rowyn

January 6

It finished snowing on Sunday evening. News reports say the city got 10", but I don't think my neighborhood got that much. Maybe 6"? It's still too much snow. I took pity on the cat and shoveled the porches so she could stand outside without standing in snow. She periodically goes outside for five or ten minutes to glare at the snow in betrayal before she wants inside again.

Eliyahu and I stayed at home again. I made an abortive attempt to tidy the living room, but couldn't decide what things I was willing to throw out and retreated instead. Lut owned a few thousand paperbacks and it falls upon me to get rid of these before I move. But throwing away books is psychologically hard. Vanishingly few places will take books as donations to resell anymore, though, so throwing them out is likely the only option.

I illustrated three Apothecaria entries on the 5th and finished two more on the 6th.

January 7

I didn't do any drawing on the 7th, but I wrote some of The Secret Dragon and was happy about that. I want to work on The Secret Dragon more because I can't read it until I finish writing it and I really want to read it. One protagonist is plural and I love both of them.

January 8

I finished the penultimate Apothecaria illustration and started work on the final one. Since it's the very last Apothecaria illustration, I decided to be ambitious about it. It includes 16 different characters. I've spent at least 2.5 hours on it and it's about one-third done. Fortunately, I don't have to post it until the 12th.

In between working on the two illustrations, I decided to tackle the living room again, this time by clearing Lut's desk. I've already decided I'm keeping all Lut's painting supplies and miniatures: there's too much sentiment and grief bound up in that for me to get rid of any of it. It can live in a corner of the room in my parent's house that I'm moving into.

The unoccupied 2nd floor room of my parent's house is large for a single room -- something like 350 square feet, as I recall. But that's still much smaller than the 900 square feet of the main part of my house, pluse the 600 square foot basement and a garage large enough for two cars. My plan is to bring:

My king-size bed

The reclining loveseat

The desk Lut used for painting (I will probably use this for my computer desk, in lieu of the ancient 8' table that the two of us had shared for our computers)

Maybe the giant office chair Lut got? I don't know. It's a nice new office chair, on the one hand, and on the other hand I don't use office chairs.

Probably some of the plastic drawers I've been using for storage forever?

All of the Warhammer 40k/Kill Team/painting supplies stuff

Some amount of Other Stuff. This will be things like art supplies, art, clothing, costumes, and sentimental objects. I will bring some number of physical books, but this is likely to be a small number: a hundred, perhaps. Mostly the books I've written plus graphic novels and other particularly pretty books. I don't like reading physical books so I don't really want to cart them around.

I strongly suspect that I will throw away unsorted everything in the basement and garage, aside from the wargaming supplies. I can't remember the last time I got anything else out of the basement. It's all things I've forgotten I own and wouldn't care about if I remembered.

Clearing Lut's desk went much better. I boxed up all the paints and paint brushes, and Eliyahu helped me break down the paint racks (four, huge) and paint brush racks (two, small). In the basement, I found an old box of 10x13 envelopes that I'd bought 24 years ago when I was on a brief kick of submitting stories to magazines. I pitched the remaining envelopes into recycling (I have not used them in 20+ years. I'm not going to. Submissions aren't even done by physical mail anymore) and boxed the parts for the racks and the paint brushes in it, then put the box in the basement with the other wargame supplies.

The two plastic boxes full of paints are still sitting on the desk, but they take up much less space than the paint racks did so it feels like progress. The basement extension (where I put the rest of the supplies) is unheated and having carefully boxed the paints I don't want to put them where the cold might destroy them. There's no guarantee they'll still be any good at whatever point I decide I want to do something with them (if that ever happens), but I want them to have a chance.

Eliyahu pointed out that the cleared desk is a much better configuration for playing Flamecraft, which has a long narrow board, than the card table in the kitchen. And also I don't use the desk for anything, so leaving a Flamecraft game set up on it will be much more convenient. We should play another game or two before they leave next Wednesday.

In the evening, I worked on the final Apothecaria illustration and did some journaling.

January 9

I decided to tackle the living room credenza again. Eliyahu joined me for company and moral support, which makes dealing with such things much more pleasant.

This time, instead of fleeing in despair, I started by emptying out a plastic tub full of ancient computer parts: cables, graphics cards, hard drives, a mostly-dead keyboard, etc., all 10-20 years old. Lut hated throwing out computer bits and so I have at least three boxes of unused bits. I will pitch the other boxes in due course as well. I wanted an empty plastic bin so I'd have a place for "I can't yet muster the energy to throw this out" stuff.

After emptying the bin into a garbage bag and cleaning the dust and cat hair out, I went through three drawers in the credenza. The first drawer was full of junk I threw away without qualms, like miscellaneous bits for my previous two robot vacuums (both of which died, leading to my current robot vacuum.) The other two drawers were full of letters, cards, art, and art supplies. I was pretty sure I would not be willing to throw much of this away, but I went through it anyway. I pitched some old cards that didn't have personalized messages, some old drawings (of my own) that I didn't care for, and reminisced over other items with Eliyahu. Throwing out meaningless sketches was surprisingly easy. One side benefit of never successfully marketing any of my artwork is that I don't have any illusions that my pictures have value beyond my own enjoyment of them. Throwing out old figure drawings was especially easy; I'd only done them for practice, anyway.

I also found two ancient technical books: ones for 20-year-old systems that Lut had bought for school when they were current, probably. Those I also pitched without qualm.

By the end, I had two empty drawers and one re-packed with letters, cards, art, and art supplies. I should organize those further instead of just piling them all into a drawer. Some of the cards and letters are in boxes, but I don't have a single box that's a good size for holding all of them.

I put some of the "can't bring myself to throw it away yet" tchotchkes from atop the credenza into a newly-empty drawer, which had nothing to do with early-stage-moving-prep but made me feel better about the state of my home while I'm still living in it.

The snow from last weekend had completely failed to melt, and we had grocery delivery scheduled for the next morning, so I finally went out to shovel a path from the kitchen door to the road. Eliyahu offered to shovel for me, but I wanted the exercise anyway. It was annoying because the snow was thick and wet, making each shovel-full heavy. But I managed the whole path in one pass. When I came in, I told Eliyahu that they'd have to shovel the driveway in front of the car in the morning if they wanted me to get challah, though.

Afterwards, I sat at my computer to do a little reading; a Scott Lynch novelette Tuftears had linked me to, and Tuftears' Timecrossed Engineer.

I wrote some about my day, and a bit of The Secret Dragon. I am slogging through a difficult scene, but I'm almost to the fun one where two protagonists meet for the first time.

Also put some additional work into the final Apothecaria illustration. Still not done.