Getting Rid of the Junk

I haven't done a whole lot today, but I have done a few things: replaced a light bulb here and there, straightened up a few spots, read this and that.  But of all I have done, I'm probably most geekily proud of cleaning out the bag that contained the enitre contents of our junk drawer from the old place.  Da Man had put it on the desk in the kitchen to remind him to go through it, but I started while he was making dinner.  There were a lot of expired coupons and instruction manuals for products we don't even own anymore.  There were also some random photos of Auggie and the neighbor kids from back in Ohio.  At one point, Da Man said, "You are just thrilled to be going through all of that right now, aren't you?"

Why, yes, yes I am.  Happy New Year!

No Longer at This Address

My, goodness, the couple who lived here before us received every catalog known to humanity. Catalogs do not get forwarded, which is why they always add "or current resident" to the label. We must have received seventy-five different catalogs in our first month of living here. I've never even seen that much mail come to one location! It's kind of funny, too, because it might explain why we have the biggest mailbox in the group of boxes across the street from us. I didn't think there was any reason for it, but the amount of mail they must have gotten was probably nuts. There are tons from companies I've never even heard of. We now put more catalogs than magazines in recycling each week.

They also receive a lot of Republican-related mail (since that also now goes to "current resident"). There's a rather hotly contested Senate primary for the Republicans in Connecticut, so we're getting fliers we never would be getting otherwise. The ones for the woman running for the slot are rather interesting. And, no, I'm not naming her since she gets enough press. Her campaign is rather prominent. She is part of a business that features well-built men, which I only mention because some of my gay male friends have said they'd be happy to vote for her if it meant they could get private time with John Cena for a few hours. But I digress. I was just struck by the listing on one of her fliers of her social media sites. Sure, all candidates use Twitter and Facebook, but she also has Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace. MySpace is the one that gets me. I thought that was primarily used by independent musicians these days. I can't remember my username or password, so I haven't been back in years, but I thought it was a tad odd for her to have a site there. Maybe it's not, and I have no plans to check it out. It's also clear that she is spending a ton of money on her advertising. Wow, they are huge and incredibly well-designed.

I will be glad when our mail outnumbers theirs, though.

Putting the Books Away

After writing for a few decades, I've learned a lot about my writing process. I am a heavy reviser. I plan for a while, and a lot of that planning isn't formal. I tend to draft pretty quickly pretty much because it's the part of the process I hate the most. Oh, it can just feel like ripping open veins and pouring blood on the page (or keyboard, as it were). But I can spend all day--or at least a few hours a day--revising. I love having pages in front of me and a blue pen that I can use to mark out and scratch up and add to for quite a while. Da Man is the opposite. His drafting process takes forever. He writes very, very slowly, but what he writes is pretty much what will stick in the final draft. One of the things I always tell students is that they need to try a few things and figure out the right process for them, and I use us as examples.

What's funny is that Da Man and I have realized how much our writing process aligns with other parts of our life. When we moved here, we both had a ton of books, of course. We got all the bookshelves in their spots right away, deciding which ones we'd each take and putting our own books away on our own time. I'm getting close to getting mine all put away while he's been done for a bit. As with his writing process, he put his books away quite slowly, and once a book landed in a spot, that's where is has pretty much stayed and will stay. I, on the other hand, left my books in piles on the floor in my office, and I've been moving them around these past few days. As with writing, I've been dreading finding the right spots for them, so I made quick piles of major categories. I separated narrative books into fiction and nonfiction and separated those by gender. I had other categories like film/pop culture, medial humanities, feminist theory, porn and sexual culture studies, composition theory, and all that. After getting the big piles on their shelves, I've started going over the shelves slowly, dividing the big categories further, trying to make sure I can find things when I need them. I'm not done, and I won't be done for a bit.

But that's fine by me. I'm enjoying this part.

The Smartest Decision of My Life

As I mentioned on Twitter/Facebook, today is our fifteenth anniversary. Fifteen years! That's over a third of my life. I'm not trying to brag; I'm just surprised. Gay men and lesbians who grew up in the 70s and 80s didn't see relationships as a possibility. There were rarely on TV or in movies. I certainly never thought I'd be in one, and Da Man feels the same way. We've both admitted to being a little stunned not that we've been together for that long but that we found someone we could be with for that long.

It's something we really try not to take for granted.

Garages Rock!

When we started looking for a new place last summer, we had a list of things we wanted since we plan for this to be the last place to which we'll never move. Basically, we wanted all the interior amenities of a house without the exterior responsibilities. We really have no reason to want a yard, and having to deal with painting and other exterior issues does not appeal to us. We found that place, and we're pretty happy about it as we near the end of our first month in the place.

Yesterday, we reached a little milestone. For the first time in our life together, which has spanned one apartment, one house, and two condos, we have both of our cars in our garage. The first apartment had no garages, and I didn't have a car. The house had a little one, but it was full of all the crap we needed to take care of the yard (lawn mower, rakes, shovels, leaf blower, hoses, and on and on), and I didn't have a car until our last year there. Our first condo here in CT had a one-car, detached garage. We'd have to make plans for who parked in there at what times. That wasn't too difficult. Whoever had to leave the house first in the morning got the garage the night before.

The new place has a two-car, attached garage. We weren't sure we'd find one because not a lot of condos here have them, but most of the bigger ones have one-car, attached garages, and we knew we'd be fine with that. It is nice, though, to have a place for both cars, especially with winter rapidly approaching. Since we moved, half of the garage has been full of boxes and random things. Yesterday, we spent the early part of the afternoon getting it in order. We bought some of those large plastic shelves at a big box home store, and that helped us get a lot in the storage closet. We found a place for everything else, and voila! Both of our cars are in the garage attached right to our place.

It's something a lot of people take for granted that we hope we never will.