In There

I am in the "where did I put that?" stage, though there's still more than a little of the "where am I going to put THAT thing?" left to do as well. The clothes are put away--though I need a better solution for several categories of items. The kitchen stuff is put away--though there's still a lot of crap around, and I have yet to actually cook a meal here. The dining room table is still in the corner, with tools on it. No pictures have been hung, so that stuff is all still in boxes or leaning against walls. There are three or four boxes of stuff to unpack, but it's mostly crap. There are also 35 boxes of books, but I don't have the bookshelves settled yet, so no books will be shelved until I know where the shelves are going to live. But I pick away at it, and next weekend, after the budget stuff is done, I'll spend some time on it, and I don't think it will take all that long. I've tried to live here a little while in order to decide where some things will go (bookshelves, pictures), and that's proving to be a useful strategy, even though it also means that there are piles of crap everywhere.

Anyway. The real adventure was on moving day, when the woman who works at the front desk in the old building came knocking on my door at 9:45 am on moving day, with these two guys in tow. It turned out that their movers were coming at 3 pm, and they had originally planned to move into a studio apartment in the old building until a one-bedroom opened up--and the front desk person suddenly remembered that one WAS going to open up, namely, mine. But only if I was willing to get every last thing out of there that day--no leaving the plants until the weekend; no leaving the cleaning until later; no change of address completed yet. No matter; I'd get my security deposit back! I scrambled around, and my friend A--she of the wine the night before the move--was able to park her kids with a friend for a couple of hours and come haul my crap for me.

In addition, the movers were really quite fabulous--they had to haul all my crap up several flights of stairs, and they still finished a half an hour earlier than they had estimated. I tipped them a bunch extra, because, hey, my security deposit had fallen into my lap. So a couple of days later I realize that part of the cord from my Ott light had become detached, probably in the moving truck. I called the movers yesterday, explained the situation (after praising the movers to the owner, to whom I was speaking), and he said, well, not likely, but I'll ask. Sure enough, 15 minutes later he calls me back to tell me that one of the guys had found the cord and brought it in, and that guy then proceeded to drop it off at my place on his way home that day. So, yay, everybody wins, once again.

I'm really not going to have time to put stuff away until next week, though; I have social stuff to do for the next few days, and a bunch of work at work next week, and a meet-and-greet with the other condo owners next week (hosted by my downstairs neighbor, which I think is rather nice of her). I'll try to get the big bookshelf settled this weekend so I can unpack the books at my leisure, and I'll have some time next weekend to set up the office/second bedroom, start thinking about where pictures might go, move the table out of the corner, actually cook a meal here, etc.

It's definitely a little strange, and I whimper a little when I think about how much is left to do; I really could use another week off to take care of everything, and, if I weren't so crushingly busy at work, I would have done that. The big stuff is done, true, but, just as there are tons of little stuff to take care of when you're moving out, all that little crap is the stuff that is also a pain to put away at the other end. On the other hand, it's not exactly what you would classify as a genuine problem, so, despite the apparent lamenting above, I'm pretty content. I make my lists (and cross things off!), I'll measure windows and move the bookshelves and figure out where stuff goes, and little by little it'll look less like a moving van threw up and more like my usual mess.