The other day I brought home all the stuff that had accumulated in my office deep in the bowels of the demented bureaucracy over the last seven years, in preparation for my final departure from the nine-to-five life. I was shocked to realize that I had so many pictures, certificates, gewgaws, etc that I managed to fill the back seat of my pickup truck. That’s what happens when you stay rooted in one spot for a long time, I guess: you accumulate, decorate and make your environment cozy and comfortable. Of course, I now have a pile of things I can’t possible hang up at home, seeing as how we’ve lived in the same house for almost two decades and have accumulated, decorated and otherwise filled up the available wall space. I swapped out a few of the ‘I love me’ wall hangings in the home office and replaced them with the underwater critter pictures that used to hang in my work office, but that just shifted the problem of too much stuff sideways.
I still remember with fondness the days when, as a young, freshly commissioned and still unmarried officer, I could load all my worldly goods in the back of my Honda Civic hatchback and head to my next assignment. Nowadays, some of my more troublesome nightmares involve the notion that we have to pack for a move because we’re scheduled to head overseas tomorrow and haven’t started yet. I generally wake up very tired after one of those nights spent dreaming about filling boxes with all the crap we own. I’ve promised myself I’d spend a few hours each week over the next year or so getting rid of the stuff we own but haven’t used in years. Of course, Mrs Thomson and I may disagree on some things, but I have my ways.
In the meantime, I’m within 2,000-3,000 words of the half way mark on Fatal Blade – Decker’s War Book 3 thanks to steady daily progress, even if it is sometimes achieved closer to midnight than noon.
Eric Thomson's Starship Stories 