Today, floatingtide and I made the first preparations for a new floor. We are currently the, er, "proud" owners of wall-to-wall shag. It stains easily, it's smelly, and it's damn near impossible to clean right. We're sick of it. And since we're having a baby soon, it's definitely the right time to replace it with something that doesn't hold a stain as easily.

We've decided we're going to go with bamboo. It's harder than most other woods, and it's very good looking. It's also a little more expensive than the standard oaks and pines, but we've decided it's worth it.

We'll be tearing up the carpet and old sub-floor ourselves, then have a contractor come in and do the installation, since I have a pathological fear of floor glue... No, not really, it's just that we want to make sure it's done right.

This will involve moving a lot of our stuff around. Very probably, we'll need to truck some of it somewhere else for a few days, especially the stuff in the living room. It's a pain in the ass, but it's gotta be done.

On the plus side, it's inspired us to go through our copious amounts of crap and toss a bunch of it. For instance, the living room closet was stuffed with miscellaneous bags we've acquired over the years, many of them moldering and useless. Into the garbage with you! It also had a bunch of the old computer equipment that seems to follow me around everywhere I go. Into the garbage with (some of) you! Yeah, some of it will go to Goodwill, such as an assortment of obsolete - yet still usable - cables for hardware I don't own anymore.

But some of it is just plain useless. I've got an old SGI workstation (an "Indy") that I'm fairly sure predates everything else I own. It's got one gigabyte of hard drive space (which was absolutely astonishing back when it was made), thirty two megabytes of RAM, no removable media whatsoever, a proprietary camera that produces a wonderfully grainy picture, and a custom UNIX operating system that no one even knows how to use anymore. Even the monitor is proprietary, and won't work with other computers. I can't even give this thing away. Into the garbage with you!

Hopefully, this trend will continue for a while and my life will become less cluttered. At least until the baby comes...