Moving 1: Packing

Packing up to move:  that week of your life when all table and floor space is taken up by stuff, stuff, and more stuff, leaving you to try to find a place to eat dinner by burrowing a small hole down to the surface of the sofa.  

Packing up to move is a Janus coin in every sense:  it's sad to leave one place, but exciting to go to another; along with dust and cobwebs behind cabinets are found beloved photos thought to have disappeared forever.   

Our movers are packing for us, but preceding that obviously comes a sorting and cleaning period: getting rid of unwanted stuff, cleaning up so that the packers take good care of our wanted objects.

By 10 am the first day, I couldn't help but laugh.  Far from finding any adorable forgotten photos, beloved cat toys, or unused gift certificates, I had found the following:  12 cell phone chargers and 3 cell phones, multiple secret stashes of expired amoxicilin, many unidentifiable pieces of plastic probably meant to mount stuff on furniture, and cat pee behind the television.  This was not the nostalgic experience that I had imagined.  

A little later on in the day, I found a roll of film.  I knew it was mine, because the label was in english, but I had no recollection of what the pictures could be of

.  Plus, the film expired in 2008.  I hurried over to the photo place.  At no extra charge, the photos would be ready by evening.  So exciting!  These could be pictures from Brown, or Spain, or who knows? The lady said because the film was expired, they might not come out.  I left, a little nervous, a little excited.  This could be my great find of the move.

Back at home, to kill time and to take a break from sorting electrical cables, I started in on my ikea hack:  a cat box cabinet.  The idea is that instead of hiding the cat box behind a piece of furniture, as we currently do, we'll hide the cat box in a piece of furniture.  Since France hasn't caught on to this idea yet (amazing for a nation of apartment dwelle

rs), and since I'm not paying to ship already overpriced cat furniture here from the US, I've decided to do a little hack on a really cheap ikea cabinet, by cutting a hole /cat door in the side

and then sticking the litter box inside.  The cabinet will be mounted on side rails with a little shelf on top of it, and we'll paint it.  So it'll be a cute cabinet with a bucketload of potpourri on top of it.  (We'll be putting one of those covered, odor-absorber cat bo

xes in there so

 hopefully it won't actually smell.)

Wanna see my super-pro woodworking workshop?

I'll admit, there was a moment when I was there, with the jigsaw, in my sunglasses, trying to balance the board on top of the two chairs, when I thought I should really have another person here while I do this.  But then I thought, naaah, and just went ahead.  Luckily, I still have all my fingers.

At first I wanted to cut the hole in the middle of the board, but then I didn't have any other tools and I didn't want to risk messing up the borrowed jigsaw, so I 

went for a side corner door.  I hope that the thing will still stand up correctly when assembled:

After that was done, I spent an hour killing time by dustbusting cat hair from under furniture. 

Finally it was time to go get my photos.  After getting a long lecture from the photo lady about how to properly store used film, and hearing about how much work it took her to color correct the expired film for the skin tones, I finally paid for my photos and got out of there.  I opened them on the street, obviously.

I had been hoping to see some long-lost friends, some park I used to hang out at, some party I'd totally forgotten about.  Is that what I got?  No.  What I got was 4 pictures of my sister grimacing at me, one out of focus picture of the sides of my nephew and niece's heads, and twenty-one pictures of my parents sitting on a bench in front of a wall.  Obviously my hidden moving treasure still waits to be found.