Saturday, December 19, 2009

Getting Ready to Move

If I was superstitious at all I might start to wonder if this transition wasn't snake bit, but I recognize that a lot of the tsuris is self-inflicted.

I sat here for a week unable to access the internet before I called Verizon. Of course, the first thing the tech asked was if I had a dial tone which I did not. (In the seven years I've lived here I've received no more than a dozen personal calls on my home phone so I don't answer it. It never occurred to me to see if it worked.) Then it took another week for a tech to come out and fix the problem - a corroded connection out on the panel.

My older sister came over from Arizona at Thanksgiving to help me pack, but she and I don't seem to work well as a team. She wanted to get rid of things I wanted to keep (or resisted getting rid of at her suggestion) so, although I took several bags of donations to Goodwill, I didn't get much packed before she went home.

I'm donating books to the county library and most of my furniture to the Salvation Army. I'm pretty much down to a U-Haul truck towing my Jeep on a trailer now, and there is a major winter storm moving up the Eastern seaboard - a foot of snow in Western North Carolina. Que sera sera. I expect to be underway for the Asheville area in ten days.

It looks like we might get health care reform legislation this year although it will fall short of providing universal health care. We let the oil industry write our energy policy and Wall Street banks write their own regulations, and now we're passing a health care financing plan that satisfies no one except the insurance industry.

I read that the commander of US forces in Iraq has just banned pregnancy among his troops. Way to keep it real, General. Outlaw physiology.