It is the walk

All day today I have been slowly moving my office from the basement to the spare bedroom in the back of the house. The reasons for this are manifold. The primary impetus is to remove myself (and my electronics) from the flood zone, but other reasons include the fact that it is colder than hell down there in the wintertime as well as the fact that I am so far away from everyone else in the basement I may as well be living in my own house. I think Heidi has gotten tired of yelling down at me and I can understand that.

Because things like this can never just happen around here, we naturally had to do some quick sanding and sealing of the hardwood floor in the spare bedroom. To be honest, it really needed it. No one had done a thing with it before we bought the house besides damage it. There were paint stains and water stains all over it. No longer. Heidi sanded it. I sealed it. It is beautiful.

So like I said, I have moved my desk and computer upstairs and I think I'm gonna like it. It's odd to have to be conscious of how loud my music is because Heidi is watching Battlestar Galactica in the next room. I don't have half my shit up here yet, but I think this is as good a time as any to thin some of the stuff that I have been accruing. I started with T-shirts that I wear to bed. Some of those T-shirts I have been carrying around for over a decade. I finally threw away the Iowa City Public Library: A Century of Service T-shirt from 1997! Also amongst the cast-offs were my Dean For America shirt, a shirt from my dorm floor in college and a "heavy metal" t-shirt consisting of that section of the periodic table. Yeah, geek. We knew that already.

I also went to a Mindfulness and Meditation session at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship tonight. I have been meaning to go to those for months now (they have them every Sunday night) and I finally went tonight. It was kind of weird, I will admit, mostly because even though I try to meditate on my own, frankly I kind of suck at it. Tonight was no different. No sooner did I sit down and try to calm my mind than EVERY PART OF MY BODY started itching. Then my leg started cramping. Then I couldn't get my back to straighten up. Once I finally got situated, I found myself having to get up and do walking meditation - something I had read about but never done. All in all, it was a good experience. One thing stuck with me though. Right before we started walking, they read from Thich Naht Hahn. The passage was "there is no happiness walk, happiness is the walk." How easy it is to forget that. So frequently, we figure that this thing or that thing will make us happy, only to be disappointed. I shall endeavor to remember Thich Naht Hahn's words during the upcoming week.

In the meantime, here's an actual artist's depiction of Heidi and me moving furniture in my new office today.


I gotta quit smoking that pipe, I tell ya. It's going to be the death of me.

I told Heidi I was getting rid of the Iowa City Public Library T-shirt and she talked me out of it! It's back in my drawer.