Yesterday, we hit a major milestone on our way to blowing town: I cleaned out the chest freezer! At least three years have passed since I did it last (guilt, guilt, guilt), so the walls were well-iced and an ugly scurf of black mold was forming on the lip of the lid. A blast of Javex-laced cleanser fixed that.

It's interesting how we take for granted household appliances that our parents never even considered buying. The dishwasher, for example -- I can still hear my mother's indignant snort at the very idea. "Why would we bother when we have you?", she said, putting rather too fine a point on it. Freezers were for people with half an acre of garden and a hunter in the family, or the bone idleness to spend their money on TV dinners -- i.e., not us.

Our frozen food holdings are now down to four litres of minestrone, a large leg of lamb, two pounds of cranberries and a loaf of bread. We are now five weeks out from Pack Day.

I, too, am collecting boxes. The packers will not touch anything that would leak, such as home-made jam or bottled maple syrup, and I'm sure as hell not giving that away. Likewise the wine and the booze; it's all coming with us, and I hope the Ontario Provincial Police don't decide to notice us on the road -- it is illegal here to transport an open container of beverage alcohol in a motor vehicle. I also have five orchids (all reliable bloomers) and a 19-year-old Christmas cactus that I would like to keep, so they will make the trip swaddled in newspaper and stuffed into open-topped wine boxes. I can see us now, storming down the 401 highway in a U-Haul van full of food and drink, with the orchids teetering on top of the load.