Moving weekend went okay. The movers came at 4:15 and did everything in one load and I paid them a lot of money. Right now the living room is still full of boxes and the bookshelves aren’t set up and the old couch is still there because we haven’t picked up the new (to us) one yet and Treasa and I will be doing a lot of measuring and moving stuff around in the next couple of weeks. I foresee many trips to Value Village and Target, even though I feel I just finished with all that. Plus there is a lot of cleaning and yard work to be done at the old place, so pretty much I am going to be working every night that doesn’t interfere with bellydance and/or going out and being fabulous. I’m tired of June already.
My new room is huge and is carpeted bright blue. The walk from the bed (on its frame now thanks very much, with the orange sheets looking as fabulous as fabulous can be) to the bathroom and the closet feels like it takes ten or fifteen minutes. I can do yoga in there, for real. It’s super bright and sunny and a little loud from the street noise, and internet connectivity in there isn’t the greatest. The bathroom is very beige but has a great goldfish shower curtain and excellent water pressure, plus much room for bathroom stuff. I haven’t decided what to do with the disco balls from the mantelpiece at the old house nor what to do with the three un-cloud-painted walls in there. I haven’t decided what to do about storage yet and haven’t quite figured out how to use the lightswitch, either.
Friday night was pretty miserable because I was tired and bruised and I didn’t know where anything was and I had forgotten all my food at the other place and it was dark and lonely and I couldn’t get to any of my books. I made it to the local pho place fifteen minutes before they closed and begged them to give me a small chicken please please please give me a small chicken. I came back and ate my pho by myself in the kitchen, shivering with loneliness and transition. It was pretty disheartening and I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake.
Saturday morning, though, things started looking up immediately because the first thing I did when I woke up, all disoriented in my new room, wondering who had done such a terrible and cheesy paint job (I mean, clouds? Whose idea was that?), was saw my bed in half. The movers hadn’t been able to get it up the stairs the evening before because the angle is really weird…we were all trying to push it up in various ways and it just wouldn’t fit. An emergency call to the ABL later, Treasa ascertained that sawing the bed frame in half would work fine, so that’s what we did, with a handsaw on the kitchen floor. Awesome.
Post-bed-sawing, I did a lot of the kind of work that involves a lot of heavy lifting and moving things around and taking things in and out of boxes and going up and down stairs, at the end of which everything looked…exactly the same. I had to go to the old house and pick up some more stuff and put it in more boxes and that was very disheartening…just really weird to see that C had taken the microwave and that the big bookshelves in the living room were gone and that I still hadn’t picked up all my National Geographics. I was in and out of there as quickly as I could manage but it was still pretty depressing. I’m glad we moved out early so we have a lot of time to get everything at the old house ready for the new tenants (who seem lovely and probably have no idea what they’re getting into with the crazy landlord) but I sort of hate feeling so in between. At a certain point during the day I gave myself leave to make a big batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, clean the kitchen, and go out for cupcakes and Indian food on Market Street. It was cold and rainy but I instantly felt better and even had a fresh shirt to put on because I’d spent a lot of time organizing my closet and finally fixing my recalcitrant chest of drawers, which it turned out I built completely wrong a year ago and which had never really worked since. It’s very handy to live in a house full of people who know how to use tools, I’m finding, because Treasa took one look at it and diagnosed the problem and I had my screwdriver right there and now I can have my socks whenever I want them, which greatly contributed to the enjoyment of my Saturday night, as did the lovely saag chicken, strawberries with cream, and lively conversation.
Sunday I spent most of the day getting lost down near Tacoma on my way to a bridal shower but I made it in plenty of time to eat a lot of chicken salad and to make friends with the bride’s sister and cousins, all of whom were lots of fun and will make this wedding a pretty big party. I puttered around when I got home and made dinner and tried to get ready for the morning, feeling a little like I’d spent the weekend with my friends John and Treasa and now it was time to go home for real. It’s going to take a while for it to feel like home, I know, but I think it will, sooner or later.