I’m sitting at the allergy clinic, waiting for my weekly shot, and they have the stupid country music station playing. Apparently this is Toby Keith singing a song called American Soldier. It occurs to me that this is probably one of the worst capitalist sell-outs I’ve witnessed (in a manner of speaking) in a long time. I mean, how cheap do you have to be to write a really bad tribute song to cash in on the emotions of military parents and sympathizers? Terrible.

I went to U-Haul this weekend to pick up some “mirror packs” - gigantic flat boxes you can pack things like framed art in - and ended up spending like $80 on boxes. I bought not only the mirror packs, but they also had these styrofoam corners you can strap onto to the picture to protect the frame, so I got those, too. But at $6.50 per box and $5 per set of corners… well, nobody ever said moving was cheap.

So there was some packing this weekend, but not the quantity you’d think. Instead, Jenn and I got into this sort of triage mode where rather than just dumping things into boxes, we’re going through everything and separating it into piles. We’ve got an eBay pile (things we want to try to auction off); a garage sale/Goodwill pile (things we’ll try to sell at my parents’ upcoming garage sale and donate if it doesn’t go); and a garbage pile (stuff to just pitch out).

As part of that triage, I decided to go through my magazine collection. I have this pack-rat style problem when it comes to magazines. I’ll read them, then if I find an article I like or pictures I like, I’ll keep the magazine. This reached a particular head during my Sarah Michelle Gellar phase a few years back and resulted in my having probably 250 magazines of various natures stashed in the closet. Time to weed out. To that end, I decided that my pack-rat nature would be satisfied if I somehow kept the article even if I didn’t keep the whole magazine, so I set about scanning all of the articles that I was interested in keeping. I spent probably 16 hours on that this weekend, and a couple of hours last night, and I finally scanned all of the articles out of the magazines I’m throwing out. 588 pages worth of scans. I won’t even get into the nightmare pile of magazines in the middle of the computer room floor. I have to clean that up tonight.

Speaking of packing/moving, my parents have listed their house for sale. They’ve been toying with the idea of moving into a condo for a while now and it looks like they’re actually committed now, which I think is a good thing. Not the condo part - I’ve tried to convince them out of that; I think it’s been too long since they’ve lived in an apartment and understood that there’s no such thing as a good attached neighbor - but the fact they’ve committed to the decision. It’s been up in the air for over a year now, and it’s time they shit or get off the pot.

In other news, Jenn and I watched an episode of The Sopranos season four via our On Demand cable a couple of weeks ago and it was intriguing. Enough, at least, so that we went this weekend and rented the first three episodes to the first season. We’ve seen the first two episodes and I’m liking it. I’m not as sucked in by it as some shows, but something about it compels me to watch. I’m sort of fascinated by the way it’s like GoodFellas meets Analyze This.

Oh, and I’ve been sucked into that show Wonderfalls. I’m not even really sure why, but I think it’s got something to do with the writing. The main character, Jaye, sounds like a live action Daria, and the sharpness of the whole thing reminds me of a song by Cake. I can’t not watch it. Maybe I should figure out when its regular time slot is (we caught a couple of episodes in “special encore” showings). I asked my mom if she’d seen the show and she had but couldn’t watch it. Apparently there was “too much going on.” I think the generation gap is starting to widen.