Of course I got up an hour late, forgetting I wanted to throw the “crap” into that dumpster on the sidewalk I pass on my way to breakfast, and they'd already come by and emptied it. Foolish of me, but the “crap” fits easily into the trunk of the car and can sit there without problem until next Wednesday. They do roll around fairly often. Weekly, in fact.

Still a head of steam. The idea is to go to Bed, Bath & Beyond this morning to pick up a set of plastic storage boxes of various sizes and move some of the computer electronic gear - cables, tools and such) out of their current larger boxes and sort them into more rational boxes in which I could find things if I needed them. And, in the process, clean up, straighten up and open up all that much more space. And get rid of the stuff I no longer need or that no longer plugs into anything anymore as it long ago became obsolete.

So, we'll see. I haven't done this in a very long time. Maybe the head, aching and all that in a physical sense, is coming together at another level and life now can proceed. Or move forward. Or something similarly silly. Interesting, anyway. To me.

As I mentioned: to breakfast and the papers, over then to the WiFi café for what is, I hope, the next to last trip in order to access the Internet, the AT&T people due Friday morning. There's evidently a plumber coming today to fix something or other in the building and my apartment manager has arranged for him (I say him, but it could be a her) to fix the on-off gizmo in my bathroom sink that's been broken now since I can no longer remember. It works, but it looks pretty funky. Good. Kismet, maybe. Many things destined to come together. More rationality in the universe. Well, not “rationality” as such. More order of a kind that allows you to spread your wings and fly.

Fly where? Fly what?

Fly to shoot more pictures and write more journal entries, of course. Start and finish these writing projects I've been putting off, deadlines approaching. Do exactly what I'm doing, except actually do them with more gusto and remain open to other avenues should they be revealed. The usual hup! hup! stuff I write about, but do nothing about, here day in and day out. We're not talking about discovering the end of the rainbow here. This is the end of the rainbow, it's just we get sloppy and forget. (Hup! Hup!)

Later. A trip to Bed, Bath etc. where I picked up a total of eleven plastic storage boxes in three different sizes and three bath towels they had on sale. I wasn't thinking towels, but I was lucky to get out with just that as they had other “clever I've not seen before things” the average guy obviously needs to have in his house. Best I not return for a while unless it turns out I need more storage and then, I suspect, I'll go zip over later this afternoon.

Bed, Bath etc. has a large parking lot behind their building and you have to walk all the way around the block to get to their front door, so, pushing my cart back to the car, I passed an open trash container, quite large, that had a few items sitting in the bottom, Styrofoam and other non-recycleable stuff. Hmm. I loaded the car with the plastic boxes, drove over to the trash container and unloaded the crap I had in the back. Not much crap, looking at it sitting on the bottom of that container, one so large it requires a mechanical lift to unload, but stuff that certainly seemed to take up a lot of space in my apartment.

Now, if they didn't have a video camera watching my every move, something I thought they might, I'm home free, feeling only half guilty. There was stuff already in it, but stuff that could have been put there this morning after pickup, perhaps by a morally challenged person like me, deedle-dee-dee.

Sitting here now at noon, the price stickers and such scrapped off the storage boxes, ready to fill with crap rare and valuable stuff. Time to start? Maybe run a load of laundry instead, get back to this pack and repack later? Am I thinking of ways to slow down this cleaning frenzy? Back into my old funk? Could be. But I doubt it.

Later still. The laundry is done and I've “rearranged” much of my crap into swell, organized by type of crap in the new boxes, the old cardboard boxes in the recycling bin, while a newly assembled box of items to be lost in street side trash containers is now sitting in the car. My, my, but this place looks different. Anyone seeing it for the first time wouldn't be impressed, but I'm impressed as I know what it looked like just yesterday morning.

More of this tomorrow? Who knows? I'm feeling good, but then, for anyone who's read any of these for even a short while, I'm often feeling good on one day followed then by days of sloth. Although, when's the last time I've made this much progress in getting my living space together? I can't remember. I'm hyped, yes, but I think I'm even more curious. How long will this last? If it goes a week or a month my environment might not be recognizable to me or to anyone else.

One odd rush, though, while going through this stuff. I found six dual gauge HO gauge turnouts wrapped up in a section of newspaper at the bottom of one of the boxes. A communication from an earlier era, an earlier set of hobbies. These are specially made by hand turnouts, nicely done, ready to be spiked to ties on a model railroad, six turnouts (sometimes called “switches” because they contain switches, but technically they're turnouts) that I'd purchased while planning to build a model railroad module.

Again, a flash from the past. They're safely stowed away in one of those new plastic storage boxes. Makes me wonder what I have in that storage locker. More “things” from the past, of course. Time to take a look? I'd be surprised. Wouldn't mind being surprised.