Living without an Internet connection sucks, when you’re used to having one. The worst part has been feeling rather isolated from my beloved (as he & I usually chat, off & on, for several hours each weeknight while he’s at work), and from my Number One Internet Fanboy (with whom I often share a short chat, and funny/interesting brief emails, at least a few times a week). So here’s the update of my week…
Tuesday: Go to work, enjoying my new (shorter) commute, come home & try not to think about the fact that, though I have gotten all the bedrooms & the bathroom at the old place phenomenally clean, I still have the rest of the old house to finish cleaning. Listlessly attempt to unpack a few boxes (which is rather difficult, given the entire absence of overhead lights in the bedrooms or large living room), give up & play Alpha Centauri until I get bored or too sleepy, fall into bed and almost instantly become comatose.
Wednesday: See Tuesday
Thursday: See Tuesday
Friday: Go to work, notice that it’s appallingly muggy this morning, decide against grabbing one of the two umbrellas in the back of my car. On my morning break, realize it’s appallingly rainy out but tromp the 3 blocks to Seattle’s Best anyway, get soaked, admonish myself for not grabbing an umbrella. When 4 o’clock finally rolls around, after a ridiculously slow day, leave work and discover that 95% of the people on the road have apparently forgotten how to drive in rain, despite the fact that it rains 7 or 8 months of the year here. Use several variations of the word “fuck” on the drive home, which takes 3 times longer than the drive to work. Run Geoffrey to work, go to the old house to finish cleaning the kitchen & dining room. Three miserable hours of backbreaking scrubbing later – having scrubbed the floor, and the fridge, freezer, oven, & cupboards inside & out – give up and call it good. The whole house is cleaner than it was when I moved in, although it’s not as clean as I wanted it to be when I started. (And since I did 95% of the move-out cleaning, decide to leave the garage stuff for Geoffrey to sort through & cart over.) Go home & take off my canvas tennis shoes – which have been sopping wet for 15 hours, pissing me off most verily. Play Alpha Centauri until I fall asleep around midnight, wake up 2 hours later (having had some seriously fuq’ed-up dreams), and retrieve Geoffrey from work. Once back in my toasty-warm bed, he offers to give me a foot massage, which progresses up my body, and I fall asleep feeling much better than at any point in time earlier in the day.
Saturday: Wake up, realize my fuq’ing coffee pot is dead, go next door & beg Jenn to make me coffee. She’s cooking hashbrowns & apple-pie pancakes (which, despite my legendary indifference to apples, aren’t bad). Organize & unpack a few boxes, while frantically searching for my van title, in the hopes the ad I put on craigslist will help me get rid of it. Come across a box marked, in Geoffrey’s handwriting, “puter stuff” and discover both my vehicle titles right on top…which only goes to show you that boxes never have their actual contents when moving. After being waylayed by our new landlord, who picked up the rent check & gave us our new garage key, Geoffrey & I go pick up Karel. We run errands (including the purchase of needed bath accessories & much-needed lamps for our new townhouse), grab a bite at Arby’s, and run a few more errands for Karel before taking him back to his kids’ house. It starts pouring down rain, with thunder & lightening, while we’re at Arby’s, so my shoes get soaked again. Show up at Lyse’s to help her take stuff to her new condo, and pick up the microwave oven that she’s giving us (possibly the one we gave her years before, my Xmas gift from my mother when Angst was a newborn…I really can’t recall), and the 4-cup coffee pot I gave her a couple years ago that she doesn’t need anymore. Lyse feeds us at Shari’s. After a trip to her new house to unload, zip back to help her with the last stuff she’s taking …and realize there’s a metric butt-ton of stuff she’s not taking, which is perfectly good stuff. We take most of it home, filling the entire back of my Subaru station wagon to capacity! Dishes, cookware, tons of books & videotapes, Victorian-style porcelain figurines, tons of clothes, and assorted other goodies…including one particularly scandalous mug which I will have to blog about once I can post a picture in my gallery. Go home, put together the new shower caddy, assist Geoffrey in putting together 2 of our 4 new lamps, collapse.
Sunday: Wake up, start cleaning & sorting stuff that I unpack out of boxes. Filled the dishwasher, discover nothing happens when I turn it on, enlist Geoffrey’s help to figure that out – it turns out to be shut off at the fusebox. Run the dishwasher, head out to Rent-A-Center to see if we can get a new entertainment center, get sidetracked at Payless Shoes when Geoffrey reminds me that I’ve been miserable with wet feet since it started raining Friday morning, and buy some footwear (black slip-on canvas shoes, lavender imitation All-Star tennies, fluffy bright purple slippers, & more purple chenille socks), then discover Rent-A-Center is closed on Sundays. Go home, and do more unpacking as Geoffrey goes back to the old place to tackle the garage. Unload the dishwasher, reload it, realize I have not yet unpacked the dishwasher soap (the first load got washed because the old tenants left a slab of dishwasher soap in the cup), and feel overwhelmed with the annoyance of having too damned much stuff still in boxes.
The last half-dozen times I’ve moved, I got everything unpacked & put away in less than a week. We’ve been in the new house for over a week, and the unpacking’s not even halfway done. I’d be furiously pissed-off if I wasn’t so entirely exhausted.
