Where’s that Todd guy been? Did something exciting happen in his life? Or did he just get so boring that he didn’t have anything to complain about?

Well, I didn’t destroy my computer with the beta Macintosh OS and I haven’t been sent on any impossible quests by my sister. (Check out her blog to see the pens I got for her in action.) Friday night I stayed up too late reading the translated Japanese Old Boy graphic novels that were the inspiration for the Korean movie Old Boy. They’re both messed up in their individual ways, but different. I can’t remember what I was doing Saturday besides helping my mom slowly move things back into her room. All in all, quite boring and fortunately much calmer than the frantic moving out that we did to begin with.

Today was my day for raking leaves and cleaning out the gutters. The leaves haven’t completely fallen out of the trees, but it wasn’t raining so I had to do as much as I could. Of course, it ended up being pretty dark by the time I finished, and I just remembered that I left a wheelbarrow full of leaves sitting in the backyard.

In the morning, before I could get out and grab my rake I got a call from Staff Sgt. Evan Smith who was getting up some of my extra computer equipment including a brand-new printer/scanner and an LCD monitor. It was stuff I’d been hoarding in case I needed it, and I figured he needed it more than I did. Plus, it got more stuff out of the house. In exchange, he helped me move the heaviest piece of my mom’s furniture, a display case, back into her room. It was lighter than I remember, but I couldn’t have done it on my own. He also bought me lunch at the Super Burrito Express, where I haven’t been for nine years. Plus, he’s a complete crack-up and it’s fun hearing stories from a witty 24-year-old military adventurer.

When I got home from lunch, I was ready to pick up the rake but had to help my mom put the shelves back into her display case. About the time the rake started calling to me once again, we had another visitor: my dad’s goofy friend Ben. Ben wrote a well-known book, The Tao of Pooh, and more people know him by his full name, Benjamin Hoff. I don’t think I’d seen him since my dad’s funeral. I showed him the mess that the contractors made, and we discussed the difficulties of clearing out our parents’ belongings.

So finally, onto the raking. My next door neighbor, who is doing an addition to his house, was out raking as well, so we had to show each other how the contractors have been hard at work at our respective houses. I don’t think I’ve seen him since the summer, and he lives right next door. In any case, I finally got to raking around 2PM and I finally got to the gutters after 4PM. What a mess that was. Fortunately, I didn’t fall off the ladder, though I had plenty of chances.

So if reading about moving rooms into boxes was too exciting, you now have the ability to read about raking leaves. It’s spectacular, isn’t it?