Sunday, March 4, 2018

Grave Considerations: Moving, Part Two





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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