Who Moved My Cheese? I Did.

Allicrocigator?

State of the world this minute: Roger's digging into a Patti Smith memoir. Buck is probably upstairs, sleeping next to Roger. I'm downstairs, listening to "The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner" and nursing a glass of orange juice. Because that's how I party.

As previously mentioned, we moved from Austin, Texas to Sharon Springs, New York. In August. On our own. Roger drove the 26-foot moving truck, which was towing our Mini Cooper. I followed in our truck, with Buck riding in the back seat. This was considerably more difficult for Roger than for me, and I promise that, next time, I will be the one that drives the 26-foot moving truck. (I hopefully have a few years to figure out how to wiggle out of that promise.)

Normal people move, you know, clothes and furniture and cooking utensils. We moved a lot of that stuff, too. But our packed - and I mean packed - moving truck also had some questionable cargo. Here are five of the weirdest.

1. An aligator (or crocodile - I'm no herpetologist) hide. It's temporarily hanging on the living room wall (pictured). I may or may not be slightly creeped out by it.

2. Several boxes of obsolete technology I refuse to part with. Because you never know when you'll need an Apple Newton 100. Or an audiophile-grade cassette deck and my collection of mix tapes (heavy on the XTC and Depeche Mode, probably). Or two dozen 1.44MB floppies formatted for DOS. Or a copy of Windows 2.0 on, perplexingly, CD-ROM. These things are all incredibly useful, and I will keep them right here in these cardboard boxes in the basement for convenient access.

3. A large paper mache (or, more pretentiously, papier-mâché) dog-horse. We could never figure out if it was supposed to be a dog or a horse or...both? It does seem to be constructed out of Korean newspaper. Do they have dog-horses in Korea? Never been.

4. Sixteen boxwood bushes in large ceramic pots. We didn't have time to remove the boxwoods from the pots. And we were definitely taking the pots because they weren't cheap. So...we loaded them in the back of the pickup. The boxwoods were acclimated to the Austin climate (as acclimated as any non-cacti can be to the land of endless heat and nonexistent rain), and I had guessed that they would immediately croak when introduced to an actual winter. But I think they were toughened up by 1,805 miles of highway wind, and many of them seem to be doing well even in January. We may end up with a nice collection of transplants.

5. An open box of instant mashed potato flakes. I have no idea why we had a box of instant mashed potato flakes to begin with. Was it for some weird recipe? I honestly can't remember. But you can't expect to put an open box of instant mashed potato flakes inside a huge moving box, and then put that huge box into the back of a very bouncy truck for a few days, and not expect to find a horrible, disgusting mess when you open it up. I bet the set decorators for "White Christmas" used potato flakes to simulate snow. I bet they were constantly getting into Rosemary Clooney's hair in the closing scene, and she hated it because it made her hair smell like the cafeteria of an elementary school.

Can we please never move again?

Until tomorrow,
Chris

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