As time goes by

I just spent about 3 hours cleaning out a portion of my one car garage. My one car garage that has enough shit in it for a 3 car garage, minus the cars. It was dirty and smelly and why, God? Why the silverfish? What purpose do they serve other than eating my precious paper memories and making me squeal with revulsion.

I'm fairly certain one of them made me have a seizure.

In anticipation of putting my condo on the market in January (we've chosen Portland, OR since I keep forgetting to mention that), my condo that is also stuffed to the hilt with crap, I decided we needed to make some room out in the garage before we can do a crap transfer from the house to the garage. (That was one weirdly awkward sentence, sorry.) But before we even got started on that, and despite my ~cough~ debilitating illness, I was up early enough to drag whitey out of bed and to a local discount center we'll call Hellmart to buy more large storage containers to put said crap in. I have been very industrious today for a sick person.

It needed to be done anyway but several factors this week in particular has put the idea of moving as a definite thing. A co-workers husband rendered himself paralyzed from the neck down last weekend from trying to ride a neighbors crotch-rocket motorcycle and after a day of drinking. And another teenager done got himself killed driving his car too fast and into a tree a couple of miles from my house.

After getting the devastating updates about co-workers hubby, and driving past the killer tree every day and seeing hundreds of flowers and kids slumped over on the median crying over their friend, and from sitting in the god damn fuck ass traffic for an hour and a half every night to try and make the 18 mile trek home from work, I've had enough. Time to suck it up and stop being a sissy girl and take the plunge.

I came home on Thursday and said, "Baby, we're going. We're moving just as soon as we can get this house in order and sell it. We're cleaning out the the garage on Saturday working our way through everything else. We're going to Portland sight unseen if we have to. I love you and life is too short. We need a change. We need to carve out a better life to be happier. To be in the position to have the things we want. I need to do something that scares me. Just wanted to keep you in the loop." Then he laughed and said, OK.

And speaking of scary, back to the garage. Let me tell you, it was gee-roce. I threw away a lot of stuff that I could probably sell in a yard sale or give away or keep, but it was so covered with icky garage gunk from sitting there for the last 8 years that I gingerly picked things up with my garden-gloved covered hands and tossed them into garbage bags. And even worse than that, some type of critter (I'm praying it was a bunny) used my space as their own personal penthouse and the, uh, evidence was everywhere.

I'm convinced I now have hantavirus.

I knew what a lot of the boxes and bags contained but after so much time you forget what's really there. It was fun to come across my coveted Barbie camper, which I stupidly covered in stickers thus ruining it because my brain was made of cheese, and the United Barbie's Friend Ship airplane that no other little girl I knew had. I was such a pimp.

I revisited a few of my stuffed animals, thanks for eating the nose off one of my brown bears, "bunny." And found a box of my old school papers and such, complete with report cards. Man, I was a shitty student some of the time. Putting in effort when I felt like it. I'm not dumb, but I can make some lame decisions. I had A+ papers right next to F's. No wonder my parents gave up hounding me about school. What a turd I was.

It was hard work and DIRTY, (where's Mike Rowe when I need him?!?) But it was also fun. Especially when I came across a pile of old clothes and unmentionables that I have no earthly fucking idea why I was holding onto and whitey coined the phrase "20 year-old cunt stain." Let your imagine fly with that one. We're still laughing about it 2 hours later.

I got rid of the equivalent of 6 large trash bags of shit and it wasn't really hard to let any of it go. In fact, it gets easier every time I do this. It also felt good to be one more step towards organization, that elusive little bastard I'm always chasing. And most of all, it made me excited to move. To have a place all our own that we start out together, no one moving in with anyone else. To get our own special spaces decorated with our own personal treasures and to make the shared rooms exactly that way we want them. To make a new life in new place with the person you love. To create a home.

I'm positive this is the right thing to do.