Aldi

Mark and I have been very busy this week getting ready for our moving sale and packing boxes of shit for the actual move. So much crap and so little energy. We went over to the Home Depot to buy some boxes and bubble wrap, so all this week I've been wielding the tape gun, slapping together boxes and sealing full boxes shut. One of the things I've found to be very tedious is the individual wrapping of each and every piece of Mark's dishes and glasses. Mostly I've used old newspaper to wrap them that we've been accumulating for the last nine months. Before the age of internet news we would have had enough newspaper in no time, but because even the Sunday paper is now the size of a large pamphlet, it's taken since last Christmas. Did you know that taping cardboard boxes and wrapping things in newspaper wears out the skin on your fingers? It does, and I'm pretty sure that I could go out right now and commit a crime because I've worn my finger prints right off.

If I were having second thoughts about the move to Chicago, our drive over to Aldi's yesterday afternoon reminded me of how much I hate the relentless heat here. Again, in the nineties. That's the one thing I noticed about Florida when I moved here twenty six years ago. The heat and what it does to  people. I mean besides skin cancer and a lack of energy to go to work, it turns people into walking zombies. Each and every person I saw yesterday walking in the midday heat and sun, looked like an extra from the set of The Walking Dead. Really, just add entrails and a bit of blood around the mouth, and you got zombies. The sunken eyes are already there along with lesions on the skin and that far off stare, as if the sun has baked the humanity right out of them. And I'm only talking about that walk from the car to Aldi's front door.