I have a fraught relationship with social media (I suspect I am not alone in this). About 20% of the time social media is a source of joy, laughter and useful info. About 20% of the time it is a source of frustration, anger and irritation. The rest of the time it is kind of just there, sucking up the rapidly dwindling hours I have left in this incarnation.

My relationship with social media is also like a pendulum. Those percentages (which I obviously just made up) change over time, from being over in the “having fun” side and slowly swinging to the ‘this is toxic as hell’ and then back again. Sometimes when the pendulum is over on the toxic side, I just skip town. Often in a rage-quit kind of way.

Last week I decided to skip town again. My ‘usual hideout’ was feeling decidedly unfriendly again. Rather than rage quit, I stated that I was taking a 2-week break from social media. That felt a little more mature and a little more controlled, and past experience has shown that some time away tends to move the pendulum back towards the good side.

It would have been better if I’d written down when I made the post, but I didn’t, so I’m not sure when two weeks is up. Not for a while though. I’ll put a stake in the ground at August 24th.

The idea was to engineer more peace in my life. In addition to breaking from social media I removed a bunch of blogs from my RSS feed, culling things down to the handful of bloggers who I genuinely feel like I “know” in some way and who I generally get along with. Then I turned my attention to my phone. Removed social media apps (the temptation was too strong otherwise!) and more importantly turning off a bunch of notifications that I really didn’t need.

So how is it going?

Well last weekend was actually pretty nice. I read a lot (as in words printed on actual paper), walked a bunch and generally just enjoyed some R&R from the hub-bub of modern life. That said, while I was reading I did get that antsy feeling and wanted to check my phone. I resisted, since that is also part of the point of this exercise: trying to rebuild my attention span.

This week, work has been frantic [it’s Thursday afternoon and this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath] so I don’t know that I would’ve even had time for social media anyway, but I did notice how my brain is trying to get around the guardrails. I’ve been commenting on other peoples’ blogs a lot more than I usually do. I can’t quite decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Props to my brain for fooling itself, though.

But going back to the attention span thing… mine is in the toilet these days. I think a lot of people are in the same boat. PartPurple can NOT watch a TV show or a movie without having her iPad in her hands. She has some little paint-by-numbers app that she works on while she watches (listens, really) to whatever is on the TV. When I go out into the world SO many people I see are walking around staring at their phones, oblivious to what is happening around them. We’ve just conditioned ourselves to that constant dopamine drip of ‘something new’ hitting our feeds every few minutes.

This is a really jumbled post. I have so many thoughts that are tangentially related to each other. But since I’m on a break from social media and so have no way to promote it, I guess it doesn’t matter! 🙂

I have been griping about not having a very active imagination these days. Another part of getting off social media is seeing if that helps. If giving my brain idle time where it can just float along and process whatever is going on in there; if giving it that time will help me revitalize my imagination. I already do this to some extent. I’ve been walking a lot and when I do, my phone stays in my pocket. My mind wanders. I really think it helps. I go from “I don’t really feel like doing this” but as the steps go by that feeling fades and suddenly I’m thinking about something from two weeks ago or whatever. Sometimes finding solutions, other times just passively committing things to long-term memory (I hope).

But when I’m indoors I’m either sleeping or DOING SOMETHING and I still haven’t managed to deal with that, or even decided if I need to. But at least, for right now, the something that I’m doing isn’t doom-scrolling.

If all that comes from this is that I spend more time reading, I think that’ll be a win. I saw a YouTube video (YouTube being the one vice that I haven’t touched) where some young Gen-WhateverTheYoungestGenIs was talking about “How to get into reading.” and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing. At least I thought that until I sat down to read last weekend and even my old man brain found it slightly uncomfortable to ‘do nothing but read one thing’ for an hour. A few times I found that I was still reading but not really processing what I was reading. I had to catch myself, back up a page, and restart and kind of focus on focusing.

Gotta tell you, that didn’t feel great. It had me thinking of the days before ‘smart phones’ or even PCs when I’d lose a weekend in a fantastic book, or I’d be recreating some historical battle in a paper map & cardboard chit boardgame, or I’d be building a diorama of some World War 2 scene, incorporating the plastic tank model I’d just painted and weathered. Now all I do is stare at screens all day, every day. I’d like to change that, but I’m not ready to give up on gaming, and work obviously requires staring at a screen.

So my small goal is to spend more time reading print books and magazines, and then maybe, just maybe, finding an interest or hobby that doesn’t involve electronics. We’ll see how that goes. Past experience suggests it won’t go well, but I gotta at least try. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, or however that saying goes!

[Header Image Note: That’s a shot I took on my phone (the one I just said stays in my pocket) during a walk. The park I tend to walk in has a nice playground and this sprinkler area designed for kids to play in and boy do they ever have a blast in there. It really has nothing to do with the post.]

[Here’s where my mind is at: I published this post after proof-reading it several times and never noticed I hadn’t given it a title so who knows how it’ll show up out in the wild!]

As of midnight last night, we’re only renting one apartment. Yes at long last our endless, very very badly organized move has come to an end. At least the moving part has.

Yesterday we went back to Raleigh, with a truck full of stuff we’d paid to have moved south but now wanted to dispose of (good use of money there, eh?). Our old place has dumpsters everywhere and dedicated recycling dumpsters and to be fair MOST of the trash was cardboard from the packing boxes, but not all. For example I think I tossed 7 or 8 keyboards in the recycling. (Leaving us with, I dunno, 6 spares, still?)

Our new place we have one large trash can that gets emptied once a week, so using the old place’s dumpsters felt like a handy cheat-code since we’d be up there anyway. Now I’ll have to figure out where I can take big loads of cardboard down here. Wherever that is, I’m sure it’ll cost me.

We did a final bittersweet walk-through of the old place. I won’t miss the actual apartment one bit but I will miss the little backyard where I fed the birds, squirrels and even the deer and foxes who wandered by. (The image at the top of the post shows a deer and a squirrel grazing in the back yard.) The new place has a ‘back deck’ which is a small slab of concrete that faces the neighbor’s back deck and is a pretty busy place. No critters out there!

We hugged a couple of neighbors, pet some doggos, said our goodbyes, turned in the keys and were gone. It all took less time than expected. We’d figured on spending the night up there but got done so quickly we drove back down. I’d taken today off thinking we’d be on the road but instead I had a good long sleep-in. Back to work for the day tomorrow and then on Monday we’re back to the old grind, and honestly I’m not too sad about that. Remind me I said that when I get tired of it by mid-February.

The new place is still utter chaos with boxes everywhere. PartPurple has been sick this week so she hasn’t gotten much done and a LOT of the unpacking is down to her since she is, shall we say particular, about where things go. Anything I unpack she comes along behind me and moves stuff so I’ll just let her orchestrate and be the muscle when needed.

The exception is my office which was so packed full of stuff I could barely move. I’m making progress…I can see the floor here and there now. I’ll work on that some more this afternoon.

Everyone has been doing 2025 recaps, as we tend to do at this time of year. 2025 was pretty awful, eh? For us personally, we lost our beloved dog, and we lost all our money. At the start of the year I had about $16,000 in a “Rainy Day Fund”. My goal was $20K at which point I hoped to start shopping for a house. Then Lola got sick, to the tune of $13K in vet bills. I actually took out a personal loan to pay for some of that since I didn’t want to drain the rainy day fund completely. But then this move has wound up costing us almost $10K because we are stupid. (Moving company was $2500 each trip [2 trips which was the REAL dumb part], a junk collector was $500, cleaners were $500, and then there was the old 1st month, last month, and 1 month’s security downpayment on the new place.) Now the rainy day fund has $25 AND I have a credit card balance for the first time in years. Quite a setback. Goal now is to have the credit card balance paid off by June, then we can start building again.

So yeah, if 2026 can just be dull and boring and not cost me a bunch of money, that’d be great. We’re still rocking a semi-busted TV, PartPurple wants a new couch, and I’d LOVE to get a proper corner desk for my office but… all in good time I guess.

So now we start to find the new apartment groove. Now that my gaming PC is back in my office, I’ve been spending more time on PC gaming since PartPurple has been spending a lot of time in the living room watching YouTube on the TV I generally do my console gaming on. I thought about moving the consoles into my office but she says she doesn’t think this new habit of hers will last and that once HER office is set up and not a room full of stacked moving boxes, she’ll be back to working on projects up there. So we’ll see.

I do kind of LOVE having my own office, though. Or I think I will once I have it organized and have purged more stuff. So much junk! For example I have SIX PC towers in the closet (plus two actually running, one work, one gaming) and a stack of 7 or 8 old laptops (aside from the ones we actually use). I have a box of old hard drives I need to wipe before I get rid of them… just so much crap. A few 50′ ethernet cables, tons of coax cables. Switches and hubs that are so old that aren’t gigabit. Stuff like that.

The long term goal is to keep purging stuff and get to where I have room for a project table where I can do thinks other than tap away on a keyboard.

Anyway, we’re so very, VERY happy to be done with this move. I’m hoping this isn’t one of those places that gets you in at a good price then jacks the rent up the first time you need to renew your lease, because I don’t want to move again for at LEAST 5 years!!!

I’m at work right now but things are pretty quiet since I expect many people are either on PTO or are acting as if they are. I know I am!

I’m in my new office in the new apartment and it is basically functional. Still lots of organizing to do, but I have both work and gaming PCs set up. As long as I don’t turn around it feels pretty good. Image at the top of the post is what I see when I DO turn around and…yeah, still much to do.

Same holds true for the whole apartment. Boxes everywhere waiting to be unpacked. The kitchen is our first focus point since we’re going broke living on Doordash and Grubhub deliveries. Tonight we expect to cook for the first time.

The move has been an unmitigated disaster. The plan was that PartPurple (Subaru Cross-Trek) and I (Toyota Tacoma double cab with a 4′ bed) would move all ‘the little stuff’ and we’d hire a moving company to move the big stuff. And that’s how it started. Mistake #1 was SEVERELY underestimating how much time it would take us to just pack “the little stuff” (by which we meant kind of anything that wasn’t furniture). The day before the movers arrived we were SO not ready; we busted our butts from 8am to 11pm and did not get CLOSE to finished. That was on Dec 10th and that was when endless exhaustion began.

The next day was moving day, and the movers (Two Guys & a Truck) did an awesome job. They were friendly, professional and efficient and didn’t break a single thing. No complaints at all.

But after they were gone we looked around and it dawned on us how much stuff we still had to go. From the 11th to the 20th we went back and forth as often as we could (her more than me because I did have to work) but it just didn’t even feel like we were making a dent in the pile, and we were just miserable. It’s 2 hours between places so it was get up, drive 2 hours up to the old place, spend a couple hours packing and loading, drive 2 hours back, spend an hour unloading, then get up the next day and do it again.

Last Saturday I hit 12,000 steps on the old Fitbit (typically I do like 3,000) and I was so tired and out-of-breath that the edges of my vision were going dark, and we STILL had so much more to do, and time was running out.

We gave up. We knew it would be expensive but we called the moving company AGAIN to ask them to come back and help us pack up the rest of the stuff and cart it to the new apartment. I didn’t care what it cost (thankfully, since it cost a lot) but I just knew that we were pushing our luck and one of us was either going to get hurt carrying stuff, or fall asleep on the drive there or back and have an accident.

The good news is they’re coming again on the 26th of December and then we’ll have EVERYTHING out. Then we have about 2 weeks to get it clean and ready to turn in the keys. The estimate for this second trip is a whopping $2,500 (which was the same as the first trip) which is a HUGE expensive, but just to show you how defeated and demoralized I was, I’m HAPPY to pay that money. I was in such a dark place I started fantasizing about just driving off into the sunset and never looking back.

Also, I am fully aware that all this pain is self-inflicted. I severely underestimated how much time it takes to pack, and how old and out of shape I am in. Five or six trips up and down the stairs carrying boxes is about my comfort limit and every trip past that is misery. And the amount we were spending on gas was stupid, too. About $40 for my truck and maybe $30 for her car.

I did consider renting a big truck but I just didn’t have the physical bandwidth to load one. Every trip, by the time my truck and her car were both loaded, I was DONE and the idea of single-handedly loading a moving truck was just not feasible. With planning we maybe could’ve done it with one of those PODS moving systems but we’re up against a time limit now.

Money is going to be tight for a while, that’s for sure. I’d hoped to buy a nice new computer desk, our TV needs replacing (the display got damaged, not during the move), and we wanted to get a new couch but that’s all on hold for a while.

But all is not doom and gloom. The new apartment is WONDERFUL compared to our old place. I have my own office and Purple has her own as well. The area we’re in reminds both of us of where we grew up (I grew up in NY, she in Mississippi, but despite that we grew up in very similar areas). There are TONS of houses lit up with Christmas decorations and such. A mix of nice and not-as-nice houses that feel, I dunno, organic? And the not-so-nice places remind me of, frankly, the houses my extended family lived in back home. Old cars being worked on in the yard, out-buildings with junk. Maybe an old boat. Sounds weird but this all feels very comfortable to me.

In one direction things feel very small-townish, and a little distance in the other direction are strip-malls filled with big name chains and stuff. And then not much farther is Wilmington, NC. Not that I’ve explored much, but I’m looking forward to doing so.

Anyway, moving lessons learned (we’d been in the old place for 13 years so were definitely out of moving practice) and a huge wad of cash gone, but I’ve been feeling SO much better now that I know the professionals are going to have our backs.

Purple is going back up on Christmas to have dinner with some friends so I’ll be alone for Christmas, but that also means she’ll be there for the movers when they arrive Friday morning (I have to work Friday so had to skip the Christmas gathering). We didn’t bother with presents or anything; the move is our present to each other. And I guess I’ll spend Christmas Day playing video games and eating a TV dinner or something.

Hope your holidays are more festive than mine, but it’ll all be worth it once we’re past this process.

Since we have such a long overlap on our two leases, we decided to move as much of our stuff as possible ourselves rather than paying the moving guys. (Even with that, the moving estimate is $2500). Might have been a mistake. 🙂

We took a load of ‘stuff’ down Monday morning to the new place; it’s almost exactly 2 hours one way. We picked up the keys (key codes actually, there aren’t any physical keys). Did a walk-through. Made note of stuff that needs to be addressed (nothing too major). Meaning SHE did the walk-through while I unloaded the truck and her car. Mostly we brought down boxes of books and movies just to get them out of the way, but they were also heavy as heck. We brought almost no furniture.

We wildly underestimated how bad the lack of seating was going to impact us. We had a camp chair and a stool. We took turns with the chair trying to get rested. The floors are vinyl with no carpet so just crashing on the floor was out of the question.

Mattress was supposed to be delivered Monday afternoon but didn’t show so we had to sleep on an inflatable mattress which was NOT designed for two people as round as we are. It was just laying on the floor (no frame) and you should’ve seen us trying to get up between it being so low and so ‘squishy’ and us both being super-stiff from hauling stuff. And my gout was flaring up big time to make matters worse.

We had no internet and the wireless signal was terrible so I had to… *gasp* read something. She forgot her purse at home so had no driver’s license with her, no credit cards. And we brought no food so I had to go do some shopping, which was the first time I’ve been in a grocery store in years. Had Jersey Mike’s Philly Cheesesteaks for dinner.

But yeah, not a great night’s sleep. My gout was screaming at me and every time one of us moved we basically bounced the other off the mattress.

I unpacked books so we could bring the empty boxes back and re-fill them, but had nowhere to put them so they’re just stacked up everywhere, no doubt in the way of later trips.

Today was better. Internet guy came and we discovered that the place is wired for ethernet but he could only enable 2 ports since the modem he installed only had 2 jacks. I’ll have to do some research on how to set these up since it’d be easy enough to add a switch and wire up more rooms if we need them, but at least both our offices have a wired Ethernet connection. Otherwise he have a couple of “Plume” WiFi hubs, one on each floor.

While that was happening the mattress showed up. Dude basically dropped it in the street and left and I had to hump it up the stairs which just about ended me. All over the box were warnings of it being heavy and a 2-person item for moving. Reminder that I am 1) in terrible shape and 2) a senior citizen. I am not made for carrying mattresses alone. I ended up standing it on one end (it was one of these foam mattresses that comes tightly rolled up) and just lifting it up the stairs, one by one, like it was a telephone pole or something. Caber tossing? Then I slid it along the floor once it was on the 2nd story.

We didn’t bring anything to sit on but we did bring the fake Christmas tree which she set up while we were waiting for the Internet guy. It looks tiny (see image at the top of the post). In our current place the star almost brushes the ceiling.

In spite of all this bitching, the place should be pretty nice once we’re settled in. Or at least compared to our current “built in the 1980s and never really upgraded” place. We have high ceilings, ceiling fans, 2 zones for A/C, as mentioned the place is wired for internet. There’s a hose and electric hookup outside in both the front and back. The kitchen is pretty nice with an induction stovetop, a built in microwave, a fridge with an ice maker, and a nice sized island with power outlets and what SEEMS to be actual granite. The toilets are modern and don’t use 5 gallons per flush and when you flush them they work. Our current place the toilets are generally 2-flush systems or they get clogged. Hoping this means our water bill will be lower.

The area seems pretty nice, too. People seemed friendly enough although when I was in Jersey Mike’s, out of about 7 people waiting in line 2 (neither of them obvious officals or police or anything) were wearing sidearms which was a little alarming for me, but no one else gave them a second glance.

The only real downside to the apartment itself is the complex is pretty compact. We have a tiny patio outide in the back but it’s maybe…75 feet to the patio behind the next row of buildings. And in the front the windows are RIGHT on the sidewalk and then there’s a narrow street and then the front windows of the next row over. But we don’t spend much time outside anyway.

But crikey am I beat. I am TOO OLD for this stuff! Plan is to go down again Friday with another load, and come back Saturday, giving us Sunday as a recuperation day before going back to work. Pro movers come on Dec 11th so once that happens we’ll for real move down there. Hopefully the next trip will be better. We’ll have Internet, we’ll bring some furniture to sit on, we’ll have a bed.

And most importantly there is now beer waiting in the fridge…