Moving House

It's very odd to wake up in a room with sliding French doors having slept on my mattress on the floor and surrounded on one side by my desk and bed headboard and on the other side by a bureau. And then piles of boxes and drawers and books strewn most everywhere else in this room and around the apartment.

Strange but not necessarily a bad thing.

I slowly migrated things to the new place over the past two weeks since it was a block-and-a-half away from my old place. The idea was that everything would essentially be in place in time for my furniture moving party last night.

That, of course, wasn't exactly the case and things in the new place are a little less organised than I would have hoped. But reorganisation is always a good thing and I need to force myself 1) seriously to organise my stuff this time by actually unpacking everything (including things that haven't been unpacked since I moved into the old apartment a year and a half ago) and 2) seriously to slim down what I own because a lot of what got moved is junk that I don't need--if I hadn't unpacked in the old place why, really, do I need it? Some of it has sentimental value, yes, but I need to conquer and defeat my packrat genes.

Otherwise, the new place is quite fabulous. I've moved in with a couple of good friends and the place is huge and spacious and will feel quite comfortable, I'm sure, once my room and the living room are cleared of stuff and the kitchen is sorted out and put back together.

I plied my friend with the promise of home-made pizza and beer and was able to sweeten the deal a bit because one of my new roommate's brothers brought some home-made beer. I kept thanking them all profusely and they all mostly shrugged it off. As one of them pointed out, not only is it a karma thing--everyone has to move at some point--but it's also a lot easier to move other people's stuff than your own. I guess it's a matter of not having any real attachment to the stuff that you're moving. It just needs to get from point A to point B.

And the move itself went really well. It was a lot easier than I'd figured for in my head (but I always expect mostly the worse). Given that it was so short, the plan was essentially to carry everything down the street. This was aided by a couple of dollies loaned by a friend which meant that we could wheel everything down the street. It was impeded somewhat by the threatening rain which mostly just misted and drizzled until we were almost done. Only the couch really got caught in the rain but not too badly.

All in all, it was about 3 hours of active moving on the team's part (one of my roommates and I had gotten an earlier start moving smaller stuff) and then we sat down to some yummy pizza (which I didn't really do much for other than get the sauce started and direct what went where. Bit of a slacker I am, I didn't even make the dough but got it from a local bakery) and home-made beer.

One of my friends, as he was leaving, jokingly told me not to move again anytime soon. I told him he'd have at least the summer to recuperate. It seems reasonable for me to think about getting out of town by fall. I fear that if I stay past that, it's not going to make much sense to try to move across country until this time or so next year. And I don't think I can deal with another winter in Maine. It's not the weather. It's just everything else. I need to get out of here, I just have to figure out where I want to go and what I want to do. You know, minor things like that.

49 days until my Portland/Denver vacation and two weeks until my (potential) weekend in New York. Wee!