This post is perhaps more random than my usual book reviews and rants. We should have done this last year, but we are finally moving.
The Tominator picked me up after work yesterday so we could go meet our new landlord, do a walk-through, pick up the keys, and (most importantly, to them anyway) pay the oodles of money it will cost to move in to this place. We saw this as we pulled away from my office:
I don’t usually notice this stuff because I commute via public transportation, walking to and from the metro stops. No idea how long this sign has been there. It’s an old joke but it’s still funny.
The walk-through went…okay. Carpets not cleaned, deck not repaired, the floor around the shower still not fixed. I’m not sure I have a great deal of faith in these guys to get this stuff fixed, either, and I kept hearing, “Oh, that’s been like that for two years, we won’t ding you for that,” and finally managed to put myself into a mindset of imperfection. Is this good enough, right now, as it is? Yes, this is. No, that’s not, so on to the punchlist it goes. There is something refreshing about not having to worry about one little ding in the paint when I move out, with a paint job that’s hardly perfect when I move in. And I’ll bitch about what’s not acceptable until it is fixed, if that’s what I have to do.
I will be so glad to see the last of this rabbit warren we’re living in now. It was a haven when we needed one, a much more pleasant place than the Armpit Arms we landed in when we first arrived in Seattle. But as the rent has gone up so as to be unaffordable, the quality has gone down to be un-put-up-with-able. I will not miss Mr. and Mrs. Warthog downstairs, he of the loud and badly tuned guitar and the loud and offkey singing voice, she of the caterwauling harmony (ahem!), they of the loud, drunken screaming matches. I will not miss the neighbors who use our stairs as their ashtray and bicycle parking. Seriously, who parks their bike in the middle of someone else’s stairs? I will not miss the lack of sufficient parking, the insufficient and therefore constantly overflowing trash bins, and I’m certainly not going to miss all the goddamned car alarms. I believe car alarms to be Tools of Satan, I really do. And I certainly won’t miss getting bitched out for putting decorative items on my windowsills. For what they’re trying to charge us every month, I’ll put plants in my windows if I damned well please.
The place we’re moving to is a duplex, the upper half of a house built in 1910 in a neighborhood of similar houses. Quite nice, but old. It will take some adapting, living in a house with a single power outlet in every room. No garbage disposal! But I like the eaved windows, the honeysuckle right outside the kitchen window, the small yard to ourselves, the huge, slope-ceilinged closet I would have wanted as my own little Harry-Potter-ish bedroom when I was much younger. And “oh, don’t worry about that bb-hole in the window” seems to indicate a more relaxed tone that will be far more pleasant than the almost military rigidness of where we are right now. That doesn’t mean I won’t photographically document the move-in condition.
I was so tired when we left. We’d started almost two hours late and I’d had one of my insomniac nights and there had been no place to sit and I’d just read an entire lease through, because I do that. Pounding headache, and anxiety was zinging through my veins like electric current. But as we merged back onto I-5, we got a message from Iris. It felt like a happy sign and I relaxed immediately:
It was nice to be threading my way through the labyrinth of boxes to bed, wonderful bed. And I slept! Now I just have to get all this packing done. Moving day is Saturday, and classes start back up Monday. Hammertime!
99 Monkeys 