You can't wrap breakables in online news...

And so, the countdown begins. The final details of our move were locked down yesterday. Closing dates on both houses have been set, the mover has been scheduled. We've got two weeks. It's time for me to get a serious start on packing.

I started out strong this morning, taping the bottoms of boxes, identifying which cupboard I would begin to pack first, and then, as I reached for the first item, a glass serving tray, I noticed a problem. I had nothing to wrap it in. That old reliable, reusable newspaper pile was conspicuously absent from my packing materials. During our last move, nine years ago, this was never a problem. We had tons of it. However, we don't get our news this way anymore. Long ago, we became members of the ever-growing group of I.N.R.'s (Internet News Readers). The occasional Sunday New York Times we get for a lazy-day-in-bed treat (seems like a while since we had one of those)gets recycled the very next day with the garbage pick-up.

And so, all my good intentions for today are momentarily stalled as I sit here and decide what to do next. I know, I thought to myself, I'll blog about it!

So what's a girl to do? Neighbors are all at work - no luck there. If you happened to see my earlier post about paper towels (yes, I actually wrote an entire post about them), you'll know that it is not even a remote option for me to use those. I've given the garage a serious once-over for potential glassware protection - nothing there. Can't use our cloth towels, we still need them. Am I seriously supposed to go out and buy $10 worth of today's paper?

A better idea yet, I'm thinking, is to make a cup of tea, curl up with the new blanket my mom knitted me (oh, and my dog, apparently, who inserted herself just before I snapped this picture), and read my new library books...