sucio!

My dear reader, I apologize for my profound silence over the past several days - as you perhaps know, I have been on an extended sojourn to the land of my ancestors. It may provide you with no solace, but I have not been neglecting my journaling - rather than writing here, I have been writing in my journal every night while drinking tea and watching 'Craig Ferguson'. Doesn't that sound lovely?

What has *not* been lovely, however, is cleaning out my childhood bedroom. The difference between my parents' new house, and my parents' old house, is extreme - I don't think it's even possible to conceive how different they are. Though they are separated by only a hundred yards, it's clear that they wouldn't even be in the same neighborhood under normal circumstances. The new house is gorgeous, and I love my room - I chose a color called 'Bombay' which turned out to be a lovely muted rose color. It's not exactly a color that I would choose as the primary scheme if I were to build my own house, but perhaps I was drawn subconsciously to how I had always wanted my bedroom to look when I was younger. And for one's parents' house, where one goes to escape from everything, a girly bedroom is perfect. Anyway, the new house is pretty much perfect; it looks out over the pond, it's extremely bright (annoying, since my bedroom faces east - I've had to resort to sleeping w/my travel face mask), and there's plenty of space.

The old house, by contrast, is a farmhouse with a hundred years of history. You might suppose that I would feel nostalgic, but I don't feel even a shred of nostalgia - as soon as I saw the new house, I half-jokingly told my parents they could just burn my old stuff. The biggest issue is that the old house smells now - a hundred years of cooking, smoking, dusty gravel roads, and intermittent rodent invasions (pretty common in the country) does not lead to a pleasant underlying odor, and it's been compounded by the fact that it's been shut up and unairconditioned for the past few months. Ugh.

Luckily for me, I have less stuff than anyone else in the house, probably because I shipped many things to California - but Vidya, you should realize that this is proof of what I've told you about my family's packrat tendencies, when I look like an ascetic by comparison to my family even though I probably have more stuff in California than any two of my friends combined. So I've successfully moved it all over to the new house (with the help of my mother, who helped me to pack, and my father, who drove it around on a trailer to the back of the new house). Now it's just a matter of organizing it so that it doesn't overwhelm my new room.

That's all for now - perhaps later I shall regale you with stories of the other fun things I've done this week. However, it's time for me to shower and finish organizing my bedroom. Have a great day!