Oh, You Gotta Have Friends........

Long time since my last entry, I notice. That's because I was packing and moving and unpacking. Much, much packing and unpacking. So, for those of you waiting with bated breath for the next installment of my thrilling moving saga, I will proceed - and try to keep it from turning into a narrative the size of "Battlefield Earth".

Packing up one's belongings after 13 years in one location is a huge job! You just don't realize how much you've accumulated until the time comes to get it all consolidated into boxes. I did purge, with a vengeance - I must have sent 25-30 boxes to Goodwill, as well as two trunkloads of stuff to the Eco-station. The hopelessly unusable stuff? Contractor's garbage bags, of course.

What with my eye surgery (went just fine, thanks!) and work, I kind of ran out of time to pack. Actually, by the last day before the move, I'd also run out of boxes and paper for packing, too. The last bits of the kitchen were packed in baskets from my extensive collection, padded with leftover gift wrap. Honest!

My incredibly helpful niece took time from her very busy uni-student-cum -student-teacher life and helped me pack up all the collectible tins and other decorative junk from the tops of the kitchen cupboards, as well as all of the non-perishable foodstuffs in both pantry areas. Then the Monday before the movers were due, three of my lovely friends from work came over and helped me pack the books. All 3000+ of them. When that was done, they moved on to the linen closet. The next day, one of the three, my very best friend, came by again, and between us we got the kitchen all packed up. That would be when we ran out of packing materials and had to get creative.

**Aside: my best friend should go into business as a professional packer. She managed to get a lot more into boxes than I would have, and not a thing ended up cracked or chipped or broken.**

So, finally it was moving day. The company I'd hired, Mini-Move, had planned on 4 men + 2 trucks - but they stopped to pick up a fifth man on the way to my old apartment. Good thing they did, even with 5 of them it still took about 4.5 hours to unload the trucks at my new house. No casualties, no damage except one castor from the bed frame was misplaced - I found it after I'd replaced all 4, but no biggie, I now have a spare set. Excellent work by a team of very nice gentlemen who were sweet enough to laugh at my jokes. The cookies I'd laid in for them were a big hit, too. Cost me a fair bit, but well worth it when you consider the books and bookcases had to go all the way up to the loft.

While the movers were loading up the trucks, my boyfriend went over to the new house. He was convinced he smelled natural gas in there. He was right. Atco came out and discovered that the furnace had a leaking gas valve, and they turned off the gas. It was nowhere near warm enough to live without heat, so we got Pro Plumbing out again - and close to $500.00 later, it was fixed.

The unpacking process was a bit hampered by the onset of cellulitis in my poor, split fingertips. One finger was well into a whacking good infection by the time I admitted that antibiotics were needed. This is where working in a hospital helps - I made a call to the nurse in charge in ER, she saved me a spot, and I was in & out in about 35 minutes, with a scrip for Keflex and stern instructions from the physician to wear cotton gloves for manual work. Wearing them really helped my hands to heal while enabling me to keep up with the unpacking.

I had a bit of an epiphany when I went to clean the old place - I had thought myself a genius for installing electronic mouse-repellers in every electrical outlet, and congratulated myself on creating a rodent-free zone in an otherwise infested building. Not so - the mice had merely gotten used to the electronic noise and got smarter, they stayed behind the bookcases and other heavy bits of furniture. After everything was moved out, the extent of the rodent infestation was appalling. I made an executive decision to kiss my $300.00 damage deposit (paid back in 1994) goodbye, told the shrew caretaker that I would not be cleaning, and then reported the mouse problem to Capital Health's Environmental Concerns department. I strongly suspect the mouse urine coating a lot of my belongings (and don't worry, I threw out the non-cleanable of those) was what caused such a nasty tissue inflammation in my fingers. Actually, telling the peroxided witch to blow me and clean the place herself was quite liberating!

My wallpaper stripping buddy helped me with IKEA furniture assembly - and the nice people from Sleep Country delivered my new queen-sized bed this past weekend. The living room is now almost box-free, the second floor is as complete as it can be without doors on the bedrooms, and the loft............waits. It's still a mass (mess?) of bookcases, stacked shelves for said bookcases, and boxes of books. That's a job that will have to be tackled in pieces, I think. Later this month or early next month I'll paint the kitchen base cabinets, then take the detached cupboard doors out to the patio and paint them, too.

It's GOOD to be home!