Hitting bottom.... and closing pandora's box

After moving here a year and a half ago, today I reached a milestone. I hit the last box! Spread across my garage room floor is a mixture of papers, documents, manuals, old candy, dried up printer cartridges, spare change from all over the globe -- a car registration for truck that I long ago abandoned -- and gold! The transfer of title to my supercharged MR2 to me, torn, wet at some point now with the ink running , but still legibly notarized - The car that's been sitting up on blocks for four years, can finally, legitimately, be filed for a nonoperating permit. (That is, if I could afford to file for a non operation permit)

I found three CDs I never knew I had, a soldering iron, cisco router, and other miscellaneous cables and supplies.

And the last box - 90 percent of it is just plain trash.

Now... the top of my desk in my office is covered with things I need to file, but for the very first time in five or six years my photographs are asserted in the boxes and labeled. Everything is labeled. Absolutely everything is labeled. My files are filed, but still a little disordered - I'm going to be late on my taxes this year.

My microphone is plugged-in for the first time in several weeks. I can safely dictate things where before I was limited to typing.

My office moved four times in the last six weeks, each time gaining a level of sophistication, I feel on the verge of being productive again, which is a good thing, for not only have I had a rock bottom on my collection of boxes, I've hit rock bottom on my finances, and I just ended a seven-week long relationship where I learned a lot about being a child, and being an adult.

Today I went for long bike ride with my friend evan, and afterwards I want to 120 union, a coffeehouse that just got free wireless Internet from ThirdBreak. I finally fixed my wireless connection on my Ipaq, and upgraded my software to familiar 0.7.2. I had a nice cup of iced coffee, and played piano for three of my best songs, to not only a smattering of applause, but afterwards a young college girl came up and asked me if I gave lessons.

I've been on a blitzkrieg against the bluebells in the garden, I've also done some serious anger management and knocked out a bunch of sagging fences in my backyard, and encouraged all the friends that left their junked cars in my parking lot to find some other place to store them. After they're gone I think I'll resurface the driveway and put in a basketball court or tennis court. Of course all this is pending the idea of actually having money, and work.

I still have things in do my todo lists, really high on one of them is to fix the LCD/fan controller for my computer, so I can leave it on, suspended, with a fan off.

I need to document and label my X10 system -- so far this is what looks like:

• outside lights, motion sensor
• front bedroom light
• lava lamp
• stereo
• garage light
• bedroom heater
• back bedroom light
• studio lights

I still haven't figured out how to put the coffee pot back on the system.

I still have to fold in the big dream of making all this stuff work off of timers, as well as off the computer in the garage, but I think of I spend another week working on subtracting things for my life, and perhaps just one more today, I should be able to file everything away, and actually for the first time begin to make progress moving forward.

When I moved here, everything that I had been lugging around in what I called Pandora's box spilled out, and I have been dealing with all the pain and nightmares stored in there for 18 months... today, I'm close to closing pandora's box, because I did find, in that last pile, the one thing that had been missing from my life for so long:

Hope.
  ¶ 12:07 PM