This shot was taken in July 2007 during a bath moment when Mattie was getting silly.
Mattie's baths would sometimes have Vicki in the bathroom with him for an hour or more. The actual "get clean" part of the exercise lasted only minutes, and well, the rest was all about the play.
Vicki would eventually drain the tub in an effort to get Mattie out of the tub, but he would just sit there, no water, and continue playing. He was quite the pip. I miss him dearly.
Well, Vicki arrived home tonight after an almost three week long trip to her parent's home in Los Angeles. Her parents sold their house and have moved into a rental, and as any who has moved knows: "moving sucks". Simply stated.
Vicki worked like a mad woman for three weeks helping her parents to cull through household and personal items they no longer needed and were holding onto unnecessarily. Let's face it: we are ALL guilty of doing this. I liken the accumulation of personal things in part to a bath tub faucet that has a tiny drip from it. Each dip seems inconsequential, but if you put the stopper in the tub and walk away, when you come back, you will have a bathtub full of water. It happens to all of us.
With moving, besides the huge emotional component of relocation, you also have the pure physical challenge of sorting, packing, moving and then unpacking. I think unpacking is worse that packing! So, if you are smart, and Vicki is more than smart, you thin out things as you prepare to move, so you are not moving things unnecessarily and are left with the burden of what to do with them when you get to your new home. But you also pack in such a way as to facilitate unpacking at the new home. Vicki's parents moved into a rental home three doors around the corner, which meant Vicki could throw a ton of things into the car, drive it around the corner and then unpack them, room or area-by-area in the new home. While convenient, it also meant Vicki made endless trip after trip between the two homes, carrying things down to the car, then carrying them into the new home and placing them.
The net result is that the movers just had to move the big stuff (i.e. beds, furniture, TVs, etc.) as everything else had already been moved by Vicki. In fact, on the night before she left LA, she had unpacked the last moving bin. This meant that Vicki was able to leave her parents in a completely "moved in" state. Quite a huge help to her parents, which I know they appreciated.
I leave you with a series of shots of Mattie. Thanks for indulging me with all these pictures, but I just like seeing his face, something that is hard to do since he is no longer with us.
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