So I get an email from my crappy ISP. Or at least the company that now owns it, RCN. Apparently they're getting around to "decomissioning" the old servers. They're giving me an RCN account, but everything else will stop 30 days after this "migration". Fortunately I already sent out an email to everybody with my new contact info, and my preferred email address on Yahoo. Web space is no problem, since I can just move everything to the 10 MB capacity space I got for free from my alma mater. But the URLs of some of my more popular sites might have to change. Ugh. Pain in the ass.

I probably should have switched a long time ago. It seems that, like the housing and the car, it's something I never get around to changing until I'm put in some kind of deadline position. On that note, I better get around to going to doctors and dentists again by next month.

It sucks that everything has practically been happening at once: office move, home move, new bills, end of car lease, expired credit card, expiring ISP. I don't know how the hell I found time to go to the great concerts I've been going to (Dio/Scorpions/Deep Purple, Poison/Cinderella/Winger/Faster Pussycat/Pretty Boy Floyd a week after that, Dio/Voivod last Friday all the way up in Montreal), but I'm sure as hell glad I did. I couldn't have cared less about Winger, though. I didn't like them then, and I don't like them now. They were so, ugh...wholesome. Kip had his hair short, clothes that look like they came out of the Sears spring catalog, and a wireless mic headset. It reinforced something I knew: there was a reason why Stewart from Beavis and Butthead always wore a Winger shirt.

I'm still in the process of moving things out a couple of boxes at a time. My new bed is finally set up. It kicks ass. Queen size, with crimson water color-like sheets, metal bars on the head and foot boards, and black curtains hanging and draped from the metal canopy. I might put up my Sigil of Baphomet banner above the head. An evil bed, for an evil sexy man. Mwha-ha-ha-ha... I still have to bring over the essentials before I can start sleeping there (the other 1/2 of my clothes, the computer, and the CDs).

As I'm digging deeper into my old stuff to either pack or throw away, I'm coming across quite a few interesting pieces of the past. I've always been such a pack rat. I've been using a huge file cabinet for a dresser, and the top drawer is actually a shelf. On the right of that shelf was a box top turned upside down, making a little box that I had lots of stuff in. Most of it was stuff from junior high. I found a number of Anthrax pictures. I even found some of my stuff from the Def Leppard fan club, which I joined when I was in 4th grade. I don't think this box top has been moved in well over 10 years. I've piled stuff in there, like my German award plaque from highschool, but never braved digging that whole section out.

At the very bottom of this pile was a plastic shopping bag. I felt a stiff boared inside. I pulled out the bag and opened it up. It was my old United States puzzle. It was a flat board with an indent for all the states, one puzzle piece per state. Actually, some of those eastern states were so small that they had to be combined into single pieces. There was one piece for Massachusetts with Rhode Island and Connecticut, one for New Hampshire with Vermont, etc. All the pieces were separated and in the bag, except for Alaska and Hawaii which were still stuck snugly in that "Alaska/Hawaii" section they put in the corner of USA maps. I put all the pieces back in. The NH/VT piece was missing. The Washington piece was also missing, but I remember it being missing when I was a kid. In fact, I could see that I had scrawled "Washington" in ink, on the section of the cardboard where the puzzle piece would have gone. So, only two pieces missing. Not bad, considering I bought this in 1980. Each state showed the capital, and there were a number of little pictures over the land showing what was there: a spraying geyser around Wyoming, an apple around Washington, a ram along the top edge of the Canada section, a lobster around Maine, etc.

I remember exactly how I bought it. That was after my first few month or two of Kindergarten. I was 5. One of those days in school, we went to the school's library. They were selling a bunch of academic stuff there. A rather big lady with glasses and short grayish hair was sitting at the table, working as the cashier. I think she was Danny G's mother, Gail. The class would later come to know her when she'd annually come in around Xmas or Halloween to give us our own cookies to decorate. But enough about her. I saw Joy G. in line with this big map puzzle and a few other things. She was also holding a rolled up dollar bill. I liked that puzzle, so I picked up one from the pile and went up to the lady. "Now do you have any money?" I stared at her blankly and a bit embarrassed, holding the flat shrink-wrapped puzzle board with both hands. "Oh. Uh. I...no." "Well, I'm sorry," she regrettably appologized, and said that I couldn't get it.

The next day before I went to school I asked my mom for a dollar. "For what?" I didn't want to explain. "Just [smirk]...give me a dollar!" She ended up giving me the dollar. I was making the assumption that we'd be going there again today (there was really no reason to belive that, but hey, I believed in Santa Claus at this age too). Sure enough, the class went to that library room again. I picked up one of the puzzle maps and bought it with the dollar. I showed it to my mom when I got back. "That's what you bought with the dollar? Oh wow!"

My mom was never all that great with geography. But my dad was the geography king. I remember putting that puzzle together a number of times with my dad. I learned a lot from the puzzle itself, but he taught me a lot too. After seeing Alaska and Hawaii together in a separate section, I wondered how the hell they could be next to each other in real life. One was very warm, one was very snowy, right? "Actually, Hawaii is out around here", my dad said as he pointed to spot about 9 inches away from the left edge of the puzzle.

Are being a pack rat and having a good long-term memory directly related?