I went with my offspring last night to see the movie "Wanted" with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, and Morgan Freeman. In it a young man is beaten repeatedly when he fails to give an acceptable response to the question "why are you here?"

I'm moving in 16 days to another city. I calculated things last week and this will be my tenth move in just under 11 years (not including the time that I stayed on my friend's floor for three weeks because I was homeless).Moving seems to be in the air this spring. Denise is moving across the country which means packing up her rainbow bookshelves. Iliana announced last week on Bookgirl's Nighstand that she's moving to Austin and now has to pack up all her books. Leila at Bookshelves of Doom bought a house recently and is moving too. We live in different cities (and in my case a different country) but we all have one thing in common - we have a lot of books to pack.

“I must be crazy. I am renovating a three bedroom house for a life I do not even have yet!” -- Diane Ladd in “Under the Tuscan Sun”.

Helloooooooo, BlogHer! Today my hiatus from being a Contributing Editor officially ends, and like it or not, I'm back. (Hopefully you like it. I'm sensitive, you know. Be gentle.) A few months ago my dance card filled up and I decided I needed to lighten my load a bit, hence the absence. But as life is now calming down, I'm picking back up where I left off. Oh, except that a few things are different since I was last here. You know that scale of life stressors where you can figure out your "stress score?" Let's see if you can figure out my recent score. In the last six months, I have:

I dream about sorting through things, and my hands hold bureaus and silver, watches and sets of antique china. In the frantic dream, they drop through the sky as my hands sort them – “keep”, “auction”, “sell later”, “give away”, “discard”. The memories flash by as I touch their triggering object. This is the little clock my mother bought by accident at an auction when she was swatting at a fly that had buzzed her ear. Here is the steamer trunk that used to belong to Miss Miller’s great grandfather the sea captain. This is the nativity set I used to set up as a child.