"Grab your coat, don't forget your hat...

...but leave your worries, leave them on the doorstep." Sunny Side of the Street, by Louis Armstrong.

I am so close to going back to school (yay!!!) but that means I'm packing up my little life and carrying it across the country in my car. On one hand, that's magnificent--because you all know how I feel about roadtrips!?!?!! but on the other hand, that's "rather a chore" as Fred says.

First of all, my car has decided that now is a good time to exhibit bad behaviour, and is therefore being fixed. Hopefully I'm going very early tomorrow morning (like, leaving home at 6:10am) to pick it up and bring it home for the rest of the days fun activities, like disengaging myself to Big Bear (we became engaged last week when we realized we were the only single people left. It seemed inevitable, but we agreed that I would dump him in the most amazing way possible Monday at 10:00 sharp. If you want to come watch, it'll be at his coffeeshop, and it's going to be amazing. I'm quite excited, actually. Then I promised a friend I would work out with her, at 10:15 sharp, so the disengagement better not take too long.)

Second, there's packing. When you live somewhere, your belongings tend to sort of expand and soak in, if you know what I mean. In the same way a fat man will settle down after a meal, lean back in his chair, and loosen his belt for a relaxing nap, so my stuff seems to have let itself go and simply collapse all over everywhere. It's being quite a job deciding what I'm taking, leaving, getting rid of, giving away, mailing to myself, taking at a later date...etc. (Picture of me in front of a mile-high pile of boxes and stuff that I'm trying to pack...)


And besides all that, I'm such a sucker for pretty boxes. I hate those compactable file boxes that you usually move stuff in, or the huge Tupperware monstrosities. I refuse to touch them--though the file boxes are inevitable, I'm afraid.

Haley Mills did quite a number of movies. She was one of the original Disney girls--which is now the legacy that Lindsay Lohan tries to live up to, but simply can't--and one of her less known films was Summer Magic, which also featured Burl Ives. At the beginning of the movie, there's a part where the family is packing up all their things in Boston and preparing to move to a little upstate town called Beulah. One of my favorite songs for moving is in that part of the movie:

Flitterin'

It's time for flitterin'
Dusting off the trunk and flitterin' far
Where the grass is greener
Now and then, comes the time again, for flitterin'

We'll soon be packing up
Stacking up our dreams and bric-a-brac for
Some destination
Don't know where, but we're going there
We're flitterin', again

New places, new faces
New friendships will start
While old places, old faces
Stay dear to our heart

As we go flitterin'
Following a rainbow, flitterin' bright
Over the horizon
Maybe then and maybe there
We'll settle down and never care
For flitterin' flitterin' flitterin' again

Someone asked me tonight if I was glad to be leaving.

I love home here, but I also love home there--and I miss parts of either half when I'm in the other, but I'm always glad to get to the first when I was at the second, and vice-versa.

Isn't it ironic?