The calm before the storm

From a churning maelstrom of activity, a hush has descended over Chez Borepatch.  Almost everything is boxed up and loaded on the PODS, which is A Very Good Thing Indeed - the movers come tomorrow to the heavy furniture.

A pool table is a lot easier to take apart than it is to put together, especially when "putting it together" involves carrying the slate up two flights of stairs and lifting it onto the table frame.  Coming down, gravity is your friend.  But I'll still let the movers take it into the POD.

It's strange to see the place stripped to its bare frame.  It's been a lot of work, and I'm just about worn out.

The Romans worshiped the god Janus, the two-faced patron of gates, beginnings and endings.  "Two-Faced" is not meant in its modern usage, of or regarding a person who is untrustworthy; rather, it was the property of simultaneously looking backwards at a fondly remembered past and forwards at a hopeful future.  Remembering who you are, and who you want to be.  Tonight it seems that Janus watches down on our journey.

All journeys involve change.  Some journeys are obvious, as with our Drang Nach Suden strategy of displacing ourselves a thousand miles to the south.  Some are subtle, and indeed outwardly invisible, as the journey South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford has embarked upon.  It's truly been said that the longest journey a man will ever take is the eighteen inches from his head to his heart.

But all journeys include both the pleasant and the unpleasant.  It's the unpleasant that makes us grow.

At this rate, I'll soon be enormous ...

The great thing is, if one can, to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one's "own" or "real" life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.

- C.S. Lewis