Comfortability

Spring semester: day sixty-nine (69, broooooo! *air guitar*)

I probably have about ten boxes total that aren't filled yet. Of those ten boxes, three or four of them are paper ream boxes saved for me by the kind office ladies on the West campus. I have two of those on main campus as well, in my office, but I'll need them there in order to be able to move my stuff out of my office at the end of the semester. What little I have in my office, anyway. Most of it is just my laptop, my spare monitor and speakers, a few books and papers, etc.

I mentioned before that this is a big weekend for me with a lot of work to do, and that's very true. In addition to my normal tasks (like grading papers, cleaning, paying bills, etc) I'm still readying things for the yard sale, I'm still gutting my closets and rooms, I'm still packing boxes (a process that won't end until probably the day of the move) and I still have to finish completely cleaning/sweeping out the garage if at all possible. Today, actually, I'll probably end up mowing the grass for the first and only time this year, since I'll move out before it needs to be done again.

I've also mentioned before that I feel a little more comfortable, a little more accomplished, with each task I take care of between now and the end of the semester and the moving date(s), though that doesn't mean I don't still feel absolutely overwhelmed at times. It's a feeling that comes and goes. Sometimes I feel as if I am on top of everything, and nothing can hold me back, and other times it feels as if I'm being crushed under the weight of that same everything. It really depends on the day. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle; there's a lot of stuff that I'll do this weekend which will make me feel much better about myself and about all of my upcoming big life changes, but that's only a small amount of what actually needs to be done. I'm more comforted by the fact that Daisy seems to be really on top of things up in Omaha, getting everything taken care of that she can do. When she was down here two weeks ago, I wrote her a $450 check (which was basically the last bit of my federal tax refund money) to help cover a lot of that stuff, and she did.

The wedding and everything it entails? That's mostly paid for, or otherwise covered by credit cards and the like. Our new home? Rent and deposit are both paid, utilities are set up and ready to go, and she'll begin moving into the place in about a week and a half -- unpacking and setting things up while I finish my semester here. Her job? Stable. Her life? Much more stable than mine is right now.

There were no more storms yesterday after I got to campus to teach; it sprinkled rain a bit, and there was some thunder and lightning very briefly when I got down to West campus, but by the time I was done with my class, everything had moved off and it was sunny enough to where I needed my sunglasses for a good chunk of my drive back home. By the time I went to sleep yesterday afternoon, it was very sunny and very bright outside, with no real clouds left. The Weather Channel, which just yesterday morning was predicting a Tor:Con of 5/10 for us on Saturday/Saturday night, is now iffy on whether we're going to get any severe storms at all. Of course, that's another reason I'd like to mow the grass today if possible -- if we do get a ton of rain and storms, it'll only make the grass taller than it is now, and about the only other time I'd have to do it would be a week from this Sunday, since the yard sale is next weekend -- and that's only if I don't sell the mower.

I've decided that if I have to, I'll extend the yard sale to two weekends in a row -- next weekend, of course, and then (if necessary) the weekend after to get rid of whatever's still left. Whatever's left after that, of course, will just have to be trashed and/or donated. It's not like I can do anything else with it. May 10-17 is, basically, the weekend before finals week, finals week, and the time after (basically as soon as finals week ends), I'll be moving out. Everything must go one way or another. Nothing can remain behind.  I wrote out the ad for said yard sale tonight and put it on Facebook to give my local friends "first dibs" on all of this stuff, so to speak. I'll upload it next week sometime to Craigslist once I edit it (if any of my friends claim anything, of course). I'm not expecting any of them to want anything or even bother to read said note about it, but eh. It's worth a shot, right? Especially if it helps me get rid of the big things that need to be taken away.

This weekend I have to start labeling everything with prices. It'll be an ungodly-time-consuming process. The spare room is also filled right now with boxes to be packed, two bags of trash and recycling, and everything in there is in general disarray. Obviously every week between now and when I move the trash/recycling bins are going to be full, but it wasn't until I started cleaning and boxing things that I realized just how much shit I have that needs to be thrown away...and how little space those bins really have in them.

Daisy is going to check out some clearance furniture soon at the Nebraska Furniture Mart. Apparently if we can get on a finance plan for some stuff it's something like $25 a month or so until it's paid off, which I'd be fine with overall.

"I'm just worried about money," I told her this afternoon, frankly. "I'm more worried about money than anything else."

Regardless of what we do for a living or where we're both working, we still have to be able to pay the bills and rent. I come from a poverty background -- I grew up a poor kid in West Virginia, where nobody in my family could be classified as "wealthy" or even moderately rich. Most of them, like I have been my entire adult life, have been scraping by because it's not like West Virginia offers any exciting job opportunities (or even a "good life," really) -- you're born, you work in the coal mines, for the university, or for Walmart for forty or fifty years, and then you die penniless. Moving out of the state eight years ago without any sort of truly marketable skill meant that I carried that poverty background with me, and I ended up working low-paying jobs for many years and needed to take student loans just to be able to eat and keep gas in my car while I was in graduate school. I've never truly had enough money in my bank account, or to my name, where I wasn't near-constantly worried about being able to pay bills or rent. I don't really know what it feels like to not live paycheck-to-paycheck, and I know the fear and stress that comes along with being underpaid and underappreciated, trying to scrape together proverbial coins and wrinkled dollar bills just so that the electricity doesn't get turned off.

My bills have been paid; I sent the 30 days' notice letter as well as the rent, and paid $100 on my Discover card (which is but a drop in the bucket, but it helps). I ordered pizza with my Amazon card, since there's barely anything on it right now (I paid it off before with my tax refund). I ate some of said pizza. My stomach took approximately five hours -- five hours -- to digest said pizza enough to where I didn't feel full/bloated/nauseated anymore.  On the plus side, I'll now have food for several days, food that I won't have to cook.

The weather forecast has changed throughout the day today, and for the worse -- apparently we're once more expected to get some severe storms and possible tornadoes tomorrow and tomorrow night, and 60mph+ winds and baseball-sized hail are, apparently, almost a certainty. Looks like the car's being put in the garage at the first sign of nastiness, which means that my plans to finish cleaning the garage are all but abandoned now. Oh well, I suppose. I've still got the rest of the weekend, of course, and now that I have Wednesdays off, I have Wednesday if I need it as well.

No, wait, actually I don't -- Wednesday I'll be grading my 102 students' papers and practice exams all day, as they take their final on Thursday and I have to get all of those back to them. Shit. Oh well. Guess Sunday or Monday it is.