It's July 21, 2020 and I'm celebrating my birthday by paying a crew of young dudes to schlepp my treasures from my old home to a storage locker on Hiawatha Avenue.

It's great to retrieve my stuff and close another chapter on my divorce nightmare, but it's sad to see my stuff caged in a soulless locker.

I-Storage, at 3601 Hiawatha Avenue in South Minneapolis, is huge and strange. It makes me sad. It's seems like a place for people who are displaced and struggling.

I'll blame the blurry focus on my emotional state. Locker number 4242 now replaces 4452 Lyndale Ave South, my home of 15 years.

Ahh, things are looking up (and bikes are looking down). Locker 4242 is getting emptied, and I'm settling further into a proper home; 3249 Emerson Ave. S., Minneapolis.

In this space, a crappy old microwave stand has been replaced by a hand-made stereo cabinet from the Lyndale basement. Soon, a proper hi-fi will replace the boombox.

One of the great treasures in the Emerson basement, the Rubenstein children's portrait, has taken up a new position. Soon a family photo gallery will be hung in this space.

On the west side of the basement, a narrow room was created by using shelves and curtains as walls. Now, that space is being packed with objects from the storage locker.

Despite the tight quarters, objects in the new storage space are still accessible. Immediately, the tools and hardware I recovered are useful for the Emerson basement project.

The cramped space works well for storage, but not for photography. It seems impossible to capture the space in a photo.