august 13, 2002.

This is what I imagine happened in the Avalanche household last night:

The Avalanches are eating dinner. The phone rings. Little Miss Landslide gets up to answer.

"Hello...oh, hi!...I don't know; I'll have to ask. [Mr. Avalanche]! Do we want two unopened bags of frozen corn and peas?"

"Is that [Amoret] calling?"

One assumes that my conversational style is becoming justly famous.

We started packing yesterday. The chaos of a week-long move is something I don't particularly enjoy; to make things even more hectic, the insufferable heat and my dust allergy joined forces with PMS to make me a big cranky ball of uncomfortable girlflesh. The Boy has been doing a great deal of the moving, as he feels that he needs to make up for the last time. This is working out really well: his newly-minted zeal for moving compensates nicely for my illness and need to finish non-moving projects before we leave (see: curriculum, unwritten; also see: website, church). He's been dismantling furniture with great speed, and yet with none of the stubbornness that characterizes my family's moving ("I don't care if you need it; this is being packed NOW"). Except for the fact that I need to sit down in a room without dust for long intervals, we've been more efficient than ever.

But all in all, it hasn't meant a lot of time at the computer, writing my life in 10-point font.

Really good afternoon with Sister Silver today. We went over to help her move some bigger items into basement storage, and after an entertaining few hours wrestling with bedframes and the like, she took us to the beach. Doing things with Sister Silver is such a treat, because she's the antithesis of the kind of focussed male energy I grew accustomed to in my childhood. Moving and dismantling things is not a chore to be done in the least possible time and most efficient manner; it's a chance to solve problems and work co-operatively. We managed to get a bedstead, 4 mattresses and a table squared away in a surprisingly space-efficient manner (pack vertical, as my dad always says). Sister Silver was delighted at the new configuration of her belongings and at the prospect of simply puttering through her last week of moving now that the heavy stuff was out of the way.

While she and the Boy were dismantling a bedframe, I was assigned the job of stripping a month's worth of kipple off another bed. It was so much fun going through the mess of another, delving into layers of dirty clothes, magazines, papers, books, coins, and a plate with the remains of a fish dinner. I found a book about "Nancy Clue" and "the Hardly Boys" that is apparently populated with exclusively gay characters. I would like to borrow it and discover if it is truly a gay adventure as promised.

The beach was a perfect bracket to our moving exertions. This was the first time I've been to a public beach in years, and the first time I've been to any beach in Nova Scotia that did not include a leech or a disgusting lake bed. Sister Silver & I discussed feminism while the Boy made ever-increasing forays into the chilly water. It was boss.