random bullet points about violence and moving

• I didn't get to walk around much while in NYC. On my way to Central Park with a friend, though, we passed a corner where two down-and-out-looking men were arguing loudly. "What the bother are you doing?" shouted one, "Woman walking with her kid and you bother with her like that." The other man was gesturing menacingly toward him with this thing that looked like a homemade bullwhip. We just kept walking. It did remind me of how pleased my mother was on the phone back when I told her I had decided against moving to New York.
• Yesterday in Harvard Yard I saw a woman with an uppermost-crust English accent go absolutely apebother on her seven-or-so year old daughter. The daughter was wheeling along the bike with tassels on the handlebars and, as part of a tantrum, had the idea to just leave it on the ground and walk away, at which point Posh went postal. Nothing physical, just shrieking, still disturbing, and yet also with the accent she still sounded classy. Made me wish again I had gone through my original plan to disappear as part of this fellowship and emerge with a bushy head of hair and a plummy English accent.
• Sister B and her daughter are coming in town to visit. This meant I was supposed to do some cleaning today, although the most productive parts of that were more pre-moving stuff than cleaning per se. On the latter, however, I continue to marvel at how ubiquitious mop technology is given its fairly small advantage over pushing a rag around vigorously with one's foot.
• Part of my pre-moving preparations are that I made real progress in my plan to get rid of 25% of my wardrobe. This includes various T-shirts and sweatshirts that I have been saving not because I have any plans to wear them again, but because I have one nostalgic connection or another. My plan for these, I think, is going to be to take photos of them and make them into a Flickr set, then discard.
• So far, so good, with my effort to lower my use of profanity by substituting "bother."
• First things I did today were cash in my accumulated spare change and buy a replacement iPod. The change came to within $10 of what the iPod cost. Which means that, for the past two years, I could have just been throwing my spare change in the wastebasket, if in addition I paid attention to my belongings enough not to lose my iPod. The ongoing tax imposed by my absent-mindedness, especially when its consequences are compounded by being sleep-deprived and traveling like at ASA, gets so bothering tiresome. Ugh. I don't know why Apple can't help people track down lost/stolen iPods since they can match the serial number and iTunes store account of any iPod that plugs into iTunes.