This weekend featured another attempt at emptying one or two more boxes, and finding good homes for the items within. Part of what made settling in to Los Angeles so difficult when I first moved there was not really the fact that a moving company had packed most of my belongings for me. It was that I attempted to do too much at once, in an attempt to settle in and make everything more home-like.

After a couple weeks of trying to unbox as much stuff as possible in the few hours I was actually at home, I stopped trying. It was madness. From the end of March until the company’s huge project was finally over in July, I simply made sure my bedroom was a place of calm and relative neatness. It was hard, especially since I was battling ants and working crazy 12 hour days where I wasn’t even always in L.A. but somewhere across the country (or even in Canada, once!), but it didn’t matter anyway. Once I finally had some time to get unpacked completely, I was looking for a new job.

So, I decided not to make that same mistake again. I open a box, and it sits there until the stuff near the top of the box catches my attention as having a place to go, or needs to be used by me. Now, the obvious stuff like pots and pans and clothing – that stuff’s already pretty much unpacked. I labeled those boxes well. But this other stuff, the bits and bobs of hobby things and toys and extra extension cords and computer parts and books – that’s all been waiting for me to get around to it.

I’m in no hurry.

So today was unbagging some old clothes – theatre shirts and sweatshirts from about twenty years ago that I have no intention of getting rid of, but do need a clean cold wash just to keep from smelling sort of stale and storage-y. And I was also unwrapping some antique perfume bottles from their newspaper creches, and placing them on the old-fashioned mirror tray I got from somewhere ages ago.

It’s hard, though, keeping the moving anxiety at bay. I’ve been packing and unpacking my things since the early part of 2007, and I am tired of it. I am staying put now, of course, but my brain is still freaking out that it’s all going to change again soon, that I’m going to have to move, that I am going to go through this painful uprooting one, two, fifteen more times before finding my home. It’s harrowing, but I think the slow pace this time around is helping. Small doses, a gentle easing in.

One thing I really enjoyed this weekend was seeing my good friend Dave sing in a small ensemble at a Baptist church out in Chapel Hill this weekend. I sat with his wife in the second row and tried not to grin too bigly at him as he sang. There were a few pieces I was pretty familiar with, having sung  them myself in my many years of choral experience. Predictably, it had the effect of making me want to join a choir myself. Which I may do! I am not exactly sure when a crunch period may be happening at work, but it looks like I might have time to do at least a little something performance-related before then. I am even looking at auditioning for a play in February.

Remind me to write about The West Wing sometime soon. I finished the entire series today, and while I didn’t exactly have an epiphany about it and how it made me feel, I did feel a reinforcement of ideas and emotions that I haven’t really had access to for quite a while.