Temporary Fix

I wanted to take a picture of my current situation, but I can't find the camera.
It's somewhere here- somewhere behind the 300 boxes (not an exaggeration) littering our small rental house.

We are renting a house in Texas, until our house in California sells. Actually, we decided to rent even when we thought we had sold our house, but that's neither here nor there. It will give us time to get our bearings- relearn the neighborhoods, get a lay of the land, so to speak.

Except the lay of the land is dirty. Renting a house is dirty business. Yesterday, I cleaned someone else's fingernails out of a drawer. SOMEONE THAT IS NOT RELATED TO ME. I think I will have nightmares about this for the rest of my life.

In other news, our stuff arrived on the day they said it would. I have been married 14 years, and out of those 14, I've moved 7 times. That's an average of one move every two years. This is the first time my stuff has arrived on time.

The moving truck showed up two days ago- at 8am. It was a balmy 76 degrees- with a big Texas blue sky, littered with fluffy, white clouds. Off in the distance, you could see a few grey clouds- but really nothing to speak of. I thought to myself, "Hey! This isn't so bad! Where's the humidity?"

They started to bring the stuff in. It's fun seeing your stuff come off the truck. You exclaim as you recognize each piece- it's almost like Christmas morning-but instead of wrapping paper, your stuff is entrenched in awkward blue moving blankets. I had a great crew- one guy used to play the drums for the Temptations. Another guy, named DJ, could lift a mattress like it was piece of paper.

After lunch, we started to lose our steam. By "we", I mean the crew- because yours truly was parked in a lawn chair- ticking off box numbers as they paraded by. The air started to get thicker, the grey clouds began to outnumber the white ones. I suddenly got nervous. It was going to rain- pour, judging by the looks of things. My kitchen and bedroom had boxes stacked to the ceiling. My house began to look more like a storage facility, and I could only imagine the work ahead of me.

I don't mind moving, I really don't. I mean, I don't "enjoy" it- but I do get a high out of the organizing that takes place as you prepare. The sorting of the junk drawers- the cleaning of the closets. It's the same with laundry. I don't mind doing laundry. I love emptying the hamper- throwing them in, starting a load. But I absolutely detest putting laundry away. Almost as much as I hate unpacking a box. Any box. And now, I've got 300 of them, staring me down.

So, forgive the lack of pictures. Once I find the camera, I'm hopeful the amount of boxes will be less than a hundred, and that our current digs will resemble more of a cozy, temporary place to rest our heads- instead of one of those pods people use to store their stuff. Because right now, it's Chez Storage Facility.