I'll Keep the Light On

Tomorrow we close on the condo. In a perhaps foolish move we will also have about a half a truck load of furniture and a few (maybe twelve} boxes delivered with notations on the outside that are sufficiently vague to make me open most of them to find anything. It will be crazy and dislocating. FFP has the idea to spend some nights soon downtown. You might see a lonely light on the right of the column in this picture, low down, just where the tiny balconies begin. (By the way, notice how there is a streak on the lighted circles at the Long Center. They are reflecting the 360.)

We've hired not only a mover but two other people tomorrow to supervise the activities at both ends. Oh, and a lawyer for the closing. My modus operandi now is to hire a new expert whenever I get overwhelmed. I hope all my experts get along where their purviews overlap. I think they will. They must. I'm too old for this!

I might not post too much for a while, but I know I'll be tempted to do it, to drag Visible Woman readers (as well as Austin Daily Photo ones) along on this adventure.

Follow the Bright Lights

After the Austin Lyric Opera performance last night of "The Bat" (with music by Johann Strauss as in Die Fledermaus and English lyric and hijinks by Esther's Follies) our friend Allan the playwright took this picture of us on the City Terrace with those alien looking lights on that little circular stage and a giant, thin tower of light that is on the building where we will have our future home.

I am incredulous that I have gotten so little done on the one hand and amazed at how much I have done on the other. Life is funny like that. I am in this state of pure euphoria, panic and confusion. I went out with some ladies and played tennis this morning which I haven't done in ages. It was fun and really took my mind off everything in spite of the fact that everyone was asking me about the stuff.

I keep packing up boxes for the movers to take and bags for me to take to the condo with various things I deem necessary to a civilized life. (Yeah, don't say it.) There will definitely be a many week period where whatever you want is wherever you are not. That may actually last quite some time because I think we will eventually store some things at our other house and, of course, the parking and storage being four floors down will mean that whatever you want is in storage or your trunk. But if we are lucky things will get simpler with every load of stuff that is tossed, preserved in its place or given away. Well, won't it? Won't life get simpler??? Really? Probably not. There will be new things to add to the confusion, new resistances to tossing newer things and, of course, the inevitable decay and obsolescence. So it goes. I suppose the important thing is to just take the next step. Or steps. And some of them will be trod next week.

Do the Illiterate Get Less Depressed?

This was a poster at the adult spelling bee we went to the other day. I have scant ability to spell out loud so while I enjoy words and even spelling them, spelling bees even with other people spelling words by pronouncing each letter make me nervous. Although the team of pirates who pronounced each R like a pirate relieved the tension somewhat.

Perhaps this entry should be in the Journal of Unintended Consequences because it gave me the kind of pause where I wondered how effective the startling statistic was when buses (in our city anyway) are so notoriously hard to navigate. First I just shot a picture of it because it had numbers. The City Daily Photo theme for May is numbers. I've decided to use a different shot for that. When I carefully read what the poster said, though, it did set me thinking. How well do you have to read to read a bus schedule? Is it harder in Berlin? In Russia? In Dallas? One of the smartest people I know rides the bus in Dallas. Or used to do. I rode the bus exactly twice in Austin (not counting a couple of Armadillo rides) and I used a WEB page to get the schedule. I had to be able to get on the Internet, of course. And read the menu for "Riding Capital Metro" and "Trip Planner" and "Starting Point or Origin" etc. It's not literature but yeah it's reading. Since there is a big dust-up here about parking problems for the Long Center/Auditorium Shores/Palmer Events Center I decided to have it calculate a bus trip from my house to the Long Center. All the trips they suggested left one north of the river and the shortest amount of walking, adding up from the house to the stop and the termination to the Long Center was .9 mile. (In fairness, they would let me minimize walking, but one shudders to think how they would do that and how many transfers would be required.)

So, yeah I guess you need to read pretty well to master a bus schedule. In Austin anyway. But I digress.

It would be depressing to not be able to read, but do the literate, fully able to absorb bad news about credit crises, death and destruction, war and such and drowning in the gibberish that most reading actually is (this sentence included), become more depressed? Particularly when encountering run-on sentences?

I've been a little depressed. So I've been writing in my journal and trying to exorcise the demons. I guess the illiterate can't do that either. Oh, and I calculated the journey to the Long Center by bus from our future home. If you are foolish enough to ask to be taken from just north of the river they will calculate the trip. I guess you'd have to transfer to use these from our current house.

I don't really have much to say today. I'm depressed. About real estate, moving, downsizing, the inevitable decline. (Watched "History Boys." Posner says "Nothing saves anyone's life sir. It just postpones their death." That says it, dun it?) [Ed: You like typing that colloquial dun, trying in vain to imitate some British accent or the other, because the spell checker is happy to accept it as a word. LB: So?]

Perhaps I'm not exercising enough to enhance my mood. (Posner is talking to the gym teacher in that scene. The gym teacher thinks exericse and Jesus Christ will save your life.)

[Ed. We are labeling this and wanted to know whether to include 'moving and downsizing.' LB: Is there anything else?]

The Shape of Things

The picture? From inside the giant tent erected for the festivities last weekend at the Long Center out to the 'ring' and the west terrace. Interesting light and shapes.

Lives take up a shape. Mine is now an ebb and flow of stuff, calendar choices and decisions. I had to think hard about priorities the last few days. Well, family comes first of course. Then health and well-being. (This includes the exercise that keeps getting pushed aside by lower priorities! What's up with that?) Then this whole shelter thing and its financial implications. Close on that? Social fun like eating out and the arts. Then...casual tennis. I love it, I do. Then my writing. Then competitive tennis. (I sub for teams that aim to, um, win. Not that I don't try to win every point in my casual tennis. I do. But it's different, the competitive stuff. And not in a good way.)

Stuff has been flowing around the house. Some goes out, of course. To the thrift store and to people who come by to get stuff. Into recycling. Into the shredder. But some stuff has just moved (and not by itself!) to another room or been boxed up and stuck under the stairs. I need to move out of my old office. But it is stacked with stuff I'm sorting from the spare room. What's up with that? As we touch stuff and touch it again, though, we keep getting more and more brutal. Time is short. Stuff still seems to be winning.

My dad will have to have two more operations on his eye. Family duties rise up. And they are, of course, most important.