The Three Plagues of Moving House

I've recently moved house which in terms of time and energy and also financially is utterly exhausting.  I'm finally at a point now where the process has calmed and I've been able to knead some normalcy back into my life.  But for awhile there I was dealing with all the hassle of moving into a new house as well as what seemed to be low-budget versions of the plagues of Egypt.

Within a week or so of moving in, still living out of boxes and the like, my eyes drifted to my front window, where my dog was sitting on the windowsill, intently gazing out.  What I saw outside was beyond the experience of my stunted man-child mind.  Wasps.  Every-single-where.  There were a few idling, still figures on the outside, but for the most part it was a full tornado of buzzing chaos that had visited itself upon my morning.  Incredulously I watched the postman go about his business, oblivious to the madness around him.  That most popular of story archetypes, the Little Old Lady, strolled calmly through the bestingered, winged melee.  Was I mad?  Was this a crazed hallucination brought on by the stress of moving house?  What in the name of holy Jordi Cruijff should I do about them?

Cloaked in my own cowardice, I crept through the back door, down the back garden path to the alley behind my house and circled, pajamed, to the opposite side of the street where I beheld their infernal construction.

I journeyed to my place of employ, downtrodden, downhearted… down.  In my quarter century's worth of experience there was no solution to this problem.  Arriving at work I flexed my under-exercised raconteurial muscles and regaled my colleagues with my tragic tale of hardship.  Empathy, sympathy, kindness… these things I received verbally.  And heard spoken the greatest advice ever received.  Perhaps the best advice that will ever be received.

"The council will come and deal with that," she said.

Words truer than true!  As I surfed on the great waves of modern digital communication I beached upon the Council's website.  I logged my problem and by the time I returned home the wasps had dispersed.  It is unclear as to whether the Council dealt with this issue or whether the wasps simply caught wind of my betrayal and dispersed accordingly.  Regardless, I arrived home relieved and satisfied.

The next plague which visited me was the plague of one single leaf-cutting bee.  You may well believe this to be stretching the definition of plague to its limits, but coming on the back of the wasp fiasco, I was ready to punch any buzzing creature with my fist until dead.  The death of either me or the insect, I had no care for which.  One bee would not usually stir this ire in me, but for the fact that I had noticed that the thing was building a nest in the wooden surround of my back garden, wheedling his black and yellow way into the underbelly of my fencing.  I had visions of autumnal afternoons in the back garden spent supping serenely, visions of peaceful picnics prevented by a pack of prying pests, passers of tres, undoing my utopia!

He's gone now, though.

The third plague rode into town on the back of two kittens.  It was rather a spur of the moment decision to welcome the two feline creeps into our home.  The decision to add a kitten to our menagerie (prior population: 1 poodle) quickly doubled to two kittens as we decided not to split the last two brothers of a litter.  Far be it for me to compromise my rampant masculinity with use of the word 'cute', but couched in such a hedged sentence as this I shall, and have. How timid they first seemed!  They are now nosey, adventurous bastards.

When we went to pick them up (from a friend who'd already picked them up from their original home), we were met with an apology that these two silent babies "had fleas".  A little frustrating, but these things happen.  It took us mere minutes of the drive home to realise that "had fleas" was a wholly inadequate description of the situation.  They were essentially flea food, perhaps merely the packaging that the fleas we'd bought were being dispatched on.  They spent the majority of their first day with us scratching, the poor buggers.  Luckily, within a day the flea treatment was working and the kittens had died off, leaving us with the 50 healthy fleas we had always dreamed about.  HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHA.

For the weeks since we've had them the kittens, Sirius and Lupin, have increased their abilities far beyond their meagre 'scratch ourselves' origins.  They can now claw the curtains, bat the dog in the face, attack each other, scream for food and walk on keyboards; nearly a full house of 'adorable' cat techniques.  Braving the plague of fleas has proven well worth the struggle; it has been nothing but shenanigans from them ever since.

When Two Become One: Rooms I Mean

It is an intimidating thing to have the rest of your life on your hands.

This is an apprehension I have had since leaving University, where the ever-present, unquestioned cycle of September – June education, that I have been unthinkingly involved in since before I can remember, disappeared. I have discovered that what I do when left to my own devices is astoundingly uninspiring, involving reading, moping and low-level internet symbiosis.

Perhaps the most active I have been since moving back from a student house was when I had to juggle two rooms worth of tat into one room. The cloying sense of pseudo-claustrophobia is perpetual, though it is counterbalanced by my feeling of superiority over these ‘things’. I am the master of this room, I have fastidiously put everything away, and there it will stay. I hope I am able to raise the bar in terms of achievements before I die, as I am loathe to be remembered as the man who was able to fit an excessive amount of needless flotsam and jetsam into his sleeping chambers.

I had a number of mini-epiphanies whilst being the foreman of this gargantuan shuffling project, most of which I am sure will reflect relatively badly on me, or at least highlight some pathetic compulsions and neuroses that impact on my day to day existence.

In order to fit the contents of two rooms into one it is necessary to make material sacrifices, and though I would willingly spill the blood of a small marine type animal in order to have enough space for everything, it was necessary to throw some stuff out. In all honesty, this should have been easy, as there were a number of technological gadgetry type items hidden away in cupboards that, while hipcool in their time, were now ponderously outdated. Looking down into the whimpering displays of three portable Discmans it was extremely difficult to deposit them into the refuse. The particularly pathetic aspect of this tale is that the portable CD players in question were all broken. They were merely totems of a less futuristic time, when going jogging with a portable music device was impossible because even thinking about coughing would cause the device to skip and jump. Strange that this purported step forward from cassettes would make portable music enjoyment more difficult. Is it even possible for cassettes to jump? Regardless, the appearance of the tiny yet mighty iPod now makes all other sort of music enjoyment redundant, and even finding the pathetic remains of my old iPod was a difficult one to part with, even though it too is broken, and has been for years.

Music is a strange thing, with a stereo that plays cassettes, CDs and radio also being relegated to the top of the wardrobe, to gather dust and moth-carcasses until eventually it too is laid to rest in a rotting filth-Valhalla. Who needs a stereo when you have a PS3 which can do all the same things and so much more? (Okay not cassettes).

Another piece of redundant tat that I discovered was a large batch of floppy discs. It is astounding how little memory is on one, where it would now be quite difficult for a disc to store even text based files from up-to-date word processing programs. What is perhaps more astounding is the fact that I have a computer that is capable of reading these discs, though that computer itself only works when the rings of Saturn are parallel to the forest moon of Endor.

I also ended up with a sack full of plugs, which is good because if I ever need plugs then I know where they are.

So after throwing out Discmans and floppy discs, and after meticulously removing painstakingly self-printed inserts from out of jewel cases (also redundant, nobody has noticed yet though), I was starting to feel as though I was essentially throwing memories into the bin. My fragile composure was further tested when I attempted to categorise the items I was tidying away.

Now some things go together perfectly, with very little thought needed; books go together, as do DVDs, CDs etc. Important documents; payslips, bank statements, contracts etc, all go together. Paper, files and stationery also stay together. Things get slightly more complicated as you journey into the land of less symmetrical items.

It is impossible to categorise a roll of wallpaper, an amp and a breadbin satisfactorily. So then they end up with each other, in what it is necessary to unsatisfactorily label a 'misc' section. There’s something about it that makes me angry. Fucking misc.

When I was organising my room I had bought headphones, which, for some reason, had come with a free boomerang. Which raised an interesting question:

How do you classify a boomerang?

It had come with headphones, so perhaps it goes in with music, or perhaps with the amp, or a microphone? Perhaps it is a leisure throwing type item, and goes with kites/Frisbees/Nerf balls (none of which I have), so can it go in with the football or the pump, sporting equipment? Historically a boomerang is a weapon, though I have no other weapons which it could accompany, save perhaps a rounders bat. I ended up just throwing it in the wardrobe and uttering the following curse: Fuck you, Phillips, fuck you. I don’t care if you are Australian, don’t give me useless stuff, I have enough of that as it is. If you wanted to promote your Antipodean heritage you could have sent me a kangaroo or a koala. They would have been easier to categorise (Pets: Kitchen).

Do maracas go in with the bona fide musical equipment?

I can see the guitars laughing at the maracas with their snooty giraffe necks, and I’d hate for the maracas to be bullied. Similarly, a tambourine is just a shaky thing with bells on. But if we’re being reductive, a guitar is just a strummy thing with strings on. Musical politics is tiring.

The advancement of music hearing technology is quite frightening, in terms of its evolution to the point where it is possible, perhaps usual, to have a million and one songs on one small device, making it the musical equivalent of satellite/cable television. Unfortunately it also suffers from the same downside, which is; often there is so much choice to be had, but nothing worth experiencing.

At least with the iPod, it is my fault.