That’s all you need in life, a little place for your stuff.  George Carlin

The comedian George Carlin had it right:  life is just a series of episodes where you’re accumulating and dealing with your stuff.

Carlin did a classic routine on the topic of Stuff; like much of his work, it’s kind of PG-rated, so if you look for a clip on YouTube, you have been warned that the language is not rated G. However, I love that routine, and it was really on my mind today as I dealt with some of our stuff.

Our original plan, thanks to an offer by one of Chris’ colleagues to help us move most of our stuff today with her car,  was to move down to the new apartment today or tomorrow. But then we discovered that the shower, while finished, needs to air out and rest for a day or two. So, we decided to stay the weekend at least in our vacation apartment, where the lease doesn’t expire until September 30th. Also, the vacation apartment sometimes has internet access of a sort (it’s not reliable, but at least it’s sometimes available). Since we also found out today that service at the new place won’t be turned on until Oct 11, staying until the end of the month at the top of the 59 steps also seems desirable.

Anyway, the change in plans meant I needed to pack most  of our stuff to take down to the new place, but also set aside some of our stuff to have at the “vacation” place. Plus, I was also on the phone this afternoon back to the place in Bolzano that is storing some more of our stuff, hoping to arrange shipment of that stuff next week.

So, we have stuff in the vacation apartment, stuff in the new apartment and stuff in Bolzano … plus we have stuff stored in the U.S., spread across 3 or 4 states at this point.

It was as I contemplated the insanity of it all that a portion from Carlin’s routine about stuff popped into my mind and seemed particularly apropos:

…Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house. It’s the second version of your stuff. And you’re gonna fly all the way to Honolulu….

…You get down to the hotel room in Honolulu and you open up your suitcase and you put away all your stuff. “Here’s a place here, put a little bit of stuff there, put some stuff here, put some stuff–you put your stuff there, I’ll put some stuff–here’s another place for stuff, look at this, I’ll put some stuff here…” And even though you’re far away from home, you start to get used to it, you start to feel okay, because after all, you do have some of your stuff with you. That’s when your friend calls up from Maui, and says, “Hey, why don’tchya come over to Maui for the weekend and spend a couple of nights over here.

Oh, no! Now what do I pack? Right, you’ve gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The third version of your house. Just enough stuff to take to Maui for a coupla days. You get over to Maui–I mean you’re really getting extended now, when you think about it. You got stuff ALL the way back on the mainland, you got stuff on another island, you got stuff on this island. I mean, supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain. …

His setting is Hawaii instead of Europe, but truly, that description applies to what we’ve been doing for the past couple of months – shifting around subsets of our stuff as we have gone from the apartment in Bolzano to the vacation apartment in Bolzano to the vacation apartment in Tübingen, etc. You get the idea.

But I figure if you can look at your life as living a comedy routine, things can’t be all bad. 😉

*****

We’ve been here at the vacation apartment long enough now for me to attempt several more times to get a photo of a huge castle whose silhouette  is sometimes visible off in the distance.  It’s hard to get it in the right light, so I have experimenting with applying some filters to the photos to bring out the castle in the distance. See what you think.