pretty depressing.

Hmm.  That would be blues, I suppose, but it doesn’t properly reflect my mental state.

Anyway, bitching aside, there are a bunch of upsides to moving.  For one, I get to pretend that this time, this move, we’re going to wind up with a place to live in which everything Has A Place and everything is In Its Proper Place.  I know it won’t ACTUALLY work out that way, but for now I can have my illusions.

Also, we’re moving from an apartment into a house.  I got to walk through our new backyard yesterday, after paying some Neighborhood Youths to cut the grass, and marvel at the fact that I was walking through a backyard, with a fence all around it dividing Our Space from Our Neighbors’ Spaces.  It was a pretty neat feeling.

And, it is a bigger place than we have now.  There’s less closet space, I think, but the only reason we need closets is to stick Stuff in them and forget about it, and I’m trying to eliminate that, so it might actually be an upside.

My wife has a great space for her home office, and I have been allocated a room for my mancave that I am turning into a Thing of Beauty.  Once it’s all set up, I will post gloating pictures, and everyone can see them and say things like “what’s the big deal?  It’s just a room full of fanboy crap.”

But it will be glorious.

I’ve also been playing through the Orange Box, starting with Half Life 2.  I first played HL2 courtesy of Valve’s port to the original Xbox and quite enjoyed it, but going through it again on a modern PC in a decent resolution with all the pretty effects is ALMOST like playing a brand new game.

That having been said, the vehicle segments are annoying me more this time; I just want them to end.  I’ve decided that I’m going to play through the Episodes for the first time after finishing HL2, and I’ve been warned that Episode 2, at least, is full of annoying vehicle segments, so I approach it with just a touch of trepidation.