I am at the last of the 2nd (intermediate) layer of packing. That is the stuff you use, just not every day. The last (crucial) layer will be packed Sunday & Monday (or Saturday & Monday, see below).

I am seriously thinking of going to a nice hotel Sunday night. Take the day off Sunday, driving somewhere nice and spending the night at a hotel.

It has become impossible to relax here. I woke at 4am this morning and started working, changing addresses on-line. I can’t use the tape gun when Keith is asleep, it wakes him up.

Getting back to needlepoint, however briefly, I heard something amazing this week. The nice lady at Comcast who helped me set up my internet access, phone and cable TV was named Yasmin (I keep running into these lovely names, they makes me dislike being named clunky ole “marianne”).

Anyway Yasmin gave me a wonderful and easy phone number. I told her I was old & stupid and needed an easy phone number (I have used that line before). When she stopped laughing she gave me a pip of a number. She asked what my internet business was, I told her (briefly). Yasmin told me there is a lady in her office who does needlepoint. She takes a plain canvas and stitches it without any pattern, graph or design either on the canvas or on paper.

At first I thought she was talking about Bargello Needlepoint or TrianglePoint or something like that.

I asked her where the canvases graphic designs or “pictures”? She said pictures. Someone out there is stitching detailed pictures on bare canvas with no direction or pre-plan.

I think that is amazing. I can’t even imagine being able to do that, beyond a graphic of some sort. I wish I knew who she was.

Something odd is happening to me as I pack. It somehow seems as if I don’t have quite as much stuff as I did when I moved here 6 months ago. Less than when I first moved to Apollo Beach in November 2008.

How can this be? The biggest room so far has been my office, by far.

It eclipses all my books or my closet (a biggie, that). I have 17 boxes of *office* plus 4 *mini-wardrobe* boxes with my drawn & painted canvases hung up in them with the bags of threads in the bottom, each marked which canvas it belongs to.

In my original move here, I forgot to mark the kit bags with which canvas it went with. Placing them was a hard task, when I unpacked.

I did not know I was getting these *mini wardrobe boxes*. The mover is lending me wardrobe boxes for our clothes and mattress boxes for the mattresses. They seem to be nice guys…so far.

I bought my boxes from Home Depot instead of the UPS store this time. The 4 *mini wardrobes* were part of the set. They cost a lot less but now I know why.

They are all recycled paper, which is good, but they do not seem to be well made. I distrust the side seams, I have taped these seams on any box packed with anything heavy.

I bought the XL packing kit, it came with a good number of boxes, a pitiful amount of bubble wrap and a few slabs of paper (to wrap stuff in) plus nasty tape I can break just by pulling on it.

While I do not recommend moving to anyone, if you do, don’t buy the Home Depot packing kit.

So, where shall we go Sunday & Sunday night? St Augustine is too far, I work hard to avoid Orlando and the theme parks. Key West is way too far.

There is the Seminole Casino & their great hotel but It is dangerous to stay there too long. A few hours & $50.00. sure but overnight and my wallet?

YIKES, maybe not.

I wonder how far Amelia Island is? Someone told me it was sort of a kind of pseudo Key West.

I wonder.