Don't get all hung up about it

So, the moving-in process is still going on, but I can say that we have the closets arranged and most of our clothes are where they will stay for the duration. Both Coco and I purged a lot of stuff in the transition, and we're storing things a little differently than we used by re-purposing some of the of our furniture, and I'd guess that we are folding more clothes and hanging fewer. As a result, we have wound up with a few clothes hangers left over.

There were three white mini-hangers, for delicate stuff...

and four white heavy-duty hangers, for pants or jackets...

...and six fancy white plastic skirt hangers with clips...

...and 17 standard white pastic hangers...
 

...adn another 26 black ones...

...and a whole pile of them in various colors.

There were five suit hangers, both wooden and plastic...

..and six of those fancy wooden pants hangers...

...and three of those crappy clear plastic  kind...

...and this doohickey for neckties.

So the question is: WTF?  Did we actually have a bunch of extra hangers that we didn't notice? Did the hangers reproduce in response to the stress of moving? Or did we really shift over 100 garments, either getting rid of them or storing them differently? And if that last circumstance is the case, how did we wind up with so many extra clothes? And why were we hanging them all up in the first place?

Of course, this whole affair also raises the question of what to do with these. I wouldn't imagine that we'll need more than ten percent of this surplus, and that leaves a lot of hangers to dispose over. I'm not sure even Value Village could absorb this donation - we might have to drive around tossing bundles into Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul as well. I am half-tempted to throw them in a barrel with all our outdated pharmaceuticals, set it on fire, and electrocute it, hoping to create a new polymer-based life form, but even if that worked, it would probably get loose and eat Fairhaven, and we all know where that would lead.

In the meantime, if y'all need any hangers, let me know, and I can hook you up. First one's free.

Back and there again

So, Coco and I spent some time this morning walking a few miles on the campus of Western Washington University, whose Fairhaven College is Coco's undergrad alma mater. It was a warm sunny morning and most of the campus seemed to be sleeping still (or watching the Seahawks game), so we had quite a pleasant and uninterrupted meander along winding paths, through underbridges, and up and down staircases both narrow and wide. The campus has an awful lot of big metal sculptures, which made the walk even more picturesque.

We ventured into one building so Coco could show me the auditorium class where she took her infamous Performance Art class, but mostly we explored the grounds, Coco surprised by a number of that-didn't-used-to-be-theres and mellowed by many oh-I-remember-thats. I saw where her drum circle gathered, found her dorm window with its middling-good view, saw the buildings where she had classes large and small, and the entrance to the dining hall where student got their soft-serve ice milk. But maybe best if all was when she shared her secret study space along an out-of-the-way walkway on the edge of campus, not too far from the Viking Union. As she sat down lost in reverie for a moment, I saw that sweet shy student still inside her, despite all she had done and become since then, the Quiet Girl who prefers her own company.

I think it's been nice to come back to Bellingham for Coco; it's a return, not a retreat. This town has lot going for it, some of which Coco is showing me and some of which we are discovering together. After the campus nostalgia today, we went and joined the local food co-op. We're settling in here, for sure, for what we hope will be a good, long stay.

Coco, with the sculpture The Man Who Used to Hunt Cougars for Bounty

Epiphany? Epiphan-no.

So, it was my birthday, and it was great one. Coco made a big fuss, and she gave me some cool books, and we had a fun morning pulling the house together together, and we took our first trip as 'hamsters up to Vancouver (where I had one of the best meals of my life).  And in the course of all this celebratory goodness, in a quiet moment over beer, Coco asked "So, what do you want from this next birthday year?"

Now, birthdays make great milestones for self-assessment and reflection, marking another trip around the sun and all that. And heaven knows this latest Big Transition -  from tenured faculty to administrator, from community college to technical college, from Seattle to Bellingham - deserves some consideration and my future career plans - eight and a half years left and counting - merit some deliberation. But although I tried to come up with something profound, or at least thoughtful, I couldn't develop a strong theme or clear focus for what I want the next year to look like.

Coco and I did make some sort-of resolutions at the new year, which I usually don't do. We used a more of this/less of that format, and my list looked like this:

I'm still working on this list - doing well on some items and not so well on others - and I'm not sure I can add another scheme to the list.

In response to Coco's question, I also thought about whether I had gained any wisdom during the last solar circumvolution that could guide me in the next, and I came up with nothing. Maybe at this stage of the game, growth is incremental or accretive rather than revolutionary or exponential; I could think of no watershed insight to use as a pathfinder. Every day I try to be a little smarter and a little kinder than the day before, and maybe that's just how it goes now.

I did have a minor revelation today, for what it was worth. While cleaning out one of the remaining bins to be unpacked from the move, I came across a cellophane post office envelope. It contained a receipt for a $6.29 cash transaction that either Coco or I made in December 2010, along with the $3.71 change from the ten-dollar bill the purchase was paid for with.

I considered this situation, and it seems to be a good choice to live the kind of life where cash money doesn't get lost in the back of a junk drawer for five years. This little vignette says a lot about being too busy, about organization, about having too much stuff, about privilege.

And maybe that's what the theme of next year, and every year, is and should be: mindfulness of all the small ways that one can live better and be better. There doesn't have to be an epiphany or a breakthrough or a bolt from the blue or a major undertaking. Maybe it is really about just paying attention and trying our best, little by little, one day at at a time.

In any case, that's what I got, and that's what I'm going with.