May 10, 2004 - Moving Experience

For moving, though, this was convenient. Everything was already boxed and labeled. All we had to do was collect them up. The furniture he had primarily consisted of shelving, his single bed, a few smallish dressers, and a computer table.

So within a relatively short period of time, we had loaded up everything that needed to be taken to the new place that day. He has two more weeks to gather up the loose ends and clean.

We drove in a caravan to the new place. As we entered the new neighborhood, I was a little concerned at first. Some of the streets we drove down were filled with rowhouses, and while they looked well-kept, I wasn't sure what the rest of the neighborhood was like. As it turned out, the street seemed like a fairly quiet residential area. He was in one half of a double house.

As we started to take boxes inside, I was amazed at how much room he has. Even when he was sharing a house with some friends, he'd never had anything this expansive. There was a decent sized living room area, a dining room, a fairly large kitchen, an extensive basement with several rooms for storage, although I wouldn't put much in there until he can find a solution for the damp floor.

Upstairs, he has a back bedroom which will be his, a small bathroom, a small bedroom which could be storage or a guest room, and a front bedroom which he'll use for a video editing room.

Many of the rooms are covered in distinctly feminine looking wallpaper in unusual designs, looking very vintage, perhaps 1970s. It will be interesting to see whether he decides to change any of it. Most of it is in good condition, except for in the center bedroom upstairs, which looks water damaged.

I had to be careful while helping with the move because of the mysterious pectoral injury I had back in December. I didn't want it to flare up again, so I only took small boxes and made more trips because of that.

After we'd finishing unloading the first batch, the idea came up to get something to drink for people. I went along with the two other women to get something to drink, as well as some other household supplies. This took longer than it should have.

We took along with us a 10-year-old and 8-year-old who were the daughters of the White Rabbit's cousin, whom everyone calls Cousin Sue. The girls were a real bundle of energy, and it required some effort to keep up with them. The 10-year-old was on a Skittles jones and each time we stopped at a new store, she'd reiterate her plea.

"You're still thinking about Skittles?" I asked.

"She spends a great deal of time thinking about Skittles," Cousin Sue said.

I discovered an interesting phenomenon. The 10-year-old was reaching an age where she could talk almost on an adult level. For example, the 10-year-old and I were joking that since we both had old-lady names already we would just get cats and shawls and save ourselves all the trouble of waiting another 50-odd years.

But then the 8-year-old would run into the room, acting very silly, and the 10-year-old would drop the discussion and join in with the wackiness.

When we got back to the house the girls wanted to shoot a horror movie in the basement, which they thought was scary. I went along with it and got eaten by a monster. They tried to make me reshoot it later, but I told them that my contract said that if my first take was perfect I didn't have to do any more.

They did manage to drag me down into the basement again, because we were supposed to be acting out some sort of video game they like to play. I didn't know much about it, except that were were supposedly going into a dungeon made of flesh.

"I don't want to go into the flesh dungeon," I shouted loud enough for others to hear.

Fortunately, the video game only consisted of picking up objects in different rooms and then exiting up the outside stairs. Thank goodness; I'm terrible at fighting dragons.

The White Rabbit brought back pizza, and we all chowed down. After we were sufficiently refueled, we drove up to the storage facility where The White Rabbit had been keeping some items for the past two years, while living in the cramped apartment.

We had trouble getting started, because the lock was all rusty and at first the key wouldn't turn. We discussed the possibility of running out to a hardware store and getting some sort of heavy duty oil. But as it turned out, we were simply using the wrong key.

I really wish I'd had my camera with me the minute we opened the storage facility, because he had a mannequin that he'd picked up years ago, which was standing in the front left corner. It would have made an awesome picture, but my camera was back in the car. I would have had to make everybody wait while I ran back, had someone unlock the gate for me, and grabbed the camera. I decided not to.

In fact, I took very few pictures the entire day, mostly because I kept getting distracted. On this page, you'll find a "before" picture of his new bedroom, with the furniture all piled up. I never completed my idea of taking similar "before" pictures of all the new rooms. But there should be plenty of interesting video footage, courtesy of the girls.

In the storage facility were a small couch, a coffee table, a couple end tables and more boxes of books and miscellaneous household items. But they weren't all in the condition they'd been when he loaded up the unit. Apparently, some red dust from a nearby construction facility had blown in, covering much of the items with a fine layer of dust. And then some moisture got in one corner and destroyed a couple boxes of books. Some were only slightly water damaged and could be salvaged, but one entire box of science fiction books was moldy.

Within a short while, the rental truck was loaded up, the storage unit empty, and we made another run back to the new house. The Gryphon and I, along with our friend The Dormouse, drove back instead to my house, to let my dog, Una, outside. We'd already been gone seven hours and were going to join everyone for dinner. We wanted to give her some relief.

She was, of course, ecstatic. After we let her out, all three of us changed into some cleaner clothes we had along and then drove back to the new place.

The plan had been to go to Buca di Beppo, but we found out that with a group this large we would have had to wait two hours. We had 17 people total, if you counted the two girls. They did help a small amount, but most of the time they ran around with a video camera, doing silly things. So instead, we ate at the Old Country Buffet.

For some strange reason, we had been picking on one friend, Agent Smith, calling him Canadian. And so when we went to the Old Country Buffet, we were calling it the Old Canadian Buffet.

Basically, I had a terrible weekend when it came to food, in part because I had really expected I'd be using more energy in the process of helping someone move. That's OK. I don't splurge that often any more.

All the coverage over the last week, leading up to the last Friends episode, made me think. They talked about how the original pitch said that it was about "the time in your life when your friends are your family."

And I was thinking that's really been the case for this group of friends. We're now getting to a stage where people are moving on to a more settled existence, starting their own families or buying their own houses.

If there had been a place, though, that we would have said good-bye to fondly, it would have been the house nicknamed Quest Labs, Springfield, which was a house where a large number of people from this group of friends had lived at one time or another. But then the owner sold it to someone who wanted to use it as a single family residence, and everyone had to leave.

While it seemed a little sad at the time, everyone has since moved on to new challenges, new ways of living, new things to get excited about. And our season of friendship isn't ending; it's continuing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a dungeon monster to run away from.

Moral:
Every exit one place is an entrance somewhere else, hopefully not into a dungeon.