In which we ask, “Wyoming?” and answer, “Hey, why not!”

I should be out of here by midday tomorrow, unless I screw around too much with my remaining chores, which include visiting the farm one last time and doing extremely tedious shit with many cardboard boxes: loading some into the jeep, getting rid of some, and shipping still more.

The Ex didn’t get around to returning my call until Saturday evening, so I didn’t get out there last week like I’d planned. Behind the swollen closet door at the farm I expect to find two boxes of family things my dad sent to me (because he lives in a motor home and has no storage room and foolishly thought that I was stable enough to care for heirlooms – hah!), my sewing machine, and perhaps some clothes or jackets that still fit. I’m also going to grab my monitor, keyboard, and bowling ball, look one last time for my PPCs sync cable, and then take one final sweep through the house in general to be sure I haven’t missed anything precious to me. (I’m of the opinion that once I leave the state, The Ex will pretty much have carte blanche to throw out anything I’ve left that he no longer wants, so I want to be thorough.)

I also need to take the jeep for a drive-through oil change at Fessler’s to get all the fluids topped off and the tires properly aired up. I meant to do it Friday after I picked the jeep up from getting its new fan belt, but I was having major issues with The Curse and I didn’t make it.

Hopefully I can get all this shit done and be out of town by early afternoon, and get some miles under me and my blue dog before dark-thirty. I plan to sleep in a motel in Nebraska somewhere – Lincoln or Grand Island, perhaps – and thus be at my mom’s place at a decent hour on Wednesday.

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At my mom’s I intend to catch up on my blog reading, send my resume to all seven of Walla Walla’s ISPs whether they’re hiring or not, drink lots of tea, knit wool slippers, read, and shamelessly make my way through half of the household’s DVD library. I also might cook weird foods and try to feed them to my mom for laughs. At night, my dog and I shall sleep cuddled together right in the middle of the bed, and moan groggily in the mornings when mom tries to wake us up to hang out with her.

I’m posting this entry at two thirty in the morning because I slept most of the day. I slept most of the day because my Going Away party was last night (thank you so much for a lovely party, Baby Girl!), and you know how it is: all those cocktails just seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, in spite of the hour, I’m going to finish packing up my clothing and stack all my boxes together and then determine which ones I should ship. I suspect I will also have a pile of garbage I’ll have to dispose of somehow; I can’t leave it here to fill up the trash bin so maybe I’ll just dump it in some previous employer’s dumpster.

In other news, my birthday is Saturday. I’ll be thirty-nine. I have no idea how I got this fucking old, nor did I expect at this age to be driving across the country with everything I own. Oddly enough I am once again as I was when I arrived back in Fairfield eleven years ago: single, broke, with no savings or insurance, with all of my earthly belongings in a vehicle too old to be anything more than merely functional, separated from utter destitution only by the generosity of friends and family, and yet irrationally possessed nonetheless with a bubbling suspicion that something way cool is on the cusp for me.

I guess I’m blessed, in the sense that rootlessness of this sort tends to feel exciting rather than scary to me. I feel hopelessness when I’m conventionally safe, with shelter and income and work and bills and monotony, but when I’m like this – in transit, homeless and uncounted – I feel buoyant and grateful and as if the world is full of potential.

It occurs to me that I may be wired wrong. *wink*