shannon_a

I got my day of rest yesterday.

Well, after the final fixes on our heater, but that was done early enough to get me out of the house by 11am: as I thought, the pilot flame just needed to be tuned down, but I neither had the confidence to do that nor the tools to open up the heater.

In any case, the rain stopped on Saturday, and it was a balmy 58 degrees, the nicest day scheduled until we leave. After a horrendous week and last weekend that were super busy and stressful, I was very happy to go out for a hike.

The hike was one that I've done a half-dozen or a dozen times: up Panoramic Hill, around the Upper Fire Trail above Strawberry Creek, up to the Sidehill Trail to Grizzly Peak Blvd, over onto the ridgeline Trail, into Tilden Park, and then along the ridgeline there until I cut down to the bus stop near Lake Anza. 11 or 12 miles total.

I did my best to be really mindful the whole time, because I'm not going to do that whole hike again before we leave (and I might not be up in the hills at all: I've got lots of my schedule). I enjoyed the paths and the people and their so, so, so cute dogs. I enjoyed the trees and the views. I really saw everything that I could.

I did also play music a bit, which I don't usually do while hiking, but it felt like a part of losing myself to the experience. Mostly I played through Barenaked Ladies and They Might Be Giants, singing along as I went, even when I was passing other people.

It was a great walk, a really pleasant afternoon, only chilly when I stopped for too long.

And I got a last sandwich from Cheese 'n Stuff too, was a surprise, given their frequent Saturday closings (but they had a sign up, a very rare sign!, saying they were closing after Saturday and not open until the new year).

Good day!

---

But there's still lots of work to be done. My post-it by my desk says: clean; Skotos work; Bitmark work.

So today I dived back in, and it wasn't exactly super stressful work, but it was lots of things to be done.

We have six or so large caches of stuff: one cabinet in the downstairs bathroom; a couple of cabinets in the kitchen; the Harry Potter closet; and a lot of stuff in my office. So I just kept going back and back and back to those today, separating things into piles for Goodwill, to offer out in front of our house, and to trash. Oh, and a very few things get set aside to go to Hawaii or to keep until we're done using them.

None of those caches is close to done yet, but I can now see the backs and floors of all the spaces, so we're a lot closer.

And meanwhile more and more of my life is turning toward Kauai. In the last few days, I ordered a microwave, a printer, and a monitor all to be delivered out there (the first two the day before we arrive, the third just after, all to my dad's house).

Lucy has been very sad since we gave her cat tree away, so we found a new one for her, and we'll order that just after Christmas to make sure it doesn't get to Kauai before we do. (Currently, they say January 3rd, but I want that to go to our house, not my dad's, which is why I'm waiting.)

---

And we did have a relaxing lunch out at Cancun, a tasty restaurant that we'll miss.

---

When I was talking to my dad today he asked if things had quieted down now that our stuff is all out of the house, and I said no, but I was too frazzled to remember everything that was going on, so I told him about all the cleaning up I was still doing, but I forgot about the stressful house work that had gone on until Saturday morning.

And I realized that we actually have to deal with more than he did. Obviously, he had to (1) get all his stuff moved; (2) do any final stuff in the Bay Area [like my recent dental appointments as an example]; and (3) get stuff ready for them in Kauai. But, we've also had to (4) prepare our house for sale; and (5) finalize things for Skotos, like my closing down our mailbox and changing lots of addresses.

On the bright side, we're going to have family in Kauai, and Mary was just making arrangements to loan us bedsheets and dishes while we're there the first weeks.

So, maybe more stressful until we leave, then less stressful afterward.

Hope so. I've been waiting for that less stressful for a while.

This was not a good weekend, because I had to frantically get everything ready for our shippers (with help from Kimberly as she was conscious and able).

I mean, we've been getting ready for the move all year, culling and giving away stuff for months and months. (Turns out that it's a lot harder to move if [1] you insist on getting rid of all your unused crap; and [2] you do your best to be ecologically responsible about it.) But, we hadn't gotten to some of Kimberly's stuff, due to her health problems of the recent years, and we hadn't dealt with places like the bathrooms, the kitchen, most of our clothes, and our Harry Potter closet.

And then we also had to separate out the things that were shipping on a boat from the things that we wanted to keep until the end and take on a plane with us (or abandon at the last minute, for some percentage of our cold-weather gear).

And yeah, we should have been doing this in the weeks previous to our shippers showing up, not the weekend before, but of course Kimberly was in the hospital up until Wednesday (and then I had friends over on Thursday, and then it was the weekend).

---

So I started slowly Friday night, working but also taking some time to myself in the evening, and then did the same on Saturday. But by the time Sunday rolled around I felt like I was on the eve of finals and hadn't studied at all.

(Which is ironic because our movers were scheduled to show up on Monday, which was the same day that finals began at Cal. But for once in the last decade+ I didn't care that the city was about to get a lot nicer ... because we had plenty to consume our attention at our house.)

The first goal was creating a home base in my office by getting everything out of there that needed to ship and then starting to use it to save stuff we didn't want shipped. And that took through the end of Saturday.

Meanwhile, as Kimberly was conscious we slowly went through those unsurveyed rooms. Besides moving really important stuff to save into my office and throwing really unnecessary stuff out, we also had to do some administration: for these, I put red stickies on everything that we wanted left behind (and over the course of the next two days I sometimes restickied and restickied as the stickies fell off. Because off-brand postits aren't very sticky, it turns out.)

We finished! But it was 10.30pm or so Sunday. And then I still had dishes to put away and ... I dunno what else. I only got to sit down and rest around 11.30pm, with a need to be up at 7am to reconnoiter our parking spot.

---

You see I'd weeks ago gotten the permit and no-parking sign for our spot for the two days our movers would be here. And I put the sign out Thursday evening to give the appropriate three days notice. No one gave it much heed until Sunday, at which point all the cars parking there became very short-term.

And then in the late afternoon, just before sunset, a trashed, grafittied mini-RV with an out-of-state license plate pulled in: one of the campers that have been illegally parking up our streets at night for the last few years, with the open knowledge and acceptance of our city council. A few hours later I was fearful that I'd need to be getting them towed in the morning, because they obviously didn't care about laws, and it'd be a whole thing because someone was living there ... and so there was relief when they moved along not long before midnight.

But still I was now worried about getting up at 7am, early enough to have someone towed if needed, before our moving folks showed up.

I awoke anxiously at 6.45, stumbled to the front window to see the space free, stumbled back to bed ... but by that point I was up for the day.

---

Our shippers showed up about 8.30 and I gave them a tour of the house, pointing out the red stickies showing that things were staying, and giving them verbal descriptions room by room. They then set forth to pack what I hadn't packed (and to label that which I had).

I had some silly idea that I'd be able to keep up with them and verify what they were doing and give guidance if our frantic two days and one evening of moving stuff and stickying it wasn't enough. But they had four different people each working very quickly in four different rooms. I soon realized that I just had to hope we'd got everything laid out right. I'd make a pass of the house every once in a while, and a few of the guys asked me about stuff here and there. But mostly I just had to let it go. I actually got some work of my own done while they worked.

Great guys. Very nice. Super competent. (Well, we'll see by how much of the stuff arrives in one piece, but they seemed very competent.) They even brought bolt cutters on day #2 to help me free up my BBQ (and went to a lot of effort to use them). I'd praise the company, but there are at least four different names, so I don't entirely know which we were working with yesterday. Royal Hawaiian is clearly the largest scale operation, working with local companies. And that I think is the same as DeWitt Move. And it looks like North American Van Lines is the nationwide company getting things from here to (I presume) the Port of Oakland and then (finally) I think Foster Van Lines is the Bay Area company that was doing the actual work. (And then there was a fifth name on some of the boxes! Like Someone's Moving Company!) So I *think* Foster Van Lines is who deserves the particular recognition for the great staff here (one of whom also played great music from the '60s and '70s that Kimberly I loved pretty much all of).

We're likely to pay around $13k to move what's been estimated as low as 7,500# of stuff and as high as 8,211#: it'd be $12,675 at 7,500# or $13,055 at 8,211#; and somewhat unamusingly because of their stepped rate system which is pretty much a half-assed way to make sure they get paid per container, even though they apparently have to legally charge by weight to get some sort of US approval, it'd be $12,948 at 6,999# or $13,518 at 7,999#; or if we were really lucky $11,830 at 7,000# or $12,720 at 8,000#. Which is to say: about $13k. But what I mean to say in all of that is, it's actually amazing that it's not more considering the 4-5 companies apparently involved.

---

Anyway, our shippers mostly finished the work on Monday. Which is what I'd kept telling them would be the case, because I knew how much I'd boxed and how much we were taking. So, they got everything left boxed on Monday, and moved everything from the upstairs to the truck, which filled it.

("I assume we're not going to have any problems fitting into a 20' container," I said, because that was a caution that Royal Hawaiian raised, before finally convincing me I should go with it, because a 40' was unlikely to fit on our street in Kauai. Our shippers laughed, because it obviously would.)

And then today two of the four-man crew came back and worked from about 8.15-10.00 and finished, which just required boxing a few things in the garage and then emptying out the downstairs.

---

So we have a kind of cavernous house. Our Living Room is mostly still there, because we kept our ratty couches and sofas and cat tree here, alongside our old, cheap coffee table and our "entertainment center" that's too small for modern TVs. (We got the biggest one we could fit last time we traded up our TV, but it's still hard to read letters and messages in modern TV shows where they assume you have a huge screen.) And our bedroom still has its bed, because Kimberly doesn't like it because it has big balls. (Kimberly says I should have a picture of the bed to better explain that statement, but that's a lot of work. But she also said the super-fancy word: "finials is what they're usually called". For the rest of us that means: "an ornament at the top, end, or corner of an object." So the balls are at the top of the bedposts.) And my office has its desk, because that's Skotos'. And the Dining Room as its table and chairs, because Eric is taking them.

But the art room is empty, and Kimberly's office just has a cat-scarred leather chair. And there are no bookshelves, except a couple still squirreled away in closets that need to go. And in fact there are no books other than a few library books that I have out. And I believe there are only four games, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and three co-ops that I want to finish up case studies for before I leave, for Meeples Together.

I mean generally, there's a lot of stuff to still get rid of. Most of it junk. Some of it to be given away on the street, which works very well in Berkeley. And some of it to be given away on Craigslist or Freecycle. (I've taken pictures for that purpose of: our fireplace equipment, our cat tree, our beloved Wedding grill, our bed, Kimberly's teeny kitchen table, the coat rack, and Kimberly's antique-ish dresser.)

But we've got a big echo-ey house.

---

Speaking of getting rid of stuff in Berkeley. It's generally been entirely successful. I mean, I moved our CD rack out to the curb with a free sign when the shippers cleared it yesterday, and it was gone by the end of the day.

But we also had some encounters with the Berkeley sociopaths in the last day who I always assume may destroy anything put out. A nice humidifier (which would be totally undesired in Hawaii) had its power cord either cut off or ripped off, so I had to throw it away. And then this afternoon some asshole managed to rip our laminated no-parking sign free of the invisible hanging cords and threw it on the ground. And that's exactly the type of random, unprovoked, and unnecessary vandalism that I expect in Berkeley. On Friday and Saturday nights, it would be drunken students; on Monday night and Tuesday afternoon, it was probably Berkeley's ever-growing transient population.

---

Meanwhile, life goes on.

I have two remaining house crises.

Our heater has been getting really flaky this year. I'd hoped I'd fixed it with a new thermostat while Kimberly was in the hospital, but five days later it started shutting down for hours every day again. We got someone out this afternoon and he said it was the gas valve, which gets too hot and then shuts down, which matches with the behavior I see. But he says he needs to pretty much replace everything, because it's all original ('60s or '70s) and way out of code. So we get to replace all of the meaningful mechanical parts of our floor heater for a $1,300 that I would have preferred not to spend, because we're already way over on the move due primarily to the painting (and gardening). I'm hoping our money isn't going to get tight at the start of the year, until we sell. But, it needs to be done, else it could have a big impact on selling, and I can't even say that this was bad timing, because it had happened a few times in previous years, just not a few times a week as we've been seeing in December. (OK, maybe bad timing nonetheless.)

"It'll be a whole new heater system that'll work for another 40 or 50 years," Heater repair guy said. "I only care if it's working next month," I kept to myself. (But of course it needs to be working well or we need to disclose otherwise.)

And, we're still waiting on splashes to complete the work on our vanity and actually make it look good, but I've now got the handyman to commit to coming on Friday to do it. More money there, of course.

And this afternoon I went with Kimberly to her post-op appointment. Where Dr. R. said she's healing great, but that the continued pain she's having is unusual, bad luck having to do with a nerve, and that it should clear within three months. Which we're trying not to think is too much like what happened with her foot, but he says it's totally different.

But that should be the end of the medical marathon (other than a few lesser follow-ups that Kimberly has) and that should be the end of the house marathon (other than work that is already scheduled and hopefully doesn't need our oversight, after those crises are resolved in the next three days) and we're done with the shipping marathon (other than anything we mail at the last minute).

So, maybe things get simpler for the next two weeks? We'll see ...

I must not call them fascists. I must not tell them that they have sacrificed their morals by working for an immoral agency. Because, it's no longer about just working for a troubled agency and trying to fix things from the inside. No. At this point, CBP is corrupt to the core, and they've been given their head under Trump. Certainly, there might be good people within, but they're good people who have chosen the path of immorality, because we know from their no-longer-secret chat rooms that the agency is rotten with bigots and xenophobes. Anyone there is enabling that.

But today I have to smile, to pretend that they're not locking up kids in cages, that they're not taking away their medications, that they're not denying refugees soap and toothpaste, that they're not lying to people on buses and planes to claim rights that they don't have, that they're not demanding illegal searches of electronics at the border, that they're not illegally tracking and harassing journalists who are reporting on them and on the refugee crisis. That they're not a prime cog in the machinery of fear and hatred that has overtaken our country.

Because I need them to approve my Global Entry application, so that I have TSA-Pre when I'm dragging our poor cats through Oakland airport just 26 days from now, and so that I have full Global Entry benefits when I come back from Buenos Aires (hopefully) this coming March. Because I'm sick of the horrific customs lines here in the US, which are offensively inefficient and rude compared to all of the European and Canadian customs that I've dealt with in recent years.

So, happy face. Pretend they're like most governmental workers: respected and appreciated civil servants who are actually making our country better, rather than the converse.

(But the converse is true: CBP is making our country, our culture, our lives worse.)

---

I take BART in, of course. I always do when I can, even if Lyft/Uber would be a bit faster. Boy it takes forever to get through San Francisco and out to SFO, though.

---

And the Global Entry office, down in the bowels of SFO, is exactly as opaque as I'd expect from a close-mouthed organization of privacy-invading bureaucrats. There are few signs, and no explanations of what to do, just a closed door with tinted windows all around. A sign on the door says "Do NOT Knock. Interviews in Progress." There's no obvious way to check in.

Do they just assume that people will be there, and pop out their head at your appointment time? Maybe. I sit down figuring that's the case, but just a minute later a woman sticks her head out the door to call someone, and sees me. She asks my name and my appointment time and makes a little checkmark on her pad.

(Over the next half-an-hour any number of people walk to the door and look confused. Sometimes folks sitting around tell them what's up, myself included. Sometimes we're too tired to, or at least that's my excuse.)

---

I write the early parts of this journal entry while waiting. I'm about 40 minutes early, because there was no way I was going to miss this appointment that I had to run a GitHub cancellation-checking bot to get.

I'm surprised when a guy shows up 20 minutes late for his appointment and is let in. Apparently the focus at CBP is on "evil" not "bureaucrat".

As we get close to my appointment time I move this journal from my browser to a file. Then I close the file. Then I close textedit entirely. Then I put my computer away.

That's because CBP has been making illegal searches and seizures of computers for several years now. And I'm not under their power to get back into the country (at the moment), but I am under their power to get this new ID that I want. So I'm minimizing any chance of misunderstandings that might lead me to calling the ACLU.

---

I'm actually called in for my appointment 10 minutes early or so. And it's the definition of perfunctory. Really, it's all the definition of Security Theatre.

They verify my list of recently traveled countries, but spit it out so fast ("spainczechrepublicnetherlandsgermanyswitzerland") that I'm not even sure I catch them all. They verify that I haven't violated any customs laws. And they just ask one little additional question.

Have I been to Canada or Mexico in the last five years?

Now, those countries were explicitly not on the Global Entry application, where you listed what countries you'd been to recently. It said something like "countries visited other than Canada or Mexico". So I find it very interesting that the CBP is now gathering this information that the people who wrote up the official forms though they didn't need. And I remember the journalists who were illegally targeted by CBP because they were writing about refugees on the Mexican border, and I remember the atrocious human right violations that have been going on there.

And I don't really have to wonder much about why they're collecting this information that officially they don't need.

"I've been to Canada," I say quietly.

---

And after my ten minutes of wandering SFO, looking for the CBP dungeon; my thirty minutes of waiting, watching people look quite confused at the CBP door; and my two minutes of interviewing, I'm done.

And you have to give CBP this: they keep the trains running on time. I get confirmation that my Global Entry application has been completed while I'm on BART headed back to the East Bay. When I finally get a chance to sit down with my laptop in the evening, I can enter my TSA-Pre code into my flight info for January 1.

And hopefully Kimberly and I will both get the TSA-Pre lane when we head out to Hawaii, as that will make getting our two cats through the airport just a teeny bit easier.

---

I don't go home, but instead to MacArthur BART. Southside Berkeley and Pill Hill have become the nexuses of my life faster than you'd think possible.

There I hike the back way to the hospital to avoid the enormous homeless camp on Telegraph under 580, and realize that it's close to a mile from the BART station to Kimberly's room, up on the 9th floor, looming over the Hill.

She's continuing to improve remarkably fast and tells me that she managed three laps around the ninth floor that morning.

(Yay.)

I visit for a bit more than an hour, the last half of which we're waiting around for someone to bring her food and get her out of bed. Everyone at the hospital seems like great people (except apparently a night nursing assistant I have not met), but they clearly don't have enough staff.

---

At home around 3pm, I have a funny idea that I'm going to work, but I actually ending up crashing.

Well, that's really what I scheduled: focus on Kimberly from about Thursday to Sunday, with a secondary focus on keeping myself healthy and sane.

But hope springs eternal.

Actually, I answer two small requests at Skotos and deal with some email, so that's something.

---

Chris and Maire come by at about six, bringing some tacos. It's good to hang out with friends and talk. They also very kindly brought some Lindt chocolates. Tasty!

And afterward they drive me back to Pill Hill and we all hang out for a bit.

---

After Chris and Maire leave, Kimberly and I talk for some more.

Unfortunately, her pain is way up. She's been so bright and aware today because she hasn't taken any notable pain meds since 8.30am. Which is coming home to roost now, around 8pm. She's going to be better about that tomorrow.

Someone has strangely written tomorrow's on Kimberly's board for a possible release, but everyone's laughing at that, nurses, guests, and Kimberly alike. I have to assume some stupid American-medicine game is being played here, where the release date gets put back a day every day.

And then we're waiting around for at least half an hour for someone to get Kimberly back into bed. (See above.)

---

I decide to give AC Transit another shot to get home, and it's a relief to only have to wait six minutes past when the bus was supposed to show up.

So, I can take the 6 pretty much from the hospital to home.

And I can drop relieved onto the couch to REST.

This is what life is like right now:

I have a home inspection scheduled for Thursday and a pest inspection scheduled for Friday.

But, I might have to reschedule the Friday pest inspection because there's a possibility that Kimberly will be able to have the less invasive colonscopy tumor removal then.

And I don't know about my availability for Saturday gaming, because it depends on (1) whether Kimberly can get that appointment; and (2) how she's doing a day later. Which means I should just cancel if we do get the appointment.

Meanwhile, I've signed up for Global Entry, so that I have TSA-Pre when we travel on January 1st, to minimize TSA trauma to the cats. (And so that my own customs-delay trauma goes down when I next travel out of the country, and it's tentatively going to be twice more in 2020.) Except, it turns out the Global Entry interview process is *totally* broken. When I first looked, I was told I'd have to travel to Los Angeles to get an interview. There were literally none in San Francisco *ever*. (Meanwhile, Kimberly signed up for TSA-Pre about a week after I signed up for Global Entry, and has already done her interview.)

I eventually found a GitHub script to constantly check for cancellations. The first reasonable date I got when using it was this Thursday, but nope, I opted not to reschedule the house inspection, which was at the same time. Finally, I got an interview for December 31st, which would at least make it happen before I moved to an island with no interview station. Then I managed to upgrade to December 6th. Which is the day after Kimberly's full-on surgery if the colonoscopy surgery doesn't work out. But should be OK; she'll be in the hospital at that point, and so me going over to SF for a few hours won't impact her care.

Meanwhile, I'm juggling things that our stager wants done, and we just got a quote in for painting, which should let me put together the *January* schedule for haulers, cleaners, painters, and ultimately staging and sale.

Aye.

At least I'm going to gaming *tonight*. I learned 15 years ago or so to make sure and maintain my hobbies that destress me when things are stressful.

Ugh. The last two weeks have been endless. I look back and I think "That was just a week ago?", "That was this Tuesday?"

And my work on the move has come to a grinding halt.

---

Unfortunately, this has largely been centered on Kimberly's health, and she just hasn't been catching any breaks.

A week and a half ago, we thought we'd figured out her "cognitive episodes" and that the appointment she went to that Monday to look at her EEG was a waste of time. Except the EEG showed her having small seizures on the left side of the brain while the EEG was going on. So she was diagnosed with a seizure disorder.

The thing is that she hadn't had any notable (large-scale?) episodes for a full two weeks before that, since we changed out our laundry detergent for something scent-free, and I rewashed not just our bedsheets, but the entire contents of our linen closet. But her neurologist said he thought that was just a coincidence. Since she was having three or four seizures a week before that, I find it hard to believe. My suspicion is that she's now experiencing chemical sensitivities and they're triggering the seizures. But chemical sensitivities are often poo-pooed by doctors, including their possible relationship to seizures. But we can accept this medical diagnosis, and meanwhile see if we can help prevent them.

(In the week and a half since then, Kimberly has had three episodes that I know of, once when she was at a friend's house, and twice when we had people over, so that's unfortunately up from those two blissful seizure-free weeks, but they're still all in situations when she could have been exposed to unusual chemicals.)

---

Last Monday night we went through the endless process of bringing our real-estate agent on to sell our house. We literally spent hours going over forms and signing them. Our realtor, B., said the forms had gotten much more extensive since when we bought our house 19 years ago, and they'd be even worse if we were buying.

Well, none of that for now: we have a house waiting for us in Kauai.

And I got some new stuff for my TODO list: get our attic door replaced and talk to stagers.

Meanwhile, I also got a DocuSign copy of our agreement with our shippers sometime during the week.

For whatever reason, I put it all off to Friday ... and then things went to hell.

---

I was in the shower last Friday when Kimberly messaged me from her GI office, to let me know what was previously thought to be a growth in her kidney had turned out to be a tumor in her colon. And the GI office was frantic about it. They eventually set up a colonoscopy to do a biopsy on Tuesday.

Tuesday, Katherine took us out to Walnut Creek for the colonoscopy, and we waited around for a few hours while the GI doctor did the procedure.

And thus far we know ... very little. Full results of the biopsy are due next week; I'll be going with Kimberly to a very early appointment with her GI on Thursday morning to find out what's happening.

---

This type of existential emergency in your family really throws everything on its head. Kimberly, of course, has been very upset, and I've been offering what support I can. Meanwhile, my own work has been tough going. I only started to get the least back in the swing of things on Wednesday, several days after Kimberly got that first report. And I didn't touch Bitmark work until last night, and I haven't done a thing on the move since our talk with our realtor.

---

And I'd all but forgotten that we went out with Kimberly's friend J. for lunch on Friday after the bad news. It all blurs together.

---

And I'd all but forgotten that PG&E's irresponsible and doublethink "public safety power outage" was occurring at the same time as all of this. We didn't get hit by it, but I was worried we might as PG&E was grossly inaccurate with their maps, showing for example that UC Berkeley was fine, when the entire campus got shut down.

Governor Newsom is now encouraging municipalities to buy up PG&E facilities, since PG&E has proven themselves feloniously incompetent. If only he had some power where he could force a takeover of PG&E. Yes, it would be tied up in court for years, but that's a first step that's badly needed.

---

I have been doing my best to relax when I can. Last Saturday I biked across the Golden Gate and into the Marin headlands. I took Monday off for the holiday that shall not be named and did a hike to the back of Strawberry Canyon. Today, I got back on my bike and went out to Wildcat Canyon.

(Turns out I haven't been to Wildcat in a while. I was delighted to discover two nasty cross-streets on the bikeway north of El Cerrito del Norte are now four-way steps, which makes that ride much nicer. I was less delighted when I detoured over to San Pablo Dam Road for lunch and discovered that area is now infected with RVs parked all over; I just don't know where they all come from.)

---

A bit of problem when I got up to Wildcat. After huffing and puffing my way up the first hill, leading to Wildcat Canyon Trail from the Alvarado area of the park, I found a sign that said the Wildcat Canyon Trail was closed between Wildcat Canyon and Tilden.

Great. That's pretty much the way you get from one park to the other (and the nostalgic trail that I wanted to ride).

I considered biking on up and seeing how closed the trail really was. I've been able to bull through more than one "closed" trail like that. But, bulling through a closed trail is harder with a bike, so instead I decided to go up to the ridgeline at the back of the park, and then take the Nimitz Way over to Inspiration Point.

Unfortunately, the paths up to the ridge line are pretty steep in the Wildcat Canyon Park. And I took a new path (perhaps the only path I'd never walked in Tilden or Wildcat Canyon, which went up past the ruins of an 1800s private "sanitarium") and it was really steep. I knew I'd be walking my bike up most of the hillside, but one section was so steep that I didn't think I'd be able to get up it at all with my bike. I stopped a half-dozen times over the course of a few hundred yards.

(A jogger went by in the opposite direction at my fourth or fifth stop on that near-vertical climb. "Windy, huh?" he said. Neither of us commented on my struggle up the hill.)

When I finally got up to the ridgeline, it was all clouds, fog, and marine layer. At times I couldn't see 50 feet ahead of me. And occasionally I'd hit a forested area and it was raining! The ride wasn't pleasant the first bit when that tremendous wind was buffeting me, but once I got past that it was weird and neat, with the gray fog covering everything and water occasionally misting into me.

---

Oh, and did I mention that the Wildcat Canyon Trail was closed due to "storm damage"? This is an increasing problem in Bay Area parks, where trails are closed due to "storm damage" for extended periods of time: we haven't had storms for five months at this point. It could easily be closed a year or two from now, due to that same storm damage.

I'm not sure they ever get fixed at this point: the signs just eventually fall down and the tread of feet finds its way around the damage.

---

Meanwhile back in the real world ...

Poor Kimberly just wants to sleep until next week, and it's entirely understandable. Me, I want to get back to a normal head-space where I can get things done.

But we've still got a long ways to go on her newest health problem. We need results of that biopsy, and there will almost definitely be surgery. And then depending on the results, Kimberly might have to fight through chemotherapy too. And if that happens, that's going to put us past January 1st, at which point we have to decide what in the world to do, because we've put a lot of effort into that January 1st move date, and there are financial issues if things get stalled out.

So, stressful times. Much, much more stressful for Kimberly than me. But for me it's on top of feeling like I need to be the one leading the way on the move, because Kimberly wasn't up to it healthwise, even before these latest few problems.

Ay.

---

Hey, had my own yearly physical this recent Thurday. I almost put it off, because I was stressed with the rest of the world, but I'd been putting it off since spring, because things always seemed too busy, and I wanted to have it done at least a few months before our move.

And I was stressed about getting my blood test results. Because as we've learned, you can never tell what's going on inside. But they just showed pretty much exactly the same thing as my last tests. My blood sugar is just barely into the high range (but some longer-term sugar blood tests are within range) and my triglycerides are high. Not perfect, but neither of those numbers seem to be moving, so I'll call that fine and get back to my plan already in process to lose a bit of weight.

---

Meanwhile, instead of sleeping this afternoon, Kimberly filed while I biked. So she's probably done more on the move in the last two weeks than me. But tomorrow I'm going to get back into that saddle ...

The night before last, Kimberly and I each woke during the night quite cold. In the morning, I stumbled downstairs to set the thermostat up from 65, where it had been during our relatively short summer this year.

An hour or two later, the house was filled with the smell of burning dust, as our floor radiator ate away at the few months worth of debris. Kimberly and I both were red eyed and coughing from the experience.

And that'll probably be the last time.

---

This morning, I woke to our fourth or fifth cool, gray day in a row, and I felt a sense of melancholy settling upon me. It reminded me of the light case of SAD that I used to fight with early each year until I started taking Vitamin D. But, this was clearly psychological, not physiological: a memory of times past and also a reflection of the future.

There will still be warm pleasant days left, here by the Bay. But the pendulum is clearly swinging back. There are likely more cold days left than warm ones, and our days overall are counting rapidly down.

---

So, September. I was out of the country until the 8th, and I didn't really get back to working on the move until the weekend of the 14th. Which was about what I expected, and better than it could have been.

But it still means I only got half-a-month of work preparing for our move in one of our last four months.

---

Our big work in September was a surprise: we got our second big painting job done. Our painting company told us they suddenly had an opening because of another job getting pushed back, and would we like to have them in last week. So Wednesday we got Elder back, painting the interior of our sunroom.

This was the first of two rooms we wanted painting. It has nice woodwork all around the seven windows (extending to two more in my office), but over the years that woodwork had become quite damaged. There was some water damage, presumably because the windows that open don't seal great, and who knows what else. It was an eyesore, and in a room in the house that could really be a showpiece.

So, four days of work, Wednesday through Friday plus Monday this week, and we had a beautifully restored sunroom (plus the one exterior window in our upstairs bathroom that had required more work).

It was unsurprisingly another stressful four days, as I was locked in the art room once more, without some of my work files, and with two cats, one of which constantly yowled over her inability to protect her territory, and another who constantly attacked that one, for being so whiny.

But, 'tis done. We have two more painterly tasks: repainting our mildewy downstairs bathroom and doing touch-up around our house, including repairing our art room closet ceiling. But we're planning those for December, because they'll impact our usage of the house (in that we won't want to use that bathroom any more, and we'll need to be much more careful afterward to not bang up paint in the house).

---

Meanwhile, the packing in the house came to almost a dead halt. My 110 boxes at the end of August only expanded to 120 boxes at the end of September. That's in part due to the two weeks I lost at the beginning of the month and in part due to the days that I lost while we had painting going on (because it always tweaks my schedule in a way that leaves me less evening time for work).

But we also came to the realization that we may not be doing all our own packing ...

---

That's because I also got in touch with a potential shipper, Royal Hawaiian, who quoted us a "ballpark" rate (whatever that means) of $2.31 a pound, said that included packing, and said they could reduce their rate by $0.04 a pound if they didn't include packing. I'm happy to have packed all of our books and games myself, as I trust me more, and it helped in the culling process, both for games and books and for shelves, but I'd be thrilled to have them pack annoying stuff like furniture and paintings and blank canvases.

Mind you, I'm leery of the shipping company.

First up, I've heard too many stories of people being ripped off on their overseas move. Astronomical prices to box up furniture, sprung at the last minute when you have no option. Astronomical prices for overages past a company's estimate. Lies about goods actually being shipped. But, I researched for a while, and came up with Royal Hawaiian looking pretty good, with complaints being both scarce and not sounding like their fault (like a guy who lost a bunch of stuff because he wasn't there when his things got boxed up, and stuff got left behind, because he didn't mark it all right, and he didn't check into it in the months until his landlord threw everything out).

But, I also wasn't thrilled when we had our assessor from them out last week, whose job was to give us an estimate. First, what he said was at odds with Royal Hawaiian at points, such as what they're going to use as the basis for charging us. (RH was very adamant that they had to charge by pounds because they were regulated by the US gov't, and assessor was very adamant that it was by volume, which is what everyone else says.) Then, he just didn't seem that competent. He didn't really know what to do with the itemized lists I had ready for him, to help him more accurately assess. Instead, he just went from room to room counting things, but kept missing stuff.

(And I didn't even mention how he missed his original appointment, calling me up less than an hour beforehand and telling me he'd just found it on his calendar and couldn't make it.)

So, we'll see. It's been another week now, and I'm waiting to see Royal Hawaiian's quote and contract. I'd like to go with them, because of the ease of them packing and then unloading everything at the other side. If the cost isn't too grotesque, and the assessment doesn't seem totally out of whack, and there aren't any gotchas ... else, it's back to the drawing board, because I didn't have a good second choice.

---

I also got in touch with our real estate agent this last month, but our planned meeting yesterday got delayed until next week. Which means we haven't talked to any stagers yet, who were the other peoples I wanted to talk with in September.

---

And there was work getting rid of stuff.

My closet full of culled RPGs went to a few happy people on the Acaeum FB group.

My closet full of culled board games went to a happy J. and M. at Secret, then onward to It's Your Move Games' collection.

Three more book cases went to Uhuru.

Two short book cases went to Mike B.

(I have two big white book cases from Amazon that I haven't managed to get rid of yet: Uhuru didn't want them because of the warping of the shelves, so I probably need to just haul them downstairs and outfront, but there's about a 50/50 chance that they'll get ripped apart by the problematic elements in Berkeley before someone takes them.)

We largely cleaned out our linen closet and art room closet, and that stuff has mainly gone away after being left out front with a free sign.

And Chris picked up the first third of his cube-shelves, which I believe originated in the nice space used by Consensus (and home of the Daily Kos last I checked) and moved on to Skotos, then a dozen of them to my home.

---

October? I dunno. We have shippers, real estate agent, and stagers all still up in the air.

I want to take a few driving lessons before we leave.

But we've got so much that's done too ...

So the exterior housing painting is done. The funny thing is that it looks about the same as it did $11,000 and 40 man-days of work ago. But that's a visceral thing. We'd long ago begun to automatically edit out all the cracks in the stucco, all the places where the paint had begun to erode, and even all of the fairly badly damaged wood on the house (which was really the reason that we did the exterior painting at all). We'd composed a platonic ideal of a house in our heads, and the difference is that the reality now matches that.

I do not know if we'd have done it if we'd realized how physically and mentally grueling the process would be. But it's done (other than one window which requires more TLC and some more hours of labor).

And maybe we'll come out even in the house sale, maybe we'll dramatically increase the house price by improving our curb appeal, and maybe we'll just have contributed something to our neighborhood on the way out. It's all good, anyway. (And the impending sale of our house is probably the only time in my life that I could shrug off an $11,000 bill like that, so good timing I guess?)

---

There was one bit of damage to our curb appeal: the front-yard plants that we've so carefully cultured this year got STOMPED.

Sigh. Three steps forward, one back.

The poor guys got largely crushed. I'm pretty sure that one is a lost cause, but it's never prospered, so sour grapes, eh? I'm hoping the rest are salvageable, though one looks oddly wilted and withered, even though it didn't get crushed.

So we've sent out the Gardener-signal, and hope he can assess what can be repaired and what needs to be replanted. It's very unfortunate, as the plants were starting to actually look mature, rather than something we just put in.

---

Here's why I'm most grateful we're done with the painting: the morning wakeup. I was up early every morning, with no chance to pet the cats and wish them good morning. Instead, I was scooping up cats and tossing them in the room of the day before I was even awake. Then there was a visit with the painters to make sure they had their parking pass and/or the stress over whether our neighbors actually managed to leave out their sideyard key, and finally when all was settled I could shower.

By the time I was done, it was still an hour before my normal workday, so I was doing some of my freelance Bitmark work first thing, which has been running at an extraordinarily high level this month (because of course it has!). And then it was off to the real, Skotos job!

And then on the backside of the day, I wouldn't have enough time to do everything I wanted, typically more Bitmark writing, more packing, more house cleanup, and, y'know, a little R&R.

(I think I mostly lost out on the R&R, but some days it was packing instead.)

---

And, no we're not actually done. There's a badly damaged window that still needs to be fixed, but we ran out of time on that because the owner was sick during part of our project.

And we're also doing a few big-gish interior projects, one of which we've already got a quote on: the inside of our sunroom, which has a lot of damaged wood as well. The quote came in at 3 or 4 days of work, which is fine, though there's the concern that our neighbors will throw fits again and make it hard if we so much as open the windows while working (and maybe even if we don't).

But that's for the future: the window, whenever, the sunroom sometime after Prague.

---

Because this project with its few days of delay has run screaming into my preparation for my trip to Prague. I've already been collecting things like cat food and cat litter that Kimberly wouldn't be able to get on her own. And for days I've been meaning to get some Czech Korunas ordered (but I was largely trapped in the house for the last few weeks). And ... there's more prep to do, I'm sure.

---

Oh, and hey, our first day of post-painter freedom coincided with move-in day at Cal. So there are students all over again.

(Yes, it's time to move out of a college town.)

The last week and a half were the most stressful time thus far of the move prep, as painters have descended upon our house.

The work began a week ago Wednesday, but it was a slow start. E., our painting manager, just looked over the project; and then that Thursday they brought in equipment; only starting to assault the stucco on the house that Friday.

But the big focus thus far, and the one that took up most of this last week, was the sun room. You see, when we priced out painting the house, our only real demand was that the wood on our exterior all get cleaned up and repainted. We were willing to consider the rest of the exterior being painted if the price came in right (and it did), but the wood was the priority. And a lot of that wood was outside of our sun room, which has eight nine-panel casement windows. So days of effort last week went into getting the exteriors of those windows all cleaned up (and painted).

This was all made more difficult by the fact that our lot is just barely bigger than our house, and the sun room, an overhanging part of the house, pretty much hugs the property line. So we had to work carefully with our eastside neighbors, and get access to their external walkway, and alleviate any concerns that they had about paint fumes and their newborn baby.

And it was all a pane. Much of it had to do with difficulty in getting them to unlock the gate to the walkway. After the first morning of that, when I was told that they'd given instructions that they weren't to be bothered until 11am (three hours after our painters arrive), I finally managed to get them to leave the key in a cunning outdoor hiding spot. But by the fourth day, when that work was supposed to be done (but wasn't quite), the key was gone again.

Sigh.

And I ended up as a middleman when there was a problem, such as the morning that our painters started painting without covering our neighbors' windows as promised. And that was very uncomfortable, because I wasn't a party that wanted anything (other than a painted house), but still I had to negotiate between two parties who did.

Anywho, this all led to the painters doing a lot of that extensive woodwork inside our house rather than outside, and that meant in the sunroom and/or in my office which is directly adjoining. So I was cast out of my office most of last week.

We fortunately have a mostly empty former-guest-room (now "the art room") that has Kimberly's art desk, so I was able to work there last week. But I didn't have access to my desktop computer or my files.

And I had two cats who were alternatively super affectionate or spazzy. And Callisto spent the first three days freaking out, constantly whining at me that something was wrong. I finally put some towels with catnip down at the end of day three. And on day four everyone was super chill, either because this was the new normal, or because the room now had a catnip odor.

---

Hand in hand with all of this, I've been waking up early, when the painters get here, and that's left me without enough time for packing or writing in the evening. (And I never entirely get that time back in morning hours.)

And I've been sleeping badly, probably due to stress.

And on top of that I woke up with a painful upper back on Monday which spread to my neck on Tuesday and didn't go away until Friday.

(No idea why.)

And meantime I was worried that my posture was poor at my temporary desk was making it worse.

---

So, sigh, tough week.

But that side of the house is done.

So no more neighbor interactions. Little more inside work. I can choose where to work (though unfortunately my office now doesn't have screens on most of the windows and the casement windows aren't opening right, and so the office is getting too hot, like it used to before it got screened, and the Bay Area started heating up today ...)

---

Meanwhile, I was really on my last nerve by Wednesday or Thursday last week, and simultaneously feeling like I wasn't getting work done with regard to packing and some freelance tech writing I have on the side, so I decided to cancel my saturday game.

I felt bad about it, as our saturday game sessions are scarce few left, but it was good. I did a bit of tech writing and tech writing organization in the morning, then did a relatively casual hike to Orinda in the afternoon, then refused to do any more work in the evening, and just read and napped. It definitely helped.

---

And today Kimberly and I celebrated our 19th Anniversary a day early at Millennium, where we've probably celebrated about half of our anniversaries in the last 20 years, at three different locations.

Happy Anniversary again, Hon (and for real, by the time you read this).

And today I also got a few boxes packed, and was able to move them back under some of the windows, clearing up space. (They'd been moved away due to the threat of powerwashing, which finally occurred on Friday; only two windows suffered any wetness inside, but one of them was above some of the boxes I moved, so good thing.) And put another hour into my freelance tech writing.

So onward.

---

Whew. But the painting starts again tomorrow, and likely has five days left.

I must admit that I entered this week with a bad attitude related to our handyman ("Tim"). He cranked up the price of our door twice last week, and also had really underbid on materials costs. Meanwhile, the joyful fact that he wanted to show up at 11am often turned into noon or 1pm, and then he wanted to stay until 6 or 6.30. Then on Tuesday, his first day back this week, he was scheduled to show up at 1pm and ended up here at 3pm.

Fortunately, things went smoother from there. He constructed the hatches for our crawl space under the house, and they looked quite good, minus the fact the he reused the frames from old, past hatches that were missing when we moved in. But we're hoping the house painters can clean that up. Then he did a good job of getting three of our ill-fitting doors upstairs opening, closing, and latching better (but still asked for the median of the variable price he'd quoted for four doors). Then he actually found a cartridge for the lock in our sunroom door and got it all installed and working beautifully. Those are all things that will definitely add to the value of the house.

I do feel like we got taken for at least $1000-1500 in the process, in that the bid which I originally thought was high got increased, with the materials also being underbid. But I'm doing relatively good at not caring. We'd been having troubles finding handymen, and at this point we really needed one for a variety of work going back years and years.

---

Did I say house painters? Yeah, getting that going was our big July initiative. I definitely wanted them to fix up and paint the wood on the outside of our house, but was willing to also look at a quote for the entire exterior. They *only* gave us a quote for the whole exterior, and it's expensive, but it was just over my number where I thought we should flat out take it. So, we've got them starting on Wednesday.

I'm not thrilled to have them so close after the handyman work, as it was exhausting managing Tim for four days while I kept the cats locked in my office (though part of the exhaustion was two days of simultaneously filing and shredding Skotos material). But Kimberly has thus far been our main contact on the painters. When they get here, they'll be more self-sufficient, and hopefully Kimberly and I can share the responsibility more when they need to talk.

My share thus far has been talking to neighbors. We have a teeny, teeny lot, just a bit bigger than the footprint of our house. So the painters identified two areas (the kitchen and bathroom walls on the east and the bathroom and back hallway walls on the south) where they'd need to get into neighbors' yards to safely put up their ladders. I thought the condos on the east would be more problematic, because their side walkway is locked and the painters wanted to put up some plastic to protect our closest neighbors and we needed to talk to at least two different households. But, I was able to get ahold of six different people (our two closest neighbors, then the owner and three tenants for another apartment accessible by that walkway) within 24 hours and everyone was totally cool. I thought the house to our south would be non-problematic, because we've worked together before (on killing Acacias) and the work is quite far from their residence, but I haven't heard back from them at all yet. (They could well be out of town, their comings and goings and usage of the house have always been mysterious.)

Oh, and I moved lots of boxes. You see, the work is going to start with power washing the exterior, and the painters' contract notes that this can cause leakage, particularly on older windows. We *have* redone about 50% of the windows in the house while living here, but almost all of the windows that I'd piled up boxes under ... happened to be old windows. So they all had to be moved interior. (I've got one line of boxes under the newer windows in my office, and hopefully they'll be fine, but maybe I'll pushing them back a foot or so after I finish up work on Tuesday, and can have my office more clogged up.)

---

A few more bits of house work and we're done: interior painting; fixing collapsed drywall and a closet and fixing some ripples in plaster (also to be done by interior painters); putting up a new exterior light and taking out an unused light switch (to be done by an electrician on Tuesday).

---

Weekends continue to be one of my prime restorative times, especially if it's a Saturday when I can hike or bike. So this weekend I decided to head out to the largest park in San Francisco that I'd never been to, which is John McLaren, number 3 in the city (at 312 acres) after The Presidio (1480 acres) and Golden Gate Park (1017 acres). Big jump there, and of course none of these reach the size of the parks I regularly hike in like Tilden, WIldcat Canyon, and Redwood Regional Park (which are all around 2000 acres) — but still pretty big for an urban park.

So, I BARTed out to Balboa Park, which I found is a world of difference from the affluent Glen Park area, just one stop up. It's a bit more of a run-down urban area. Not bad, but occasionally sketchy and the bike routes were much rarer, despite the streets being pretty busy. I stopped and had lunch at a Popeye's that was amazingly busy.

The actual park (John McLaren, not Balboa!) is one of those urban parks that gets lots of practical usage. So, the ugly southside of it is all kinds of sports parks while the northeast side has a lake and playgrounds. But there's lots of attractive, quiet park in between. The very middle was the only bit that felt like wilderness. I did a hike on the "Philosopher's Way", which is a loop with some side paths here and there that runs from the middle of the park up around the north and back. It was some pretty neat hillside walking toward the middle, and then some quieter forested areas around the north. There was really an amazing amount of diverse terrain in a relatively small area. And oh, there were beautiful views of the city and bay whenever I was walking on one of the edges.

One of the neat things about the Philosopher's Way was that it had these big granite trail markers which just featured understated arrows. They were really easy to make out, and kept you going the right way among the park's many paths.

Interestingly, the Philosopher's Way avoided all the more trafficked parts of the park. So I had to go out of my way to see the teeny little manmade lake to the northeast and to cross over some of the "Hidden Bridges" (which were very nice, long bridges among relatively forested areas, crossing over streams and ravines). Also, to go the Upper Reservoir, the park's sort of other lake — and also the only place I saw a homeless person all day, in an experience totally unlike modern-day Berkeley. Just past the "No Swimming or Wading" signs, he was bathing in the Reservoir. I also investigated the "Philosopher's Labyrinth", another one of those little stone mazeways or spirals that seem popular in San Francisco. And then it was back to my bike and down the hill to Glen Park Station this time (because I didn't want to mess with the streets and neighborhoods around Balboa Park Station again).

Overall, it was nice to see a new neighborhood of San Francisco, and nice to see a new, interesting park.

---

I have no idea what San Francisco's fourth or fifth largest parks might be, but I've been to many of the largest green areas in the city at this point.

We have finished our first cut of culling media. 72 boxes (or the equivalent) went out the door: 59 boxes of books and graphic novels to Friends of the Berkeley Public Library, 10 long boxes of individual issues and graphic novels to Fantastic Comics, 2 bags of books to a friend's little library, and 1 bag of DVDs to Half Price Books (Berkeley).

(And thank goodness for Friends of the Berkeley Public Library and Fantastic Comics being willing to pick up.)

I don't believe in fads, including the recent cleansing-your-life fad, but it's pretty great to get a lot of stuff out of the house that we weren't using. We're going to have a relatively fresh start in Hawaii.

We did pretty good at keeping the stuff we expected to reread or wanted for nostalgic value, and I'm sure there's stuff we'll regret getting rid of at some point ... but we can always repurchase if so. Personally, I was very sad to see those individual comic issues go, because many haven't been reprinted, but I just didn't consult individual issues anymore, so there was stuff in there I loved, but never looked at. *Shrug*. Hopefully trades of my favorites will eventually appear, and if not, the digital comic services are continuing to mature.

I've just started the next two big culls: roleplaying games and board games. That's going to take some time and effort.

(I should note: it's not like we haven't culled before. I regularly culled my books and graphic novels over the years as shelves got full, but we also added shelves. I regular took as many games as I could carry to Endgame's auction every single year. But I was still piling up games in my closet. Like entropy, games, books, and graphic novels always increase.)

Meanwhile, I've packed 54 boxes so far of books and graphic novels, with a few shelves of graphic novels to go. When we're done, I think we'll have maintained that 50/50 ratio of cull to ship.

Five and a half months to go.