Minimal blog time

So the blog has taken a back seat. Sorry, faithful readers. I'm in the process of moving. Moving out of the three-bedroom townhouse I share with my sister and my kid, and moving into a two-bedroom apartment which I'll be sharing with the girl and my kid. It should be...interesting. I'm betting by the time the lease is up in a year, we'll all know each other *really* well.

I've been spending a lot of my time down-sizing my worldly possessions. Why exactly do I need that 1990 Performance Bike frame that I nabbed out of somebody's garbage two years ago? Right...I don't! Thus far, I've dropped two truckfuls of stuff off at various thrift stores. I've also taken a bunch of stuff to mom's house for storage (yay extra basement space!). When I'm done with this exercise, I really hope I'll live a more streamlined lifestyle. I don't need boxes of crap that I never even look sitting in my closet for years on end. It's time to get down to essentials. Bike/bike gear, camera/camera gear, socks, underwear, maybe some books (most about biking and camera-ing). I could be forgetting a few things, but you get the idea.

We just signed the lease on the place today, so the girl and I took over one truckload, and one carload of stuff. Got the bike rack set up on the balcony. Got two bikes hung on it (we're three floors up, so if any of you are having Spiderman-like thoughts of pilfering my prized 1999 Fisher Aquila SS, all I can say is "bring it, Spidey"). I have piles all over the townhouse now. This pile is the thrift-store-pile, that one is storage-at-mom's-house-pile, that one is move-to-the-apartment-pile, the one over there is the store-it-somewhere-till-we-can-get-our-hands-on-one-of-the coveted-garage-units-at-our-apartment-complex-pile.

I'm really pissed that the real estate market around here is so outrageous that someone looking in from the outside has little chance of breaking in. I lothe the idea of spending over $16,000 in rent over the next year with nothing to show for it at the end. The one shining point is that we got a great deal on this place, so hopefully we'll have some cash socked away by next year (the year after, at worst) for our own place. This moving crap is for the birds.