Teleportatation, & Dangers Inherent

Packing books in my room...

To do list.

Ja Mon. My apartment is clean. And empty. Aside from packing every piece of underwear I own, except the one worn by yours truly, into storage, putting my life into storage went smoothly. Everything I own was marshaled, serialized, and packetized into this big blue box that descended from the sky into the street in front of my house. Then, one week later, just as miraculously as it had appeared, it vanished. In the future, I will again summon this strange and awesome power, and have the box dropped off at the time and place of my choosing.

In Star Trek, they teleport people by disassembling them into atoms, sending them across some kind of sci-fi matter/data pipe, and reassembling the bits at the other end. So it is with my stuff. And my life. We are shipping to a future time and place. Sometimes things are mishandled in transit, for better or worse. Hopefully only positive mutations occur.

In the first photo, you can see the beginning of my packing efforts. Little did I know this was only the first 1/10 of a percent of the work. Moving out is a ton of work. Ugh. Luckily Sharon, Tim, Alex, Hans, Jack, and Lydia all helped tremendously. Sharon was even visiting from out of town, on vacation. I warned her I wouldn't be a good host, since I would be watching my life spin around me in a cyclone, standing in the calm center, as things were sorted in a huge centrifuge of my own making. But she came from Atlanta anyway, and helped me pack. At right is an old picture of the todo list I started when I began this trip, deciding to take it, anyway. It's chaos, and almost all checked off. Yes! I've learned something about being a producer, I think, in the last four years.

I've been staying at Tim's place, which has been tons of fun, and super sweet of him. It helped with the apartment separation anxiety, too. I also crashed at Hans's place one night, but the story of Sabine (his cat) and me will have to wait until later. Tomorrow I review the apartment with the landlady, and drive to San Carlos to spend New Years with Cat. Cat has graciously offered to watch my car for the next few months, and ensure it doesn't get into any misadventures, or take any rides with strangers. Then, on Jan 1, I fly to Tel Aviv, to meet Anya & Nadav, who some of you may remember from last year's international travel blog sensation, Big Katamari. I'll spend a week with them, then a week with my aunt Rina, before continuing onward to chart the mysteries of the sub-continent.