Mikal not in Philly

Yesterday we cleared the final remnants out the apartment in "unStable Court," loaded up the pickup truck until it looked like we were the Beverly Hillbillies, had a final Mexican dinner near the Italian Market, and said goodbye to living in Philadelphia as we drove over the Walt Whitman bridge towards the Jersey shore. We drove slowly, so the leaves wouldn't blow off my 50 year old grapefruit tree.

Moving twice in a year is complicated enough. Moving to two places at the same time borders on bizarre.

We wanted some time at the shore before taking off for the Midwest. We have a half-renovated cottage in a funky bayside town called Villas, New Jersey that we've decided to keep rather than "flip" so we can spend part or all of our summers on the East Coast. There's a short interlude before my wife starts working as a professor in Carbondale. So we're spending it almost camping in our cottage.

That meant packing our apartment into two categories: those things going to Illinois and those things going to New Jersey. And of course, the subcategories, like those things going to New Jersey now but going later to Illinois. What a circus. Oh well, we're almost done. The wing chairs and piano and big-screen t.v. are on the moving van headed west, and the rest of what we own is in New Jersey. (Except for the stuff still in the storage unit in Indianapolis.)

My friend Jeffrey Zeldman listened to my plans to live in a cottage with a kitchen consisting of a microwave and a dorm-style refrigerator and said, "what are you, still in college? I'll really get worried when you tell me next you're going to backpack around Europe."<