Barely dented it

At least, that’s how it feels. Yes, there are a number of emptied & collapsed boxes, and the kitchen is almost serviceable (or at least it will be, once I find our flatware), and I’ve unpacked and broken down all of those big boxes where they hang clothes — what are those things called? But I haven’t managed to clear a room yet, and I haven’t found our bedding.

Add to that, our problems keep multiplying. We gave away our old gas dryer when we moved from Oregon, and wouldn’t you know it, this place needs a gas dryer. Our old electric dryer won’t adapt. Either we would have to get an electrician to change out the wall socket, or we would need a new (gas) dryer. Our dryer is 12 or 13 years old, so who knows how long it has to live. And I know how much electricians charge. They’re worse than cosmetic surgeons. So I went with the cheaper option and bought a new gas dryer.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly wiped. Dehydration will kill you in this climate. I won’t drink the tap water (it’s heavily chlorinated) and two sodas, decaf though they may be, will not cut it. So I got dehydrated, my allergies have been bugging me all week, and the air quality today was miasmal. And if miasmal isn’t a word, it should be.

Goals for tomorrow: move the tarantulas; find our bedding; finish the kitchen; take receipt of the new gas dryer; wash and dry all the bedding. That’s not so much, is it?

Have I mentioned how much I hate moving?

D.

The damage

We have a three-car garage, one-third of which is mostly full of boxes and assorted junk. By stowing the low priority boxes in the garage, I was able to keep the number of boxes in the house to a minimum. That means I really ought to be able to make our house box-free by Monday.

The garage is another story. Back in Oregon, I never did succeed in ridding the RV garage of all boxes. It became an impromptu storage unit. Some of those boxes were simply ridiculous — about half a dozen packed solid with ten-year-old issues of Nature and Science. What, exactly, did I mean to do with them? Cut out the pretty pictures and use them to make mobiles for hyperintelligent infants?

When we moved south, I managed to rid myself of most of that stuff. Things are better now. Really they are! We never could have fit our belongings from 2 years ago into our current space. The guy who moved us said we weren’t all that bad. He could itemize all our belongings on four pages; some families’ belongings fill fifty pages.

Tomorrow, I start unpacking. Tonight, I need sleep.

D.

I’m back!

Didja miss me?

I drove up to Santa Rosa on the 24th. Without traffic, it’s a 4.5 to 5 hour drive, but somehow I managed to 6.5 hours, what with stopping for gas, food, and water, toothpaste, toothbrush . . . The later it got, the more I began to worry that by the time I made into Santa Rosa, the grocery stores would be closed, so I stopped in Castro Valley to pick up some stuff, then promptly got discombobbled. Don’t ask.

The rental home in Santa Rosa was remarkably dusty. Sleeping in my bed was enough to kick my allergies into fourth gear, and sweeping up the next day only made it worse. I’ve been trying to decide if this is a cold or allergies. It feels like allergy only worse . . . but then, I drove back to Bakersfield with my trunk and rear passenger seat stuffed with bags of cat hair-laden garbage.

Once the movers emptied out all of our stuff, the rental home looked quite nice. Much nicer than when our stuff was still inside, which leads me to the conclusion that our stuff is crap. Which is true, really. We have a black leather (I guess it’s leather) living room three-piece set which looked handsome when we bought it back in the mid-90s, but that was a lot of baby vomit and cat hair ago. Our Ethan Allen dining room table and chairs were once nice, too, and still are, provided you don’t examine them too closely.

But the real problem is the hodge podge of furniture and the abundance of junk. Why, why didn’t anyone tell me in college to pare away all belongings? “Never own more than you can move in the smallest of U-Hauls,” someone should have told me. I guess it’s inevitable. You need a bed or two, a desk or two, a table and chairs. There’s a kitchen to stock, after all, and a TV, and a computer or two or five. To keep possessions to a minimum, I would have had to swear off owning my own home and only rent furnished apartments.

Which really doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, now that I think of it.

Just received the key to the new house . . . and tomorrow’s our move-in date. We’re in our furnished rental until the 30th, so I have a few days to make the new home livable. Part of Thursday, Friday, and the weekend . . . gaaah I’ll barely have time to set up the bedrooms and make the kitchen serviceable! Unpacking is the worst, the absolute worst. Let’s hope I won’t have to do this again any time soon.

D.

Chores

Some things are important. If you have two cars and two drivers, and one car has to take the kid to school while the other has to shlep back to Santa Rosa to meet with the movers, then a flat tire on one of the cars is a serious bitch. A cracked windshield isn’t quite as big a deal, unless you cross a cop on a bad day.

About the windshield: first, it got starred by a flying rock on the 101, then a trip to Medford in the middle of summer turned the star into a spider. I replaced that windshield and the very next week (again on the 101) a truck kicked up a rock which starred my windshield. This time, I said fuck it, I’m letting this thing ride for as long as I can.

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