A change

We've long been working on getting ready to move into a new house. A few months ago, Mom found a house she really likes; Dad likes it too. Recently, we've started getting ready to put our current house on the market. On Monday, Mom told me, "We're moving in about two weeks."
-I knew we were moving, but I expected to know farther ahead of time. I didn't realize it until I heard we were moving, but I actually kind of like this house. Well, that's misleading. What I like is a couple things peripheral to the house. One is our backyard, which is the best sledding hill in the near vicinity (not opinion, but a verifiable fact, considering steepness and lack of fences). The new house has a flat backyard. And the other thing I like is Warder. Warder is not, actually, a great park. It has woods, but the woods are mostly composed of shrubs and very difficult to walk around in: you have to bushwhack to get anywhere, pratically have to crawl. And there's a pond, but it's a very small pond and the water is definitely not the kind of water you go swimming in. I'm don't even wade in it unless I'm trying to catch a frog. But it's the closest park to me, and I've spent many happy hours there. It does have some good aspects. The first one that leaps to mind is the Ivory Tower. This is the name that Micah and I have come up with for a towering old pine tree that resides in a mostly unvisited part of the park. It has its share of dead branches, but an accomplished climber won't be daunted. There are more dead branches now than there have been for a long time. This is because last winter there was an ice storm. Several of the larger limbs snapped off. One is still suspended by the branches below it, and I don't know when it might hit the ground. All these broken branches have left stumps, and the stumps have oozed a prodigious amount of sap. I think they've healed over somewhat now, but the climbing branches are still covered with pine tar that leaked onto them - I think the rain just can't wash it away. I walked up to Warder yesterday without direction and ended up at the Ivory Tower. I climbed up it and watched the sun going down. Silhouettes of pine needles and far-off trees on a background that blended from a deep, jolly orange at teh horizon to an unassuming blue to an encompassing indigo that was night but still trying to be day. I sat in the tree. I thought, but then decided not to, and just sat in the tree watching the orange turn to red and then magenta, watching occasional lightning bugs, and listening to the nature around me: an unchanging hum of crickets, the occasional snapping noise of some other insect, wind going through the trees. Cat Stevens's "The Wind":
"I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul.
"Where I'll end up well I think, only God really knows.
"I sat upon the setting sun
"But never never never never,
"I never wanted water once;
"No never never never."
I enjoy that song. I got a Cat Stevens CD recently. I noticed that while most songwriters' lyrics read like, well, like song lyrics, his read like poetry. I don't know much about poetry, but some of the Nobel writers were poets rather than novelists, so I guess I'll be reading some in the not-too-distant future.
-I checked Google Maps on 31 Sherry. It's mostly suburban around there, as here, though the houses are bigger; but I noticed that there isn't a park right nearby. There's a woods, but I haven't been to it: it might not be accessible (private property), and it might not be very good, and in any case it's not very big. So it looks like if I want to go recreate in someplace that's not a building or a road, I'll have to bike there. I could reach Warder in about 15 or 20 minutes, and Winton Woods in 20 or 30. I'll see what there is more immediately nearby, too.
-I'll be using these last two or three weeks (Uncle Dan, the House Professional Person, came by and he says it'll be more like three, probably) to say a hearty farewell to old Warder. (I can't really bid farewell to the sledding hill in fitting style in June, but maybe I'll roll down it once or twice for old time's sake.) I plan to sleep out there sometime in the next couple weeks with Micah in his tent, and I'll take more excursions like that sunset one. I've mostly finished my font, which was eating up several hours of most of my days. So now I'll have more time to go outside.
-I applied for many jobs: Borders, Walgreens, CVS, Panera, Hader Hardware, Graeter's, Bruegger's Bagels, Skyline, Winton Woods, Gear's Nursery, Blockbuster, The Hillman Group (where Mom works). Most managers said they were flush with summer workers already. I biked up to Bruegger's five times on five different days before finally coming into contact with the manager, who told me that. But today I finally got a call back. It was from Hillman. I applied there as a warehouse worker. I'm not sure quite what that entails yet, but I'm going in for an interview tomorrow at 1400. I expressed interest in any of the three shifts, knowing that they're always shortstaffed on 3rd. Sure enough, the hiring manager, Alethea (note: Greek word for absolute truth, though missing an i - Aletheia / Αλήθεια) seemed interest in having me work 3rd. I don't mind, actually. Often I've toyed with the idea of becoming nocturnal during the summer, but I've always had too many obligations (band camp and subsequent twice-weekly practices) to try it. Now that I've washed my hands of marching band for good and I'm (probably) getting a 3rd-shift job, I can actually try it. Too hot during the day anyhow in the summer. Only thing I can think of that would keep me from getting the job is my limited time frame. I'm leaving for Grinnell on the 14th or 15th. Crowduck is from the 16th to the somethingth. There's a family reunion this weekend - I just heard about that one today. Still, that leaves about a month and a half for me to package widgets in the mysterious Hillman warehouse. And better to have an employee who works for a month and a half than to have no employee at all in that space and leave critical widgets unpackaged.
-I predict that once Google discovers this page in a few days it will remain forevermore the only hit for the phrase "critical widgets unpackaged".