When I still lived in my parent’s house I would frequently, out of nowhere, have a sudden itch to rearrange everything. This usually involved a combination of my bed, a desk, two bookcases, an extrememly heavy sofa, and whatever happened to be on the wall. My mother once commented that every time she came into my room it was different.

I didn’t have these sudden urges for change as often once I moved into the dorms. The explanation of this for the first dorm I lived in is pretty easy. Almost all of the furniture was attached to either the walls or the floor. Neither my roommate nor I had bothered to bring any additional furniture, so there was absolutely nothing we could move around. My second dorm, when Rachel was my roommate, has a different explanation. It pretty much boils down to; Rachel had a lot of stuff. The mass reconfiguring of our dorm room involved all of her stuff which meant she had to be on board. It’s not always easy to convince someone to move their stuff around, or to allow you to move their stuff around. I do remember looking at Rachel one night after she had finished pledging and telling her that I just couldn’t stand the layout anymore and that we had to do something about it right then. It was fast approaching midnight and we both had early classes the next day. For some unknown reason she thought it was a brilliant idea. To this day I have no idea why she agreed to it. We stayed up past 3AM getting everything just right. Thank goodness the walls were thick, or else I’m sure we would have had our neighbors complaining about us. We finally ended up crashing into our respective beds and missing our morning classes, but it was a wonderful moment of roommate collaboration.

After Paul and I got married, my need to rearrange rooms subsided. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we’ve moved so many times. Why rearrange anything when we’ll just move someplace different in 1-2 years? Now that we’ve been settled into our own house for more than two years and we won’t be moving anytime soon, I once again find myself wanting to change things around. Unfortunately, we had to choose the one house that had the absolute weirdest floorplan. I can’t rearrange anything because I’ll be blocking doors, windows, or walkways. And now, in a roundabout way, I finally get to what I really wanted to post about. I need to change things, I need to do some rearranging, and since I can’t do it physically in real life I’m going to have to do it virtually and online. This is my way of notifying my three dedicated readers that I will be implementing some site redesign in the future. At the moment, I’m just trying to figure out what I would like for the end result to look like. Once I get the ideas on paper, I’ll have to see if it can actually be done. I have no idea how long this will take. I’m just hoping to have things shiny and new by January 1, 2009.

Wish me luck.

Since Texas allows early voting, Paul and I headed to the polls this morning. I have to say that I’m rather proud of us for doing our civic duty and for attempting to be as informed as possible about it. We’ve both been following the election process closely this year. We started really paying attention just before the Texas primaries. In an effort to be prepared for voting I printed out a sample ballot and spent several days doing research on the candidates last week. We’re quite familiar with the presidential candidates, but there hasn’t been a lot of campaign information around here about those running for other elected positions. I have seen a few commercials for the major parties running for Senate, but commercials never tell you anything useful. Even with all my research there were several people I just couldn’t find any decent information about, so I ended up leaving a few places unmarked on my ballot. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the people just because of party affiliation.

Now it’s a matter of sitting back and waiting for the election results on November 4th.

The Monarchs are migrating. They are heading south into Mexico to weather the winter. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen Monarchs migrate, but it can be such an impressive sight. When I lived in Abilene and they migrated through I had never seen anything quite like it. There were droves of them everywhere for an entire week, fluttering around, landing on people, but consistently heading south. It isn’t quite the same here in North Texas. The smaller numbers may be a side effect of the bustling metroplex, but it’s still more than I ever saw growing up in West Texas. It’s also a pleasant way of mother nature to giving us a heads up that fall is on its way here since we can’t rely on the leaves turning.