I refuse to unpack...

...within 48 hours of packing all my belongings up in the first place. It's such an insult-to-injury situation; not only am I emotionally and physically exhausted, but now I have to undo the most recent productive thing I've done?

Yeah, walking across the stage, hearing Professor Baumann intone "Alaina Therese Baker, Artium Baccalaurei, magna cum laude et magnis cum honoribus in Neurologia," and pressing palms with the Nuge was 100 kinds of snazzy, but I refuse to call it productive in and of itself. The actual work was long done at that point.

So I'll have plenty to do tomorrow. I've realized that the luxury of this double-life includes some costs. Now that I'm moving my college stuff in, the belongings that got left behind must be compressed, moved around, or otherwise disposed of. Plus I've got to be mindful of which items will be coming with me in August, and what I want to have at home to bring to Chicago when I get back from Germany. It's quite a bit to ponder, and I'm worried that preparing for the next steps will involve buying even more stuff. Accumulation never ceases. Was it Thoreau who enjoined his readers to "simplify?" Unless I'm going to go live by a pond and eat bark, not bloody likely.

I got to see the cousins today. Ran around the yard with Justin, 5, and engaged in multifarious advetures with Kailyn, 2. She is a humdinger. She drank half my lemonade at dinner and ate a third of my corn, but barely touched her dumplings. She even tried the lemon-pepper trout. The pepper was too strong for her, but she apparently loves sour stuff and was completely enthralled by the process of extracting juice from a lemon wedge, and lemons in general. She's already mastered the "put a citrus fruit wedge in your mouth and smile" trick. Prodigious.

Hopefully the phone will ring in the next hour and Mike will tell me all about his graduation and other fun stories. I'd love for him to tell me that he's on his way home tonight and I'll see him tomorrow... sadly, I've probably got a week to wait. Let the countdown begin, again...