serenissima | Around the house

Twice in the past three days I've been unreasonably grumpy. Once was less than an hour ago, but after some idle websurfing, I'm getting my equilibrium back. The other time was at 3 AM a couple nights ago: I couldn't sleep, and my mind kept going over and over things that were bothering me. Part of the insomnia was hunger, so I got up and ate a yogurt, but I still couldn't sleep afterward. And I don't think I can blame low blood sugar, because I checked and it was in the low 90s on both occasions, which I think is smack in the middle of normal.

One thing that's bothering me is the damage to our dining table. The moving company won't reimburse us for the damage, and I can't decide whether paying for professional repair is worth the cost, which is half what we paid for the whole table in the first place. On the one hand, I want it to look beautiful and be sturdy. On the other hand, the damage is mostly out of view, it's just a table,

aristeros could make it hold together, and we have lots of other uses to which we could put that amount of money. I thought I had already gotten over this issue and contented myself with home repair, but receiving the letter from the moving company in which they make their excuses upsets me again. Maybe it's hormones.

At least the weather is starting to cool off. We haven't needed to put the swamp cooler on for the past couple nights, and high temperatures for this week don't exceed 90°F. That makes going out during the day much more bearable.

We passed a pleasant Labor Day weekend, the last weekend I'm permitted to travel far from home for a few months. We drove up to the second closest major city (I'm still allowed to visit the closest), went to a couple of museums, visited friends and ate good food. We boarded the dog for the first time, for four days, and he seems fine.

The next thing I'm trying to do is organize our belongings properly and get rid of some of them. As I'm sure I've noted before, I have a tendency to keep stuff I don't really need. This house is small, and we don't have a spare room we can devote to storage the way we did in the last house. My parents will be coming for a multi-week visit later this fall, and I need to make sure we have space for them. The hard parts are, first, determining that it's all right to let go of an item, and second, figuring out what to do with it, since I hate throwing away anything that can still be used by someone for some purpose. For examples: purses that I don't like enough to use; an old pair of jeans with holes and torn cuffs; an old bathroom scale that's not very accurate; melamine serving dishes that we've used perhaps twice in five years; reusable plastic food containers saved from Chinese takeout.