YESTERDAY'S TWEETS

21:12 More Tron digital "bits" delivered worldwide for the ARG tinyurl.com/yzaj9l7 tinyurl.com/ycgycfc #tronlegacy #fb #in

22:08 I'm at Faultline (4216 Melrose Ave, at Vermont, Los Angeles). 4sq.com/8oU5oF

(auto-shipped by LoudTwitter)

MUCKING OUT THE STALL

Spent the day reorganizing my home office, something I've put off for months (years?) and have really, really needed to do.

Dave shake_it_up came over to have lunch and help out a bit. It's always easier to have not only physical help when doing this kind of thing -- many hands make light work, as they say -- but it's also great simply for moral support.

I try not to be a pack-rat, really -- and I know those of you that know me and have been to our apartment are rolling your eyes right now -- but really, we have tried very hard to change our ways in the last few years.

When we moved to Orlando in '98, and then back to LA again in '00, it was a full-service corporate move both ways, which means you don't get to really sort your stuff and purge as you pack, it's all packed by someone else. It was only after unpacking from Florida (where our "stuff" had grown into a larger house there), and living in our small apartment here in Sherman Oaks for the first half of the last decade, living the same consumerist lifestyle we'd been living in our larger place in Orlando, that it all sort of caught up with us and started to become ridiculous.

Since about 2006, Jason and I have made an actual effort to stop buying as much "stuff" -- I haven't collected DVDs nearly at all anymore (I used to buy fifty or a hundred a year or more), and our collectible book, toy, and gadget splurges have become extremely discretionary -- rarely if ever, and we have a pact that we have to pick two things to be thrown out or sold on eBay for every one new thing we buy.

Part of that was financial, of course -- but a lot of it was just realizing that we didn't have any more space, and the prospect of moving to a bigger place was pretty far away. Even though we curbed our habits significantly, we still had lots of stuff -- and it was getting stifling. We needed to pare down and reorganize things badly. I'd re-done the home office once already in 2007 with Matt xxtapemakerxx's expert skills, and that sufficed for quite awhile. But that was only a first step, hence my continued effort today.

In fact, shortly after Dave shake_it_up left this afternoon, I vapor-locked at the sheer magnitude of the job that remained, and had a complete, curled-up-on-the-couch-in-hysterics meltdown. I guess I'd been repressing how much pressure I'd put myself under to get my shit together, and the valve finally blew. Fortunately, the ever-patient Jason fidgetcub got home from work right about that time and pulled me back from the self-inflicted abyss.

We worked the rest of the afternoon and evening, hauling dozens of bags & boxes to the thrift store and to the trash. The closet is much more efficient now -- and my boxes of "projects" (i.e., photos, videos and CDs that I want to digitize in order to eliminate most of my physical media) are now in easily-accessible boxes, stacked in one place instead of scattered all over the closet.

We're hardly done -- but now we have a game plan, and are going to have similar spring-cleaning makeovers in every other room in the apartment. Our finances are such that we're still at least two years away from buying a larger place to move into -- but now we're on the way to making the apartment we already love a much nicer, more comfortable place to be while we're still in it. Baby steps.

COBB GETS AROUND

Cobb Finally Admits It
Originally uploaded by tapemaker

Matt xxtapemaker catches me in a rare moment of opinion and candor...