Snafus

26 days left! I can barely stand it. The weather has finally turned extremely humid, although I think there is some sort of statute of limitations on how much complaining one can do about 90 degree weather when one's best friend lives in the Middle East, and 90 feels like fall weather.

Packing still going on. It is an odd sort of dance, since I am also sorting through the items that are mine, and the stuff that is my mother's. We went through the books and cd's without bloodshed, but the dvd's are up next and already I can feel the battle brewing. Naturally this also takes more time, because packing involves heated discussions over who bought what and where. My fresher age leads to better memory, but also can lead to wheedling, I have discovered. So far I have scored a Macy Gray cd, Gone With the Wind, and Dune. Also a baking sheet. Small, but important, victories.

I've packed ten boxes of books so far. I still have one bookcase left to go, plus about twenty or so books lying around. (Okay, thirty. Forty. Whatever.) I still do not understand how everyone tells me I should just leave them behind. As though I won't need them! Admittedly, I did go through quite a Stephen King phase. I probably won't be rereading all of those. Or my Michael Crighton phase. (I didn't say I went through extremely literary phases.) And I likely will not be revisiting my Nancy Drew series. But the point is, all those books are important. I remember a really great detail with each book: where it was bought, what was going on when I read it, the impact it had on me. Well, these are memories I guess. And I can't just discard them.

I have run into one tiny snafu. (Besides just catching my wily alpha female dog Gizelle in the pantry, eating the cat food, which required her to maneuver around a baker's rack, over a high back chair, and past an opening to the counter.....grrrrrrrr.) Okay, anyway, my snafu originates with the inability of an entire industry to be able to design a gerbil cage. Seriously people. Gerbils are not hamsters. Gerbils chew plastic. Gerbils chew anything and everything that they can. Why, oh why, are all the cages made of plastic in hideous primary colors? Gerbils also like to dig. Profusely. With gusto. So why are all the cages not made of plastic, made of metal bars that allow all the shavings/bedding to drift ever so carelessly to the floor when the gerbils dig? I may have already mentioned the chewing thing, right? So why the hell are all the glass aquariums sealed with toxic glue??? I am sensing an anti-gerbil barrier in the pet kingdom. I never would have agreed to let my cat have a gerbil if I knew this would be such an issue. All I can say is that it is a damn good thing Yummy (Dakota's gerbil) is cute. Because the little bastard is messy.