I’m dead tired after spending the past two days doing not much else aside from moving. Tonight was to be the big move. I got a 10′ truck from U-Haul, which turned out to be a bit too small. So now (at $1 a mile plus gas) we’ll have to head back to Seattle.

Everything is still on the truck and will be unloaded tomorrow morning, bright and early. Then it’s back to Seattle (25ish miles) to get the rest of the stuff and then back to Everett to unload it and then to the U-Haul place. All before 1pm.

I should have gotten a bigger truck.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures of the new place and some of moving stuff. Enjoy!

Relocation is a strange thing. We’re moving to a town called Everett. It’s north of Seattle and kind of like Williamsport. This is so that we don’t have to commute 25 miles to work everyday. That’ll be nice.

It’s exciting getting a new place. This one is bigger and will allow for office space and a separate TV room. The music (mostly records) will be in the living room. I like that a lot.

Right now, everything is in boxes. Well, not everything. Just the things we think we won’t need for a week or so. All of the records are packed up and in Sarah’s car awaiting an early morning drive up to Everett to unload them. Then it’s work and back to Seattle to load up more stuff and then back to Everett to unload. Then back to Seattle.

The final move will be on Thursday. We’re still debating on whether or not to hire people to help. I don’t want to, but even more, I don’t want to do all of this on our own. The little things are ok, but the furniture is the killer. Have you seen how big this couch is? We brought it home ourselves, so we should be able to do it, but I think it would be better with help.

Buck from work (every shop needs a guy named Buck – we have two) offered the use of his truck. That’s mighty cool of him and I’m hoping we take him up on the offer.

Things will be hectic for a while, from now till we get settled in.

It’s strange to see the apartment in such disarray.

We sign the lease on the new place tomorrow – everything is pretty much a done deal. Many pictures to come, plus a tour!

One of the great things about living in Seattle is the super easy access to “health food.” I’ve got several different co-ops and Whole Foods pretty much everywhere. It really is easy to be vegan in Seattle.

But there’s one thing that really bugs me: I want a small bottle of grape juice, but all I can find are hippie drinks.

Now, there are tons of hippie things that go along with health food. There are silly new age “cures” and chocolate covered flax seeds. There’s tasteless cereal and shoes that have toes in them. I can live with all of these (ignoring most), but one thing that I can’t get over is why there are so many hippie drinks.

I found myself in the cold drink isle of the local healthfood store, PCC. Like most grocery stores, there’s a whole cooler isle dedicated to cold single-serving drinks. Instead of Coke and Pepsi, you have juice blends and soda made with cane sugar (the new healthfood).

As I stair across the isle, my eyes glazing over and mind turning to pudding (organic vegan gluten-free soy pudding that somehow also doesn’t have soy in it), I hunt in vein for grape juice. All I want is a grape juice. Just pure, 100% regular old grape juice. You’d think a healthfood store would have such a thing. You’d think they’d have all sorts of juice!

Well they do. Sort of. They have juice in things. For instance, there’s carrot beet celery juice. That’ll hit the spot. How about “smoothies”? There’s lots of them – all with vitamin boosters and most with agave (read: sugar from a sort of aloe-looking plant). And speaking of aloe, how does this Cocoanut Aloe Drink sound to you?

There’s tons of stuff with acai berries in it. Acai berries are the new(ish) trendy fad. They replaced goji berries last year, which itself replaced pomegranate. It’s almost sad to see the goofy little bottles of Pom on the top shelf, marked down for quick sale.

Since bottled water has recently fallen out of favor with the hippies (and it’s about time), you’d got very little of that, but what you do have is mineral water. That’s basically water with a bit of carbonation and some minerals (which is great upon the event that a geologist performs your autopsy – won’t he be pleasantly surprised!). These go for around $1.50 a pint. You’re paying $12 a gallon for fizzy water with some rocks in it, you stupid hippies!

Do you like flavors such as cherry, raspberry, lime and grape? Sure! How would you like regular old water with barely a hint of those flavors? They’ve got that too! They also have root beer and ginger ale spritzers. Sounds great until you realize that it’s just watered down soda that’s gone about 3/4 of the way flat.

There’s also “Enhanced Water” whatever the crap that is.

Need a boost? How about a “100% Natural Energy Drink”? It’s got a bunch of “natural” stuff in it like water and fruit juices, but it’s also got “natural caffeine.” Can you guess what the chemical difference is between synthetic caffeine and natural caffeine? Only your wallet can tell – chemically, it’s exactly the same stuff.

Oh and then there’s the teas. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a nice glass of cold iced tea on a summer’s day. Even a bit of fruit flavor with it is wonderful! But how about this Herbal Fruit Tonic Tea! It’s 26% juice and the rest is tea (which is water). But this has got nifty herbs like St. Johns Wort and Ginko. This is $5 for a pretty small bottle. That works out to over $50 a gallon. You are paying $50 a gallon for iced tea, you stupid hippies!

And don’t even get me started on Kombucha.

But wait… what is that? Is it an incredibly small selection of regular old juices? It sure is! And hey! They’ve got Concord Grape Juice! Huzzah and huzzah again! Seems a bit tiny – it’s only 8 ounces. Aren’t these things normally in 12 ounce bottles? It’s $1.39, which isn’t so bad if it were a normal size. But it’s not.

Like many, many so-called healthfood items, this product is sold at a normalish price when compared with its “conventional” (meaning normal super market) counterpart. And again, like many of these “healthier” products, the portion is much, much smaller.

I know it costs more to produce organics. I get that. I’m totally fine with paying a little more for these products. But don’t try to trick me with tiny packaging because all that really means is more packaging.

As I look over the drinks again, most of them are in tiny bottles, tiny cans. You pay a lot more, get a lot less and create more and more waste. Sure, you can get all smug about recycling more, but couldn’t you get just as smug about consuming less?

It’s a shame that I just recently discovered Matt Green’s blog. I would have loved to have followed him on his ramble from Rockaway Beach in New York City to (hopefully) Rockyaway Beach in Oregon. The blog’s called I’m Just Walkin’ and he’s on Day 95.

With my blog of wanderings, I often write 1000 words per day. This fellow is sort of the opposite. Though he posts several times a day, he hardly writes at all. The blog is made up almost entirely of photos he takes along the road.

He provides little, if any, exposition – just snapshots of wherever he is.

Mostly he tents in the yards of those willing to host him. “My general plan for lodging is to walk until late afternoon, then start knocking on doors and asking if I can pitch my tent on people’s farms (preferable) or yards for the night.” His equipment consists of a converted stroller holding a storage tub. The tub contains everything he needs – tent, clothing (including rain gear), toiletries, etc etc etc. You can read all about that here.

Matt could write a thousand words every day, but instead he posts the pictures and every day I log on to vicariously follow him.

He’s in North Dakota right now. In a bit of small world fun, on day 14, he walked through Lewisburg and Mifflinburg. From there it was across Ohio, Indiana to Chicago and then a bit north through Minnesota. North Dakota seems pretty far west, but he’s just a little over half way.

So now I’m following him like folks had followed me a couple summers ago. I’m jealous and itching to be on the road – even if it’s walking across America. You should check it out.

The last time I quit a job was in 1998ish when I quite a pretty good job at a machine shop to work at a little bookstore in Lewisburg. Seven years later, I opened my own store.

Today, I quit my job at a large chain “home improvement” store to work at a screen printing shop. In five years, I’ll open my own (ok, probably not).

Due to the situation, I couldn’t give the customary two week notice. This kind of bugged me because it’s just the right thing to do. I went into the store today to hand in my notice, effective immediately. Luckily for me, several of my favorite people were in the break room, so I stopped and talked for a bit.

This job was one of the worst I’ve ever had. I hated it. But the folks I worked with were wonderful. Almost all of them were fun to be around and made the long and ever-changing hours bearable.

What really did me in were the hours. Sometimes I’d be up at 4am for an early shift and other times, I wouldn’t get home till around midnight. My sleep schedule was all over the place and, worst of all, getting a weekend off (or even two days in a row off) was a rarity. It turned into a quality of life issue.

With this new job, I work normal hours and have weekends off. And sure, all the people I liked from my last job aren’t there, but I know where they work and will definitely pay them visits.

So what will I do with all these weekends? Well, this weekend is a Civil War reenactment and next weekend is the Greenwood car show. After that, who knows!

There are two things they tell you when you get your teeth ripped from your skull. The first is that you can only eat soft foods for awhile. Some folks say two days, some say two weeks. The second thing they tell you is that you should not, under any circumstances, get dry socket.

I’ve got the soft food down. Applesauce and scrambled tofu. Not together, that would be a little weird, but I make a mean scrambled tofu.

As for the dry socket, that’s just nasty. I had never even heard of it prior to all of this tooth drama. Basically when you get a tooth or three pulled, a blood clot forms inside the hole. If you somehow lose your blood clot, you will probably get dry socket.

Dry socket is exactly what it sounds like. The hole is “dry.” There’s nothing in it and the bone is exposed to the air, bacteria, food, etc.

Let me repeat that. The BONE… your very own jaw bone is exposed. Holy crap. Oh and it’s incredibly painful, so I hear. No kidding.

Do I have that? No idea. They say that if you get it, it’ll have about four days after the pull and you’ll know it. The pain is apparently a hundred times any normal pain you’ve ever experienced ever. That’s awesome.

Speaking of pain, I’m having some. I wasn’t prior to last night, but I am now. It’s more of a pinching feeling. It’s like the dentist ripped my gums a bit (which he probably did, since that’s what they normally do when they yank out a tooth).

The applesauce is gone. I’m relieved and unhappy at the same time. How much applesauce can one person consume before they freak out and start breaking things? I hope to not find out.

I’m incredibly hungry. I want to eat something. Soon I’ll be back to normal, I’m sure, but I’d love a pizza or a veggie burger, a big plate of some Thai dish or even a bag of chips.

Time to eat something soft. Yum.

All pain is temporary, of course. Some pain is just more temporary than others. Remember that toothache I was talking about? That was a temporary pain. Eventually it would end.

Of course, that ending would happen in the form of my jaw rotting off zombie-style.

So I opted for an actual fix. When teeth are all messed up, you can get a root canal to save them, or if they’re too bad, you can have them extracted. I chose the latter because I couldn’t afford the former.

The dentist I went to at 6:30pm on a Saturday night (weird hours) was pretty fun. He was the only one there in his very well decorated office. He was seeing another patient for a quick repair and then it was my turn.

I knew that at least one had to come out. Probably two. My No. 1 tooth (right-hand, bottom molar all the way in the back, right before the wisdom tooth) was bad. A filling had fallen out way too many years ago and I did nothing about it. The upper right wisdom tooth was broken and cutting into my cheek in all sort of horrible ways. That probably had to go as well – is a wisdom tooth.

He x-rayed me and thought that I wanted the No. 1 tooth out as well as the wisdom tooth behind it. I didn’t even know that one was bad. He showed me the x-ray and the tooth had a huge cavity in it. I explained that while it was fine with me if he wanted to extract it, I was actually talking about the one above it. He took a look at it and agreed that it should go.

The No. 1 tooth had a rather large amount of puss under it. That’s what was causing me pain. The puss would build up and move stuff around and hurt wonderful bad.

As he was about to numb me up, he said “You seem like the kind of guy that just wants these teeth out. Just forget the numbing and rip ‘em right out!”

I got a wild look in my eyes and said, convincingly, “HEY! Let’s do this OLD SCHOOL!” We both had a bit of a chuckle and then he thankfully numbed me.

The first bit of numbing made me light-headed and he gave me a minute, making a joke about not wanting me to throw up. I do NOT throw up. Haven’t since I was 12. That’s going on 23 years, no reason to start now. The second bit of numbing made my the side of my face numb. Even my ear.

He asked, “Would you say that your bottom lip is tingly?”

A little out of it, I replied, “Hmm… yeah… yeah, that sounds like something I’d say.”

Ok, time for business. He opted to take out the top wisdom tooth first. Joy. I felt a little pressure around my upper jaw and then heard a crunching, twisting sound. It was like celery being broken and then played through a sub-woofer. It was quick and thankfully painless.

As he was about to work on the other wisdom tooth, his voice dropped to a raspy creepiness, “I don’t understand how people can just go to a dentist they’ve never met before. You have no idea who I really am. I could be some weirdo off the street just doing this for kicks.” It was strange and very wrong. But wow, it was just what I needed to break a weird fear that was gripping me at this point. This dentist is demented! He was joking, of course. I couldn’t reply to this because of the pliers in my mouth, but I gave him a hearty thumbs up and was now relaxed and ready to go forward.

The bottom wisdom tooth was much the same as the top.

The No. 1 tooth, however, caused some problems. He got the pliers around and under it (I could almost feel it – I knew what was going on, but it didn’t hurt). The tooth was lifted up a little and I could hear it, like a twisted, rusty nail being slowly pulled from a block of wood. He put his arm around my head for support, pulled upwards and twisted a little. He gripped my head tighter and twisted it the other way, still pulling up. It made a popping feeling/sound as it was extracted.

All done.

He asked me if I wanted to keep them. I jumped at the chance saying, “I’ll just stick them in my pocket!” He sort of recoiled at that thought and gave me a bag (I was joking, of course – sticking bloody teeth with bits of puss and flesh hanging off of them in your pocket is nasty).

I was given a prescription for Percocet after I told him that Vicodin just makes me angry and I say mean things to people. He gave me the standard warning of addiction of liver damage.

So far, I’ve taken one. It made my face feel itchy and my heart was all weird. Well, it probably wasn’t weird, it just felt that way. But I know that I didn’t care for the way it made me feel. I’ve not taken one this morning – I’m waiting to see if there’s any real pain.

He drove the fear of “dry socket” into me too. Dry socket is bad. Really bad. The blood clot that is covering the hole disappears and the raw bone of the jaw is exposed to everything. He told me to magnify the pain that I’ve been feeling by like a hundred. If that happens, he says, we’ve got some pretty big problems that will need to be addressed immediately.

Sounds like fun!

All in all, a horrible experience. I was stupid and should have treated this many, many years ago. The cost (about $500) really hits me hard right now, but still, worth it.

I feel like someone just beat me up. My whole body. My face hurts, yes, but my whole body is in total trauma mode. I don’t feel too different than I did after the surgery on my crushed finger last year. In the words of a slightly surprised Han Solo, “I feel horrible.”