Well, it’s been a long time and a lot has happened. Big changes. Really, it’s like another world.

Last I wrote, I was 15 days away from moving and had five paintings left to pack up, but that was before I discovered 20 more, inventorying more than 250 works of art! And that was just the 2D works. Seven days later, I began to draft a new blog post, but I was so busy I couldn’t even keep my head on straight. I had so many fires going at once, I was miffed at the fact I knew my own name.

During the last week at the old house, we had to get rid of so many things, and in a hurry. It may not be a big deal to other people, but I got rid of my 8-foot cutting table. I had that thing almost 20 years! “Greenie” is taking up the space where my cutting table used to be in the above image. Greenie (the big blue-green ATA flight case) is faithfully storing my entire set, as well as extra drum heads and other drummer brick-a-brac — and there is still room to spare. I gave away the two beat up fiber cases I already had to a starving musician. They were claimed seconds after I put them on Craigslist. He was happy. I was happy. Everybody — “winning!”

It took me until the last minute to finally sell seven boxes of the extra Purex Erlenmeyer flasks I had on hand. It was a difficult sell, that one. Who is in the market for such a thing? Well, someone was.

Moving day was on the 14th, but we told our landlord it was set for the 15th so she wouldn’t come snooping around. Now that we are out of there, I suppose I can write about the situation, at least a little bit. However, she still hasn’t given us any part of our security deposit back. She legally has 21 days to do so and there is no reason on God’s green earth for her not to give us every single penny. We were excellent tenants for over 10 years, always paid rent a tad early and left the place 100X better than it was when we moved in there. She can fish for something negative all she wants, and she’s been trying, but she won’t find anything.

She has made my life a nightmare. She was once my friend — yes, my own landlord — and she turned ugly for absolutely no sane reason that we could come up with. We tried. I tried. I always want to understand people from their perspective. I really do. I’m sure a lot of it had to do with the financial stress of her home having major structural damage, which was how this all started. It’s going to cost her a lot, but that was the fault of no one. While we understood this, she managed to inconvenience us in every way shape and form in an extremely short window of time — over the holiday season no less — and within a manner of a few weeks of traipsing unqualified contractors through the house, we suddenly had 60 days to pack everything up and leave. We’d talked about leaving as an option while paying reduced rent for the quarter of the house that was caving in, but she was waging war on Michael. Mjp was suddenly her enemy — because he told her we wanted to check out what our rights were in an email! “He threatened me!” she said.

And oy, it just got worse.

Well, now we are here, in Monterey Park (<–see mjp’s sunset pic), it’s pretty okay. The house is, well, regular. But now our things are inside of it, so it’s starting to feel like home as we put things away, giving them their proper places.

Creating new storage areas and a work space has been challenging, but it’s the kind of challenge I actually enjoy. I’m an organization junkie. I love that shit. Puzzling together the closet in my office has been “fun” for me.

And my work space is getting there too. It just needs a few things…

I can’t do anything about the popcorn ceilings, so that needs to be ignored first off, and I am waiting on custom solar shades that will fit that long window. Then, most importantly, the room desperately needs art on the walls. In fact the whole house does. It’s not a home until that happens, but I need everything put away first. That’s just how it’s gotta be. What if the furniture has to be moved for some unforeseen reason and we’re putting necessary holes in the wall? You never know! So I’m waiting until the function of everything is set in stone, so to speak.

These past weeks, I’ve been too distracted to be depressed. Instead, I haven’t slept much. Although, since we’ve moved here, I’ve had more sleep than I’ve had in months. More and more each night I would say. Now, the depression comes in waves at odd times, or little things will trigger it off and I will easily go dark. For instance, I hit my head on a beam in the garage the other day and it sent me into a blubbering mess for 10+ minutes while I held the top of my head yelping and crying aloud from the injury. I don’t know if it was physical or mental pain, or a combination of both. All I know is I hit my head very hard and I got an instant headache from a galaxy far, far away. I was dizzy as hell and it stopped me from working for the rest of the day. And I  H-A-T-E not working! I know that my dreads saved me from a much worse injury. Luckily they pad my skull a bit and I broke no skin.

So that was fun.

Oh yeah, I also sprained some tendons in my wrist and hand (in three places). I’m not really supposed to be on the computer using my thumb at all, but I swear I started this blog post seven days before I was about to move and it’s been 15 days since the move that I finally finished it (Thursday). But then I’ve still been so crazy busy with everything that I haven’t had the time to go over this to edit it the dam thing. I also need to get the pictures in and post it before everything I said in my timeline isn’t true anymore. Things change everyday; the new changes the old, the future changes now, yet now does not exist.