Postcards from Ragnarok − 4 May, 2008
This is the end, beautiful friend.
My family is moving to Virginia. For the past few months, most of my free time has been sacrificed to getting the house ready for sale.
And I hate losing this house. It is beautiful.
I can say that in words, but it's better to show you in pictures. I uploaded a bunch to Flickr today.
It's not often you get to see a world end. But in a way, that's how I feel. I've been living in Gainesville since 1992, and in that time, it seems I've lost the ability to imagine living in a different place. When I look into the future, I see nothing. For the first time in 16 years, I can't anticipate anything -- the road ahead leads to grey chaos.
In my personal Ragnarok, Time was the first enemy. My ally is Music, the only force certain to lift me out of depression. Time took that away. When I looked at my music notebook last weekend, I saw it had been about a month since I'd gotten in even 1 minute of pure practice time.
No wonder I was starting to fray around the edges.
But I defeated Time . . . Well, for the first round of our battle, at least. By June I'll be lucky if I can find time to ding a spoon on a glass to make a tune.
Some good came out of the first battle. I learned to install floors with a speed and efficiency that anyone who knew me would find astounding (since my secret identity is Captain Klutz).
Have a look at the two pictures I've posted below: b20 is Hannah's room, which you'll see later, in the process of being renovated. (Of course there's a boom box -- you know me. And this album was playing while I put in the floor.)
To show you how tough this job was, consider this place I call the Weird Corner. Photo b21 shows one of the corners in Hannah's office. On the other side of this wall, there's a very fancy and cool entry way. However, any time you make odd decisions about where to place walls in one part of the house, the decision echoes to others as well. In this case, we have Weird Corner, which I will tell you required about 3 hours of careful measurement and jigsaw work.
This week, I'm going to take you through a tour of the now. This is a lull. The current working title on my music notebook is "That Vast, Terrible In-Between" (a line taken from Babylon 5, of course).
I'm giving you ringside seats to the ending of a world.
Comments:
peahayes (May 4, 2008. 07:09pm)
Cool. I'll be there.
intrepideddie (May 4, 2008. 08:58pm)
Sweet! Just like the restaurant at the end of the universe, right? Got to be tough, though. The longest I've ever lived in one place was 7 years (junior high & high school). Fortunately for me, my wife has the same problem with wanderlust that I do.
bmccosar (May 4, 2008. 09:04pm)
I think my next line is "Zero . . . zero . . . zero . . . destruct . . . zero . . . initiate." (Kirk didn't know about the philosophy of choosing secure passwords.)
peahayes (May 4, 2008. 11:11pm)
You know, someone who's a fix-it guy or gal will someday look at that corner and marvel at how nicely those boards fit into the Weird Corner. That is, if the house's owners haven't crammed something into the Weird Corner, rendering the carpentry invisible. Which would be a shame.