The Op

Every so often you hear parents say that they wish they could have just a little mild illness, enough to warrant an absence from work, but not so serious that you feel really rubbish and, whisper it, can't enjoy your time off.  That's another thing gone with the pandemic. Now time at home off work is not too different to time working from home.  Yesterday I had some of my meniscus removed, the flappy, damaged part that was in the way of fun things like turning around and, who knew it, breaststroke.  This has necessitated a pause in the physical work of packing the house up for the x/y.  

Amongst the things that can be done horizontally, is writing a blog.  Which is good because there was a real danger that we would skip from "we're taking a year off" to "we're off work for a year" without any of the packing, painting, fixing, contracting, moving, admining, organising, purging, whining, whinging and drinking that is involved in moving out of your home for a year.  And so it has come to pass that in between all the online schooling and the working from homing, we have done bits and pieces of the aforementioned.  We now sleep on mattresses on the floor having moved our bed frames out to the grandparents' garage and are frequently short a dining chair as it has been co-opted for the home office or home classroom.  Funny thing of course is that having shifted two entire uhaul lorries full of stuff, we appear to still have a house full of stuff.  

Stuff: the scourge of our time.  Stuff that took the raw materials and the energy to extract, transport, refine, process, transport, make, package, transport, sell, construct, transport, unpackage, dispose of, transport.  Stuff that then steals our time, our sanity and our homes.  There's the good stuff: the bike for the adventure, the chair for the meal, the mattress for the sleep.  But the constant battle to keep the stuff working for you, rather than the stuff making you work for it, is real.  And if you don't like the idea of throwing things away only to have to replace them someday, then it's all the more complicated.  AND, even if you are vigilant about bringing more things into your home (we are a little bit) it gets there anyway!  The well-meaning neighbour who drops off clothes for the kids, the piece of furniture headed to landfill on garbage night.  These are privileged problems, but those with less privilege are striving to have all these things while at the very same time we all suffer the consequences of a world damaged by those very things being here.

That was an unplanned rant... Back to the story we tell ourselves...