I'm packing up my troubles 'cause I'm moving today

The first question after deciding to set up an apartment is how the apartment's owner is trying to meet you. If the owner offers a partly-furnished apartment, that covers the furniture too dull for the previous occupant to take. You're set for desks that can't be moved into or out of the study. If it's fully-furnished, the previous tenant hasn't moved out and the owner hopes you're keeping different enough hours to not suspect. If there is no apartment, you have to buy and assemble one from a kit. Try to get ones that assemble with just an Allen wrench, because you're allowed to cheat and use staples.

Think of utility. Do you need a shoe tree? Is it World War II and have you run out of ration points? Of course, if you just like them that's fine and if you're really pursuing the hobby you should be ready for shoe canning and making shoe preservatives. Don't do it from a sense of obligation to the shoes. Remember the sweater bushes fiasco. And the neighbors are still angry about the sockweed.

It's too complicated to think about setting up everything. Focus on one room at a time so its complications inspire despair. In advanced thinking, we focus on a single item --- whisks, say --- and despair over how compicated they can be.

Stocking the kitchen is easy. Get a pot, then another pot just smaller enough that it won't fit in the larger one, a slightly larger yet pot with a different enough finish it seems to come from another planet with a different set of physical laws governing metals, and an enormously large spaghetti pot with 860-gallon capacity. I never need that much spaghetti, and use the Spaghetti-Wave to microwave spaghetti to al dente-tion. This saves time, keeping anyone from asking me to make spaghetti again, and it's not that common that superheated stalks of spaghetti spontaneously explode from sauce.

For each pot you need a lid about a quarter-inch too large in radius (metric, diameter) to fit. The lids will fit securely except on pots used to boil or simmer things. In that case the lid slips off, possibly to adjacent zip codes, giving you a voyage of discovery and adventure, getting to know your community. It will be held by teams of highly trained groundhogs. Don't worry; groundhog training is entirely in Skee-Ball. You might turn out to share interests, such as Skee, or Ball, or having things boiled.

You'll want pans, to boil shorter things. These should come in several sizes, none matching the lids. Some pans should be dishwasher-safe, while others are dishwasher-phobic and scream a lot even for the light rinse. As you'll never remember which is which, wash them by soaking for a couple days and don't think about them. Also get one of those heavy cast-iron pans to stand by the back door all night waiting for forgotten comic strip characters like Jiggs or Mutt And Jeff to arrive. These often have instructions about how everyone knows you don't really clean them because accumulated grease is what makes them so good, which doesn't sound right however much you vaguely hear it.

With those pans you'll want some way of measuring temperature. You don't want to trust the pan itself, since they're prone to panic --- that's not a pun, that's etymology --- and get all screamy whenever put on an open flame. We can't blame them, yet we do, because it's more fun being hypocritical than decent. Be ready with a soundproof lid.

You'll want a high-quality cheese slicer so whenever you encounter a block of cheese --- whether at home, the grocer's, the office, or while stopped in a traffic jam created by people hoping to see what being stopped in a traffic jam is like --- you'll be confident you can say, ``I could easily slice you with quality''. Don't actually say that, but enjoy the confidence in your ability to say that.

Your kitchen should have something inappropriate for a kitchen, like a soap-bubble waterfall or iron lathe, so you know when you haven't finished setting up your kitchen.

Trivia: Within four years of its debut, James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald had a circulation greater than that of the Times of London. Source: The Paper: The Life And Death Of The New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger.

Currently Reading: Live From Cape Canaveral: Covering The Space Race, From Sputnik To Today, Jay Barbree. You know, this is an outstandingly mediocre book.