And now for something completely different

And so, Grandma, Grandpa, and I went to Crowduck. So did Dan, Tracy, Dave, Maria, Jazmin, Sierra, and Hayden. But more on Crowduck later. Suffice to say that it was a glorious two weeks, and I did much swimming there, and I really love lakes as opposed to swimming pools for several reasons, not least of which is no chlorine. It was hot in Canada. Yep, Canada does get hot. I'll transcribe my Crowduck journals sometime, but I can't guarantee when, because things are getting turbulent.
-The day before we were due back in Ohio, we were staying at the Antlers Motel in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Mom called and said we had closed on the new house at 1000 that morning. So, as I predicted, the day before I left for Crowduck was my last night sleeping at the old house. I slept over at Grandma and Grandpa's the night after Eau Claire, and then Mom came and got me the next day and I drove us to the new house; she gave me directions.
-It was pretty bare, and we spent the next few days picking up heavy furniture and putting it in a trailer and bringing it to the new house. This task was not made any more fun by the weather, which in addition to a heat wave is also a humidity wave. The human body's natural response to hot weather is to sweat, which cools down the body when it evaporates because the latent heat of vaporization is drawn from the body's heat. But in the humidity, it's much more difficult for sweat to evaporate, because the air is nearly saturated; thus, the sweat stays around and makes your clothes stick to you, which even further compounds the problem by insulating your heat into your body. This is why it's not the heat, it's the humidity. And I hate hot weather. Our air conditioner needed renovating before we could use it indefinitely, so we mostly left it turned off on the last few days. We also did not have internet, because the phone company was slow to come out and hook it up. They just did that today; hence, this blog. So I've been isolated for the last few weeks, with only occasional access to the internet - at Grandma and Grandpa's, or at the library down the street. The internet has definitely become a dominant force in life, and pretty much all my important Grinnell-related notices come by way of it, so being away for this long has resulted in a backlog of stuff to do, which I'm finally getting around to and which I'll continue to work off over the remainder of the week.
-We're pretty well moved in now, and the stuff left at the other house is all trifling stuff. It wasn't until we started moving that I realized just how much absolute junk we've accumulated in the fifteen years we spent in Finneytown. A few days ago, Micah and I had to clear out the attic. Occasionally, we put some stuff in a bag and then chuck it up into the attic. Over the years, this stuff became a pile at least four feet high in some places, encircling the hatch door; when we had it all tossed out into the kitchen below, it was piled so high that it took some doing to even get the ladder folded back up into the ceiling. It was all covered with a half an inch of dust, and it was all absolutely useless, but we still took almost all of it along. Similar situations have arisen with the shed, the garage, and the Pods (those takeaway storage containers that you see advertised sometimes). They were all full of crap that we haven't used in a decade or more, but which we couldn't bear to part with. For example, Dad's computer books. They're for computers made in the 1980s, but we couldn't get him to let us throw them away. Mom even had them in the can, but he made her fish them back out. Homer Simpson had to clean out the basement once:

MARGE: I want you to throw away these old calendars and TV Guides.
HOMER: Are you mad, woman? You never know when an old calendar might come in handy. Sure, it's not 1985 now, but who knows what tomorrow will bring??

Or alternatively, check out this.
Seriously, we only use about twenty percent, if that, of the stuff we've moved into our new house. And know what? The new house is bigger, so we're going to get even more crap now that we have room for it! Thoreau would have us consider doing something different: "Simplify, simplify." And "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to do without." Mom and Dad should have paid more attention in college English.
-However I must make the point that I love the new house. I had no idea how cramped we were until we moved here. Now we have actual space in the house, and we'll be able to move around without running into piles of old mail (which is another thing we need to learn how to throw out). I only regret that I'll be living in it so briefly before going off to college for a few months. I got my room assignment the other day at the library. I'm in 3213 Rawson Hall, and my mailbox is number 3200. The two numbers are unrelated - I'm in a triple, and my roommates have numbers hundreds off from mine. Well, actually, one does; the other is close to mine. Whatever. My roommates are Jeremy Johnson and Jay Bhadnagar. I don't know anything about them except that Jay is from New Delhi. So don't ask me. Mom keeps asking me all about them, and I still have no new information besides everything I just told you. I'm going to go check my email and see if either of them has written anything to me.