The inaugural ceremony managed to alienate hundreds (if not thousands) of ticket-holders thanks to sloppy planning and bad security deployment. They’re not the first event to fail on that count but historically I think this is the first swearing-in-of-a-new-president crowd to get the gate shaft. Imagine holding a ticket to the coveted blue or purple sections only to find that you can’t get to your place because it’s already full. If it were a concert there’d be refunds in spades…but not for this thing. Tickets were free; your plane fare, hotel room, and other “gotta be there” costs had nothing to do with access to the event itself so you were doubly screwed. And yet nobody kicked anybody else (that we’ve heard of), nobody tried to rip down the gates, nobody pitched a hissy and got themselves arrested.

Yay, new era!

On the other hand, the main attraction had to redo his oath because one word was spoken out of sequence. Capitol Hill wanted to be absolutely sure he was officially and unquestionably the President of the United States. That’s kinda funny in a way. Imagine if, a year from now, they discovered that he really wasn’t the president because he flubbed that line in the oath of office. What would that mean? That Bush was technically still our leader? That Biden should’ve been sitting at the Resolute Desk? That our troops had, in a very real sense, gone AWOL from their posts in Iraq when they came home? Heh.

Oh, well. I’m glad it’s over, and I’m glad we are a happy and proud nation looking to our new First Family to do all the right things, cure all the lingering evils, walk down paths strewn with flower petals, and eat at IHOP after church on Sundays just like the rest of us. The Second Camelot, isn’t it? I’m looking forward to seeing things unfold. Imua Obama!

I only have one nit to pick. Okay, one serious nit to pick: I really hated the ball gown. Really, really hated it. Sorry, everyone else. I call it a fail.

In the distant past I had a thing for clean interiors with sparse furnishings and tons of plants. I like a lot of space, plus there’s nothing wrong with music echoing off the ceilings and walls at 500 amps! Sadly, though, I’ve become a Person of Clutter (PoC) in my old age. I’m noticing it more with this recent move than when I moved from Hawaii. Two years ago I woefully got rid of art, furniture, stupid things, dear things…taking Tracy’s and Donham’s advice to divest myself of material goods so that I could acquire more when I got here.  Oh, how they made it sound so manageable.  But I know better now.  Shopaholism and packrattiness go hand in hand (and then some).

I’m in a 3-bedroom apartment that’s fully furnished by all the stuff I had in the 2-bedroom. It didn’t seem like I had that much over there. It didn’t seem all that cramped, really. Yet here I am, looking at buying just a couple of things (The Kid’s dresser fell apart and needs replacing and we need a small sideboard by the kitchen).  Every other area of the house is done.  I have no idea how it fit in the old place but there you have it.  It must’ve looked insane to everyone else but me.  If I’m not careful, this place’ll turn out the same.  Meep!

Most of the 60ish boxes are empty at this point. I have about a dozen more to go.   Things are piled on top of each other while I figure out whether I like the feng sui enough to commit to it. The place is a wreck but it’s no longer a wreck of cardboard, just a wreck of too much stuff. When in my lifetime, for example, did I need 600′ of coaxial cable complete with couplers and splitters? I can understand needing miles of speaker cables. Music is my life. But TV cable? Heck, I haven’t even watched TV much since I discovered the Net. I’m horrified to think that I have more round, white cable than the guy who installs it. I’ll bet I have better couplers than him, too.

I have more pictures/paintings/ephemera than I have walls to hang them on. A lot of these are autographed so they’ll go up somewhere. Among the stuff in one of my handy FedEx tubes is a signed lithograph by a famous Japanese painter. It needs a frame, but if I frame it I’ll end up needing a wall. Frames are easier to acquire than walls. I’ll have to see what else suffers so the lithograph finally sees the light of day.

I also got rid of enough books in Hawaii to make Broos cringe =P But honestly, where the heck did I pick up half of the books I have now? Do I really need six books on the Brontës, eighteen on Shakespeare, twelve more on King Arthur? When did I forget I’d already memorized my favorite Guy De Maupassant stories, and when did I rush to buy them again because I might have needed to refresh my memory? And the game boxes. Lord have mercy, I have all my MMO boxes.  Even Horizons: Empires of Istaria, which I haven’t played in years and years. And The Sims. And Oblivion, which I keep promising myself I’ll get around to playing but I never find the time. I like the boxes, they stack neatly on a shelf. The installation CDs and booklets on their own aren’t quite as exciting to look at. I suppose I could suck it up and throw away the glossy boxes.

Not gonna happen.

Cuz, you know, they’re like CDs that way, and my CDs are my lifeblood, my road map through the decades, the history of the development of my musical tastes and my previous career.  They’re also really, really heavy, as the movers pointed out to me last week.  Which reminds me…I need a good storage cabinet for them, too.

See?  See?!?  This is how it happens! This is me, packratting right before your eyes.  It’s indecent, I tell ya.  But I need more stuff to hold my stuff, Mr. Carlin!

Maybe I should’ve rented the four-bedroom unit.

I need an intervention, I think.  Or a really big dumpster parked outside my patio.