-- Thursday, July 29, 1999 --

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9:30 a.m. Time for a change. Time for a move. I can feel it upon me, sure as the moon. Have you been watching the moon for the last two nights? It's been blue-bright, almost like fizzy limelight. Last night I went up to the roof to see if I could frame a nice picture while I still have the digital camera on loan, but the moon was too high to pose prettily among the treetops and chimneys.

I really do like to be settled and cozy; I really really do. But. Suddenly you look around -- and you're not as satisfied with your stuff anymore. Maybe somebody comes to visit and casts a gimlet eye. Or maybe you see something in a store, or on TV, or in someone else's house. And your own stuff looks -- I don't know -- stupid? Shabby? Frayed at the edges?

Things, things, and more things. Do they really make you who you are? Are we being driven by forces greater than ourselves to spruce things up, arrange and rearrange? Is it only women who hear the call of the wild and who have to answer it by getting behind a huge amoire and pushing it slowly and laboriously across a polished floor?

Well, for whatever reasons, it's time to move my entire desk arrangement away from one wall and over to another wall. Yessss. I'm here ... but I feel I should be over there ... and once I get there? I'll see how I feel.

At least I've learned a few rules for moving that I can pass on to you, if you've perhaps looked at my photo from March (opposite) and lusted after your own yellow shelf and file and calendar arrangement. The cardinal rule is: biggest things first. Trust me, this rule will work for you as well as it's worked for me.

When I used to be a rampaging mom, queen of my domain of littlefolk and supreme boss of bosses, I used to demand maybe once a month that the kids clean up their rooms. Once and for all, I can't take this mess anymore, I mean it. I'm giving you one hour. I'm closing the door, and when I open it, I want to see everything put away.

My son seemed to get the idea. He would grab the biggest pile of stuff, find the biggest empty space, and stash and mash it in. Close the lid, close the closet, drape a bedspread over some lumps and wah la. My daughter, on the other hand, would get caught up with whatever interesting bauble befell her as she began. She tried, I know she tried. But after an hour, when I would fling the door open and laser eye the room, she'd look up, sheepish and uncomprehending, from the pages of an opened book or the teeth of a teetering lego mound amid the most incredible, intractable Rube Goldberg tableau you can imagine.

My own DNA requires that I behave like an artist one day and then smack myself upside the head for slacking the next. Create the intricate piles of minutia on Monday, and then actually try to dust under them on Tuesday. Maybe the new Drugstore Dot Com has something for this ailment under their bright colored banner.

I've managed, incredibly, to keep my office in one part of the room since March. But that was then, This is now. I feel dissatisfaction with my lot. The moon is full. Igor has already begun to howl.

The sun'll come out, tomorrow!