My wife and I are moving in 20
days. Our cat is moving with us, but he doesn’t seem to be all that concerned
with it. Nor is he doing any work to help us, but I suppose that is to be
expected. We have begun the process of packing, starting with the pieces we
have on display, a very large task for each of us. Last weekend we began boxing
up figures that were still in their packages, things like Masterpiece Transformers and such, which necessitated their
transformations to fit in their boxes. I had a thought as I was transforming
the old MP-06 Skywarp: this figure has moved with me three previous times, and
I was converting him for packaging and transport a fourth time.
And then, I’m packing new things. Things that have never
moved before, because I bought them here. Disassembling and bubble wrapping
Hades and such, boxing up third party figures and practically forced to wonder
if, all those months ago, long before this move was a reality, long before we’d
even seriously begun to consider it, I’d made the right choice in throwing away
all of those boxes I’d been keeping.
We had long been talking about moving, but it was usually
just a thing we were talking about, you know? We wanted to move, for a number
of reasons. Our place had been a bit cramped for a while, probably since our
cat came home to live with us, as suddenly there were three of us. We’d long
since exhausted our storage space here, but frankly, I’d always chalked that up
to the apartment needing a good, thorough, deep cleaning to let us get rid of stuff
that had accumulated over our years of being here. Honestly, part of my
endeavor to throw away empty toy boxes was based on the hope that doing so
would inspire my wife to get in on the action, and that said deep cleaning
would commence, but it didn’t work. Still, I got rid of a bunch of stuff, and
that is usually a positive thing by itself.
By the looks of things, our collective toy collection is
almost completely packed up now, and some real progress has been made packing
our library as well. Once those two parts of our lives are boxed up, everything
else should be easy. And we do still have some time before the big day,
including today, a Sunday, whose plans contain finishing this article, going to
the gym, doing laundry and packing. That’s all I have planned. That does not
sound like too bad a day, and it’s one that could hold quite a lot of
accomplishment as well. Grading papers and work-related things can wait until Monday.
Oh yeah, work. I’ve moved a few times in my live now. I’ve
moved fast, where I sort of knew an apartment was waiting for me, but wouldn’t
know until the morning of that I could move in to it, and then did. I’ve moved
slow, where I knew I was moving, like, at the end of the month, and had plenty
of time to get my stuff together. If I recall correctly, that was also over a
summer, like in July or something, so I had time away from work as well. I’ve
moved at the start of a semester, where we were only two or three at most weeks
in, so things were still relatively light and there was not yet any pile of
grading hanging over my head. But this time, a combination of qualities is
making this move rather tough.
Provided that I get this posted the same day I am writing
it, tomorrow will be Monday, and the start of the seventh week of the Spring
2018 semester. Essays and assignments are pouring in, and I have been falling
behind. That always happens, and I honestly don’t feel bad about it. But this
time, I’m falling behind for moving-related reasons as well. We weren’t
planning on moving now: in a Lyft en route to a Super Bowl party, I turned to
my wife and said something about moving. I forget how the conversation went,
but it was more or less along the lines of we should start looking for a new
place, maybe for the later spring or early summer. My wife immediately began
looking at listings on her phone and found a few. Later that week, I was
arranging viewings; early the next week, we saw a couple places; the next
night, we were approved for the place we are moving to. Life really does come
at you fast. I’m not sure if “we’re looking to move at the end of March,” the
line I’d tell agents on the phone to set up showings, was really true or just a
ploy, but we looked at our schedule, saw that two of our three Spring Breaks
coincided at the end of March, and determined that, if we were going to move at
the end of March, we actually could do so. And, it wouldn’t jeopardize C2E2,
just two weekends after our move. So it started as kind of a nice idea and
something that we’d been wanting to do, and rapidly became something that,
every morning when I wake up and shuffle bleary-eyed around with my coffee, be
it weekday or weekend, I look at things and say, “I will box that up today,”
because our time is running out.
The semester is making this more difficult, because work is
a huge drain on time. As instructors, my wife and I face that lovely scenario of
having so much work to do that we usually do need to bring it home with us. Ah,
I remember being a fresh-faced middle school teacher at the start of my journey
as a professional educator, sitting at the desk in my classroom at like 5pm on
a Wednesday, grading assignments, because I was dead set on not taking work
home with me. I didn’t want my work life and my real life to contaminate each
other. I did pretty well with that for many years, but since I’ve been teaching
college, a lot of the free time I’d have during work hours is sucked up by
driving to my next school, and I amass a lot of work that needs to be graded
attentively, so I can’t just leave it all for office hours the next day. Each semester
I make this attempted promise that I won’t work on weekends, and so far, the
best I’ve been able to manage is that I don’t check my email on weekends, at
least not with any seriousness. That was a change I made about a year ago for
mental stability reasons. There’s no feeling in the world like saying something
multiple times in class on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday, and then
getting an email on Saturday that runs along the lines of “Hi professor, I’m
pretty sure you said [insert the opposite of whatever was said repeatedly], so I
just wanted to make sure.”
Anyway, the result of moving at this point in the semester,
and by all metrics unexpectedly, is that at-work hours have become frenzied
scrambles of grading. I had a class on Friday that ended five minutes early,
and I tried to grade assignments in those five minutes. I am incredibly glad
that I am not teaching the dreaded and hated Nine Classes this semester, because
I do not know how I’d handle that much work and a move. I have taught nine
classes in a semester three times in my collegiate career, and have barely made
it out in tact each time. (for reference, the normal, calendar year workload of
a full time college professor is eight classes. I do that every semester. –mr)
Nine classes mean that every moment you’re not at work or driving between jobs,
you’re grading something, or sleeping off a migraine. Time is completely taken
up by work, constant, unforgiving, unyielding work, and there is no way that I could
come home from that and put things in boxes. But, I’m not doing that this
semester, and thank goodness.
I know that this was not anything focused on figures, or the
other pursuits of this blog. I wanted to write up a series of entries chronicling
the activity of moving a large toy collection, and I ended up using this piece
of it to just ramble. But, it was what I needed right now, so it’s what I did. I
am trying to keep the Coffin moving while we are moving, and fortunately I had
taken a lot of pictures back in January, before the semester began, so I can do
some writing even as things get put in boxes and sealed away for the next three
weeks. I wanted to talk about, in this very entry, thoughts and feels that come
with moving some pieces for the fourth time, and I have aspirations of getting
the first of the TFC Toys Seacon articles up later this week. I also have a full MakeToys Quantron set
on the way, and that should be here Thursday. I’m real happy about that: I have
been looking around our apartment at the dwindling number of available figures
to mess with and getting sadder and sadder. That’s one of the real big
negatives of moving a large toy collection: it winds up being the stuff that is
packed first, because it is nonessential to daily life. If Life really teaches
us anything, it is that happiness and well-being are totally optional luxuries
that you can want, but seldom can have. How can you have any pudding if you don’t
eat your meat?
More to come, and hopefully more on-topic.
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