End of an Era

Yesterday I worked with my daughter to clear out a swath in The Yellow Room.

One of the many objects that had landed there out of lack of any other place to put it was a two-sided cassette carrying case holding more than fifty cassettes, most of them homemade compilations. A couple of these dated at least back to my undergraduate days, and hadn't been played in more than a decade. Most of them were my "radio" tapes: random collections which I used to play in the car. There were a couple of themed tapes for Favorites, Walking Workouts, and Inspiration.

And I threw them all out. I threw out my compilation tapes. I threw out most of the few original tapes, and kept just the one or two which were never released on CD.

I never listen to cassettes anymore. I have my iPod at home and in the car, and it is almost always set to "Shuffle Songs" on the main song list. I buy CD's or download music and put it on the iPod and almost never use my CD player anymore. There are playlists for what used to be tapes like "workout" and "inspiration."

There was no reason to keep this chunky case, which did nothing more than take up space and collect dust.

But it felt strange throwing everything away (or into the thrift store bag). There was a lot of my own life stored on those tapes, in that music, in certain arrangements of songs (not all were random), and even the memory of the handwriting on some of them. The fact that I still have the songs made it possible for me to throw the tapes out, but it was still throwing away potent relics of my own history.

Vacation? Weekend?

It was A Very Good Thing I had signed up to take Thursday and Friday off from work last week, because given what was going on at home, and my daughter having a bad cold on Thursday, I really needed to be at home rather than at the office.

And I've done a lot -- with my daughter's help, plus some assist from the Ex in hauling out some of the larger debris from my living space -- to recover from the worst of the collateral damage from the home improvements.

And I even enjoyed a 90 minute massage yesterday, courtesy of my friend R, the Licensed Massage Therapist.

But I really would have liked to have had an authentic Day Off sometime in the past four days before having to return to work this morning.

*sigh*

Air and Fire

A few days ago, I wrote that my spiritual observance for Eastertide was riding with the re-alignment of Water and Earth in my house, as our plumbing, sewer, floors, ceilings and walls were being worked on.

Today the Ex's SO told me that the furnace repairman said that our 14 year-old gas furnace needs to be replaced.

It seems that Fire and Air are also getting into the act.

We are going to be so much more balanced when this is over.


(At least, that's what I keep repeating to myself.....)

La Vie Harry!

Harry Potter meets Rent!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-FpkYSs98Y

(Blame havah_prewitt!)