Snoqualmie

The squeaky wheel actually has whiskers.

I'm trying to pack up the disordered miscellany that composes my earthly possessions, because theoretically tomorrow will see me moving from this relatively squalid basement room into an airy ground-floor apartment a block up the street. If you hold a flowery-language-meter up to that last sentence, the readings will tell you all you need to know about how assiduously I have been actually packing. So far I've generated one largish box of clothing labelled "Bullshit that I never wear, winter/formal edition" and a smaller box of clothing labelled "Bullshit that I never wear, summer casual edition". There's a purpose in packing boxes of things I don't wear, which is to consolidate the things that I wear most often into a single box which I can be sure to keep handy until I get fully moved in. But I've found that packing that last box of frequently-worn items involves a certain amount of staring at embarrassing clothing, shuffling my feet, and subjecting my closet and boxes to elaborate and highly defensive arguments about why I need to have these pants around when they look so terrible on me. As it turns out the closet is a pretty implacable audience.

I tried for a couple of hours to avoid packing by going to the house's room bids and watching people hesitate, double-cross each other, change their minds, change their minds again, and panic about having either too many or too few options. The house health workers brought out their two chinchillas to ease the process with their calming fuzziness, which didn't prevent the bidding from taking two hours but did allow me to spend 45 minutes with a pear-shaped blob of fur hiding in the hood of my sweatshirt and twitching its nose at passersby. I've decided to declare cuteness a highly valued form of productivity, in order to feel better about spending my time being tickled by whiskers instead of heaving things into boxes.

In other news, Cute Overload has received the Congressional Medal of Honor and been knighted by the Queen for its invaluable contributions to social progress.