I haven't posted here in a very long time. The last two months have been crazy and very little poker has been played. Moving from our old place, and moving into the new place, were both much more eventful than expected.
My wife and I at one-point lived in a two-story house, then we moved to a much smaller house. This last move was a major downsizing effort. All of the stuff accumulated at previous residences was way too much to bring to a trailer park. We did it to downsize, simplify our lives and save money, but some of the issues were daunting,
The main problem was what to do with all of our stuff. My wife and I were both going to have a home office in the trailer. There would be no basement.. No Attic. No spare room. We had to get rid of a lot of things and it took several weeks and three dumpsters to do that.
While that was going on, we found out that there was a major flea infestation at the new place. I could sit down in a recliner and have fleas crawling all over my hands and arms in a matter of seconds. I flea-bombed the place, but that was only part of what was needed.
We found out that fleas have a very quick life cycle. Some eggs would survive the bombing and there would be brand new baby fleas in less than a week. So, I drove the seven miles from the old place to the new just to vacuum, every day, for three weeks, until we were sure that all the fleas and their eggs were finally gone.
Fleas weren't the only surprises that greeted us, for example, the mattress pad had cigarette burns. It really hurt to realize that the new caregivers had both fought and smoked around my mother-in-law. There were a lot of unpleasant surprises.
While all that was going on were were struggling with the huge amounts of stuff that could not go with us to the new place. For starters, I estimate that we had about 1,500 books in our home. We tried to sell some of them, and other things, at a flea market, with very little success. We made a few trips to the local rescue mission store to donate some of our things. In the end, we were running out of time and we wound up throwing at least 1,000 books into the dumpsters.
It hurt to throw away all of those books. It reminded me of the book (and movie) Fahrenheit 451. One of my dreams was to someday have a home library for all of those books. But, this is the 21st century and no one needs physical books any more. My newest poker books are on my Kindle.
The move was much more expensive than expected. We didn't expect to fill dumpsters at more than $100 a pop, we didn't expect a pitched battle against fleas and we didn't expect to use professional movers twice. It set us back financially for a couple months. After that we can go back to paying off all of our debts and I will be able to afford some things that I need to keep poker going, inlcuding properly setting up my new poker office.
I'm finally in the new place. I have my own office where I can study and play poker. My next post, which should be tomorrow, will talk about my plans for poker as I look forward to 2017.
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