2003-08-08 - 12:01 p.m.

One way is the way my in laws went about their last move. 20 years of stuff had accumulated in their house. They didn't start boxing or anything until the day of the move, and truly seemed to believe they would be done in two days. Chaos ensued, which resulted in them leaving most of their stuff in the old house.

Michael and I, disapproving of that, decided to go the extended-chaos route. We gave ourselves two weeks of pretty much nothin' else but moving. And when I swear to you that we have the best packed storage unit on Earth, you'd damn well better believe me.

We have books. We have five bookshelves of books, and some of those shelves have stacks of books rather than rows of books, because we just couldn't find space to put a new bookshelf should we buy one. We like our books. Some of them are quite old, and really we should have left them in Elizabeth's care, and now I can't imagine why I didn't have that idea until just now. But we have a lot of things, books mainly, that we do not want to be eaten by bugs.

Which brings me to my last storage experience. Two and a half months, and everything I owned was infested with bugs. Ew.

So far, every box in storage that has contents that could be eaten are wrapped in plastic. This includes books, collectors' comics (guess whose), tens of thousands of Magic the Gathering cards (guess whose), clothes, scores of writing notebooks (guess whose), and our hamster. No, I'm kidding about the hamster. Gilley's taking it.

We got a five by ten storage unit. We are actually going to fit five bookcases, two dressers, one coffee table, three end tables, one queen-sized bed, one desk, and all of our books into it. It's really quite incredible when you think about it.

But now you're thinking, where is the chaos she was referring to?

You walk into our place right now, and you'd have no idea. You'd see some empty bottles from the first night of going away parties. But other than that, you'd think that everything was fine. Then you'd walk upstairs into our bedroom and you'd have a heart attack. Because we put all the chaos there to get it out of the way. Two weeks of moving chaos, all in our bedroom. It's kind of incredible when you think about it.

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