I spent a couple hours this morning moving into Serenity. Like, really moving into Serenity. Tomorrow morning when I want coffee, it’ll be in the van. When I get dressed, I’ll be running out to the driveway first. My cooking capability in my house is down to… well, nothing, actually. My frying pan and two pots are both in the van, along with all my utensils.

Does this make any sense at all? No! I’ve got four more days in my house and Serenity’s not hooked up to water, and the refrigerator’s not cold, so it’s impractical to think I can really just stay in her. But I’ve been having to make tough choices about what I can bring & what I can’t bring and tomorrow is my last trash day, so I needed to make decisions. The easiest way to decide was to try things out.

It was fun, actually. I put all my dishes and pantry goods onto the shelves, then realized that when the bed is made up as a double bed instead of two singles, one of the cabinets will be difficult to access. So I rearranged everything. And then I decided that my shelves didn’t work the way I needed them to, so I did it again. It felt remarkably like playing house, like being a little kid in a pretend kitchen, doing pretend shopping.

Analyzing the way I use my dishes has also been entertaining me. I have two pretty mugs, blue with red flowers, white interiors. I’m very fond of them. But I use them only when I’m having an extra cup of coffee. They’re “special” mugs. On a daily basis, they’re too small and they cool off too quickly. Meanwhile, I have four tall latte mugs, and I use them exclusively for tea. They’re the perfect tea mugs, because they heat so evenly and hold the heat so well. I also have two red mugs that I didn’t actually like very much aesthetically, but they were what I drank regular coffee from, because they were a good size and weight.

Eight mugs. Serenity does not have enough room for eight mugs. Also, I am one person. I do not need eight mugs. For a time, I had six in there — two of each. But even six didn’t fit. So then I had one of the pretty ones, one of the red ones, and two of the latte mugs. The reality, though, is that my perfect tea mugs are by far my favorite and the most useful to me. What to do? Finally I asked myself the daring question: could I actually drink coffee in my tea mugs? It turns out the answer is yes.

But it amused me to realize how rigid I am in my uses of specific things. I put almost all my knives in Serenity for exactly the same sort of reason: I need the small one for apples and other fruit, and the next size up for carrots and vegetables and the third for slicing meat, and the fourth and fifth and sixth… but I suspect that after I’ve lived in Serenity for a while I will discover that I can live with two or three knives. Fortunately they don’t take a lot of room, so I’m going with abundance when it comes to knives for now.

Ugh, and bowls… so many tough decisions when it comes to bowls, because apparently I need a certain bowl for scrambling eggs and another bowl for marinades and a third bowl for mixing salad dressing and a fourth bowl for making rubs. And let’s not forget cereal, fruit, and frozen treats! I could actually explain why each of these bowls is better for its purpose than another but I did manage to decide that I could adjust to having only a couple types of bowls. Well, four. Or five. Anyway, I still have plenty of bowls, but I picked ones that stack and reluctantly let go of the ones that don’t.

Spices and herbs have been fun, too. I think I wound up keeping almost everything except red pepper and pink Himalayan sea salt. Their containers were just too tall or I would have squeezed them in, too. Three kinds of vinegar — balsamic, red wine, and white wine, but I jettisoned all the oils except coconut and olive. I hardly ever used the avocado oil, the red palm oil, the canola oil and the other oils I had, so I can live without them. Soy sauce, yes, fish sauce, no. Four kinds of hot sauce and chili-garlic sauce, yes, but all pre-packaged salad dressing, no.

Tomorrow I take Serenity to the dealer and get her vent fixed. Saturday and Sunday — I finish cleaning the house, I guess. Do a last load of laundry. Swim and swim and swim some more. Spend some time with friends, I hope. And then I’ll be moving on. And getting back to Grace! I find it really very funny today that Serenity has stolen so much of my attention from Grace. Even funnier when I realize that my mental name for APB (which has also stolen attention from Grace) is Balance.

Serenity, Grace, and Balance — three very nice things to have in one’s life.