satisfaction

I have a vague sense of My work here is done.

It's not, really -- it's just that I feel like I accomplished something today.

The beach car has sprung some sort of a coolant leak, so we couldn't go to the beach today; this morning's thunderstorms didn't help, either. It was so steamy this afternoon that I desperately wanted to go, but no, not today.

So instead I cleaned closets. Really what I did was move stuff out of upstairs closets into the closets downstairs that are for more general long-term storage. This makes sense to me because there are people actually living in the bedrooms now, and there will soon be even more people, and it will be nice to actually be able to use the closets in the bedrooms this year. (I wasn't kidding about the amount of stuff in this house. Really.)

The biggest accomplishment actually involved moving something into a closet: the big stack of shelves+cabinets ("the unit") that holds the prodigious video collection. No one has watched a tape in years, yet my mother balks at off-loading them somehow. That's fine, I say, gritting my teeth for the third year in a row, but there is too much furniture in this room if three people are sleeping in here and it's holding five people's worth of stuff, so how about I move this cabinet into the closet?

Mom was skeptical, but I accomplished this tremendous feat by moving the toy box downstairs into the newly re-done play room, huzzah!

It's passing ridiculous that I should be so happy to have moved that unit, but I am totally psyched. I don't have to look at it anymore! You know what they say: out of sight, out of mind. If I don't have those tapes staring me in the face every day of the summer, if I don't have to constantly navigate around that unit, why -- it's as if they're already gone.

There's still more work to be done, of course. But I have to get the beach car checked out first, because I need transportation. Every year I think I should rent a car and every year I decide not to spend the money and make do with the beach car. In other words, I cheap out. It seems weird to say but being here does save us quite a bit of money, the beach being infinitely less expensive than day camp and all the other activities the kids would be enrolled in, were we still in AZ. I'm so profligate in everything else I do, I like it that I can actually spend less money for at least a few weeks a year.

I must give more serious thought to this question for next year, though, because having only an old (old - 1993!) car with no A/C really does put a damper on any travel plans.

In the meantime, I must take this creaky bod of mine off to bed.