#325: THINGS I LEARNED WHILE MOVING FROM ONE APARTMENT TO ANOTHER

As I stated in my previous entry, we will have no home internet access until sometime on Saturday, so I am squeezing this one in over lunch and a break during which I could be smoking because I am a smoker, but I would much rather chat at you than edge ever closer to black lung. Feel the love.

And, as I always do when I am feeling lazy and time is on the short side, I proffer up a list:

Things I Learned While Moving From One Apartment To Another
(which obviously did not include the rules surrounding which words to capitalize in a title)

When packing up large, cleaver-like knives, do not throw them willy nilly into a box with a miscellaneous grouping of other household items. That decision always hurts in the end.

I have never moved into an apartment that was cleaned to my satisfaction, and this once takes the cake. The Fiery One and I were told that professional cleaners had been hired, and we were even given the keys a week later than planned so that the cleaners could come in to do the job. I can't figure out what they cleaned. Their were black fingerprints on the doors, dried out shrimp under the stove, liquid soap goo on shelves, brownish drippings on the cupboard doors, and little black bird feathers stuck under a shelf in the refrigerator along with a greyed chili pepper that had petrified. Do not trust people you have never met to clean shit.

You don't have to look too far afield to find out where some of your fat-phobic / disordered eating / dysmorphic issues stem from. On the way to and at supper, both my parents made it obvious. I pointed out a friend of mine in our new building and told them what a nice woman she was, and when my mother looked up at her and saw that my friend was large, she asked does she work? In the restaurant, my father saw a large woman with a child and remarked I bet she blames her extra weight on the fact that she was pregnant once. These remarks were so hate-filled, unnecessary, and exclusionary. My parents did not even know these women. It made me think back and understand why I felt such a lack of acceptance during the severe acne attack of my late teens and my great ballooning in the months prior to my wedding.

Wash the fingerprints from your headboard before your father and your husband carry it up the stairs into your new place. I am sure that the Fiery One did not notice the greasy hand and finger marks clustered around the top center of the headboard that wrapped around to the other side, because he was too busy wrestling bulky furniture into a second-floor apartment. I noticed because the natural light in the stairwell glanced off the wood to highlight its warm, red tones and dirty grip marks. I particularly liked the incredibly obvious prints of two palms pressed next to each other.

If you think that you have packed everything in a relatively orderly fashion and assume that you will be able to find your pets' food, think again. My poor birds, Elliott and The Female, were chattering at me in that agitated way that tells me they want me to feed them NOW, so I poked through boxes and bags all over the apartment, and then I poked through the same boxes and bags all over the apartment a second and a third time. Then, because it was becoming obvious yet again that I am an awful bird parent, I felt guilt and shame. This morning, I discovered a box that I had not noticed yesterday, opened it up, and there was birdseed aplenty. Elliott and The Female displaying great rejoicing through dance and song. Thankfully, their brains are too tiny to retain any clear memory of this event.

Always check all your locks and make sure that you know how they function. We have both a front and a back door. When we left to have supper with my parents after everything was moved in, we locked the front door and put the chain on. Why? Because we could. We left out the back door, locked it, and felt safe knowing that our place is fairly secure. When the Fiery One and I arrived home afterward, we found that we could not get in the back door, because although we could unlock the deadbolt, the doorknob locked automatically and didn't have a key. Brilliant. So we went around to the front door, unlocked it, and found that with the chain on the other side, we could open it a whole two or three inches. Doublebrilliant. We eventually managed to get our hands on some bolt cutters after spending forty-five minutes being driven around town by a kind woman we had just met in the middle of our frustration. We had not even slept in our new apartment for one night before strangers were moved to take pity on us and we had to take bolt cutters to the place. Nice.

Having a living space that is big enough to afford the two of you each your respective privacy and enough floor space so that you actually have to walk from one room to another to get anywhere is really freaking fantastic. As way of illustration, the Fiery One was in another room, and I could hear him talking. I asked him what he was saying, so he started to repeat himself. Finally, I had to remind him that he was in another room. In our itty bitty old apartment, you could never be any more than fifteen or twenty feet from anyone else, so this concept of having to actually find each other to talk when we're at home is a new one. Gone are the days of hovering around one another like cabbage moths.