Some would say the garage is half-full

The momentum of moving into the new house seems to have reached a low ebb, which is a bit of a shame because we haven’t exactly completed the process. There remain un-unpacked boxes (in some cases, still taped shut) in various locales around the house, including dozens of boxes of books relegated to the rarely-visited basement, a huge box of linens that wound up in the den, two boxes of picture frames waiting for the wall-painting project to come to fruition, and a random assortment of boxes, bins and loose items in the garage. The pirate bar also sits in the garage, and probably will until the spring thaw, which means it’s no big deal that we’ve only cleared enough room in the garage for one car; even if we found a home inside the house for every other item in the garage, the bar would still prevent comfortable accommodation of a second vehicle. So there’s that.


Of course there’re multiple factors at play here. One is the weather, which keeps the house well-chilled round the clock and discourages embarking on ambitious activities that would involve long periods of time spent in the garage or basement. Another is ordinary day-to-day life, which we did our best to put on hold on the actual weekend of moving day but which has inexorably reasserted itself. Given the choice between unpacking a box or washing/drying/folding a load of laundry, the latter has taken on a greater sense of importance on any given evening. (For that matter, a choice between unpacking a box and watching tv or surfing the web now that we have cable/internet again tends to slide down a similar anti-unpacking slant, but I figured I’d try to throw something out there first that doesn’t make me seem like a completely irresponsible slacker. Semi-irresponsible, if you please.)

But ultimately I think a lot of the problem (if, indeed, it is a problem) is simple burnout. The move was almost four weeks ago and there’s only so many consecutive days that one’s brain can focus on a particular task before cracking at least a little. If you extend the timeline backwards to when we first started packing, the whole experience feels even more interminable. And since we’ve moved in, we’ve hosted a family holiday gathering, had two different couples over for dinner, and put up my Very Little Bro for four nights. Clearly whatever urgently needed to be dealt with has been. This, in turn, raises some not altogether welcome questions about the items still nestled in cardboard cubes. If we haven’t needed them in the past month, how important can they possibly be? Why did we bother moving them here in the first place? Sure, there are reasonable answers that make use of words like “seasonal” and “luxury”, but still. You formulate an image of yourself as someone low-maintenance and relatively unattached to material possessions, and then you realize you own one bed but five or six different comforters and you need to decide how much cabinet space you’re willing to dedicate to your cappuccino maker and your bread machine. How odd.

I should probably try to make a note when the final box is unpacked and the last possession is given a spot in which to reside. Then every year on that date we can have an official family observance, somehow centered around said item. Of course this will probably yield something utterly ridiculous like “My Wife’s Summer Shoes Day” celebrated in late March, but if I can attach the appropriate amount of beer-drinking and meat-grilling to it, I think it could be a big hit.