Hazel just went down for her afternoon nap, so I am taking a break from my most loathed part of packing: the very end. When there are odds and ends sitting about that you might still need, like scissors and scotch tape and Hazel’s baby journal in case something fantastic happens, and you have lots of empty wire baskets and other small storage to deal with, and you still have to take shelves off of the walls and figure out how to not lose all the hardware, and you inevitably have no choice but to just start putting un-like objects all together in the abnormally-shaped boxes that you have been passing over for weeks and weeks in favor of the “better” boxes.

My grandpa built a bookcase for me when I moved into my first apartment – it’s the perfect size for schlepping from place to place during these years. I have four – FOUR – sets of brackets for the shelves, because I have misplaced them in almost every single move since then. They are always somewhere logical, like the toolbox, but I end up going out to spend a few cents each on new ones at Lowe’s before I figure out where I put the others. Right now all of our bookcase and CD tower brackets/pegs are in a ziploc baggie right beside me on my sewing-table-turned-computer-desk. Mikey is going to freak if misplace it and he can’t shelve his books immediately upon settling into N.O.H. – the closest Ikea to where we are going is over an hour away, so we couldn’t just go get more. I have been trying to plan where to put the baggie when there is nothing else to go in it, and I think my purse seems like the most logical place for this move. I will not take it out of my purse until it’s actually time to put them back in their home.

Since we will be out this evening and tomorrow night, too, I think I will pack up some of Hazel’s books and toys to save some of my sanity – I need to put like things in a box at least once today.

Week 45 – the end. One last big haul of stuff to the freestore. Our television and microwave and probably some other stuff will be added to this tomorrow… any last minute “I don’t even want to deal with this” stuff.

The end is near.

Listening: Iron & Wine
(Hazel is) Reading: Russell the Sheep
Packing progress: I am at 107 boxes, a page full of totes and various other containers, I don’t even know how many Toronto Stars, and over five rolls of packing tape.