4 posts tagged “moving”
I'm in San Francisco! Yesterday was travel day, and shopping essentials day. I spent the night in a hotel (easier to start rent on the 1st) not far from the beach. So let's start with more beach photos: the weather was clear and beautiful, so these do the beach more justice than the last ones.
I know I'll be singing a different tune in the summer, when my neighborhood fogs over for a few months, but right now I can't imagine why you wouldn't live in this part of town.
What part of town, you ask? Why, the Sunset: all the houses are pastel (with the occasional shocking blue) and squished together in a way which seems... ill-advised, considering the region's position over a fault line. But it's cute, it's very quiet (although I'm across the street from a school), and someone once told me that the west side of town is the smartest, vis-a-vis earthquakes. (The fault line, according to my source, runs underneath the Bay, making Berkeley and the east side of town the most dangerous. I'm skeptical that this is really going to save me in the event of The Big One, but whatever.)
As usual, all the airports and time changes and naps on the plane interrupted by babies and getting up at four in the morning (two, actually) left me feeling a little crazy. So I skipped on the venerable tradition of getting drunk and shouting at midnight (in Texas, add: shooting off guns at midnight. Ah, Texas.) and instead engaged in the other venerable tradition of turning up the heat, eating junk food in bed, and watching about three hours of Bravo. And then sleeping for twelve hours.
Refreshed, I set about stocking my new room and then unpacking everything. Once again: here's "before"...
And here's "after"..
You are not blind. There is no bed. Yet. (There are no desk, chair, or dresser, either, but I like it that way.) Right now I'm camping out on my new quilt (which, combined with the exciting patters of my wall hanging and my rug, is a little dizzying) until my futon ships out here.
I only ever visited the house at night (twit! not supposed to do that!) so I had no idea that the house has a yard, and that my window looks out over it.
Privacy is a concept with which the architects of this neighborhood were unfamiliar. Look left or right and you can see
clearly into at least three other yards.
Whatever. I just won't be sunbathing nude on the porch. Your loss, neighbors. Your loss.
Finally, the kitchen is pretty cute. The yellow tile is, according to my roommate, the original tile from when the place was built in the early 50's. The sun comes in during the morning and the whole place lights up.
I like the new place, so far. I appreciate that the neighborhood is quiet and safe, and that roommate 1 (no sign of roommate 2) is sane. Tomorrow I have a few other trips to buy things to make after my first day of work. I'm not sure if we'll actually get into training or just set up schedules, fill out paperwork, etc. More on that tomorrow.
Just as a reminder:
And after?
After hours of scrubbing and vacuuming and screw-unscrewing and taking things (boxes, cinder blocks, one of the big suitcases) down the stairs, I am left with a clean, quiet, empty apartment. The picture makes the space look small (and it is), but it feels huge after it being full of furniture. I left the futon there so that my little bags don't look so lonely.
Now that the place is clean-- and I'm exhausted, I'd love to lie down and take a nap until tomorrow, but tonight the acroyogis of Austin are throwing an acro jam/going away party. (I had an equally nice dinner last night with my coworkers, which involved considerably more good sushi and considerably less being tossed around on people's feet. But I take them either way.) There's always a premium on open space for acro, and suddenly I wonder why we don't meet in my virtually-empty apartment tonight instead of cramming into Jason's place and potentially damaging his stereo system.
And then I remember: I'd have to clean again after they're gone. I love my acrofriends, but not enough to repeat all that cleaning.
I had a nice holiday with my folks, but now it's that time that we've all been dreading: packing time. I'm not sure that these pictures, compared with the "before" pictures, are what you might call heartening, since there seems to be a steady level of messiness. Everything's just getting lower to the floor as the furniture disappears...
It may not show, but I had a strategy: my plan was to pack everything I knew I wanted to take, make sure it fit into my suitcases, and then take the rest to Goodwill or to the dumpster. This, however, requires enormous foresight, and after I packed the suitcases, I realized there were other things I wanted to bring.
I think I can still get it all into the two big and one little suitcases, per the original plan (I really don't want to ship anything if I can avoid it). My goal for the day was to get everything in the main part of the apartment taken care of, and then tomorrow focus on the kitchen, bathroom, and closets. I was almost successful in getting through the living/bed room today, since I got in another hour or so of work after I took the pictures. But the kitchen is scary. Very, very scary.
Today was also my last day of work, which was sad. Goodbye to all the lovely and strange people I've met on both sides of the desk, goodbye to tea stains on the carpet that won't come out, sweat puddles, and that silly software. Goodbye to the cushiest job in the world (you're going to pay me to sit at a desk and talk to cool people and take free yoga classes? Yes!)... hello reality check.
And thanks to everyone who has given me such good wishes. I'll need them, not in San Francisco, but to get through cleaning my kitchen tomorrow morning.
It's a strange feeling to look around your modestly-sized, full-of-stuff apartment and realize that in two months' time, all that furniture, all those books and clothes and movies and dishes-- all of it is going to be consolidated into two trunks, a suitcase, and a backpack.
At least, that's the plan. The furniture will be going into storage for my sister, when she has her own apartment and needs to fill it with stuff. Things like my bike will be sold. The rest will be given away, all except for clothes, a handful of books and movies, some essential electronic equipment, and a yoga mat or two. My goal is to cram whatever is going with me into a couple of biggish trunks (as big as the airline will allow me to check without slapping a fee on it) and two bags for carry-on.
I tend to think of this as being a pain in the ass, more than anything else, because there's quite a lot of posting things on Craigslist-- not to mention scrubbing down my apartment, which at present is a bit grubby in the corners-- between now and moving. But it's also an interesting exercise in simplicity-- even radical simplicity. I imagine that it will be satisfying to get on the plane with all my earthly belongings packed neatly into a few bags. Satisfying, assuming the airline doesn't lose any of those bags, in which case, "problematic" is the operative word.
Speaking of essential electronics, I have to get my camera up and running. It might be interesting (bearing in mind that my use of the word "interesting" typically only refers to "interesting to me") to take "before and after" pictures of my apartment/belongings.
