We're moving. In three months, so I'm already behind in planning and packing. What? I like to overplan.

Step One: Drink more tea.

We have a baker's rack on one side of the kitchen, a tall, thin, five-shelf piece with a wine rack on the bottom. You can see it behind the bunny and the boats here (note: you would not believe what I have to do to get pictures for this journal. Be happy with the old ones.) I bought it the first week I was here, when our neighbors across the street had a yard sale. For three weeks it was the only stick of furniture in the house. Me, a sleeping bag, a baker's rack and all the rabbit paraphernalia that could be crammed in a Nissan.

Anyway, two full shelves of the rack are filled with tea. I have little decorative tea tins from the Vietnamese supermarkets on Stockton in Sac, dragged all the way across the country and still filled with their original jasmine. There are a number of salsa and jam jars, rinsed and pressed into service to hold more loose tea than any sane human should consider drinking. There are, at last count, three jars of spearmint tea, drink of the gods.

This semester I have blown through a bag of red stinger, a jar of hibiscus (fought off the death flu which took out the rest of the Neurology Department), a box of blueberry and a box of strawberry/cranberry. This semester has been hell on tea. The Transient Oregonian just rocked my world with a package of teas: black currant, black tea with citrus, red stingah! and spearmint. Without her, my whole education would grind to a leathery halt.

So I'm making it my mission to drink at least a cup a day and try to consolidate. Just the really pretty jars. And the plain one marked "Open the jar? Instant party." (Mango Paradise).

Step Two: books.

I've given up on finding places for the books that don't involve being in stacks under the window. No categories, no alphabetizing, screw it. Agatha Christie on top of James Patterson, wedged in between Tim Cahill and a guide to raising chickens. Wild times at the Uprooted Library.

And it's not like I'm trying to cut back at all. I've answered a couple of ads on Freecycle and picked up Christopher Buckley's Fluke: Or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings ("Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me."), the aforementioned naughty chicken-raising book and a whole mess of random pot-boilers, which I promptly traded with the research nurses for decent mysteries. My mania is becoming a cottage industry. Step Two is pretty much doomed, isn't it?

Step Three: I have no idea.

What can I pack ahead of time? The one remaining fish-shaped plate? Wool? Rabbits?

You realize this will all get left until the last possible minute, when I'll stand in the middle of the house, in the shadow of the book stacks, slackjawed and puzzled, needing to pack everything and not having a single cup of tea to do it by.