Tag: moving

The locks have been changed and we are officially out of our old place, leaving it to the realtor and keeping fingers crossed.  This week, we had a crew in to patch up all of the holes in the drywall from the various Ikea crap I installed and then ripped back out, and then had everything painted.  After that, a cleaning crew came in and scrubbed everything from top to bottom, and got the whole thing in like-new condition, smelling of fabuloso and shining.

I went back in the other day, just to make a final round of obsessive cleaning, wiping off little spots and scraping off tiny droplets of paint here and there that were left behind.  The whole thing hit me with a massive rush of deja-vu, thinking back to May of last year when we first got the keys and I spent a weekend assembling cabinets and listening to Rockies baseball on my then-new iPhone.  This was our first home, our first really big adult purchase, and there are so many memories behind the whole thing.

It seems like we’ve lived here forever, even though it’s been just shy of 18 months.  But I was thinking about the various places my cats have lived, and they have been at this place longer than anywhere else in their lives.  And then I thought about it, and I think the last place I’ve lived for a longer period was probably back in Astoria from 1999-2005.  I guess I lived at the Lower East Side place for just about as long, but it’s hard to figure out when I started living with Sarah, since I slowly moved things over a gym bag at a time over late summer/early fall 2005.

Anyway, the old place is for sale, and has an MLS number, and has percolated through all of the various online real estate sites.  I am mixed on posting a link here, as I doubt any of my four readers are actually interested in buying the place.  I am half expecting a sea of junk mail from the listing, more mortgage refinance offers and the whole nine yards.  I am still trying to figure out what to forward and what addresses to change, and that will take me forever.  (If you really need my actual physical mailing address, let me know.)

I have to go back to New York in December.  This will be my first trip back since I left in 2007.  It’s going to be a hurried affair – flying out on a Wednesday, getting in at like ten (getting to JFK at ten, which means probably getting to the hotel by midnight), and then flying out on Friday afternoon.  I will probably be doing company stuff the entire time, and won’t actually get to see anything.  I’m not sure I will bring my camera (the DSLR, anyway) or even my personal laptop – probably just the work laptop and two changes of clothes.  And the Kindle, of course – I will have to load up with plenty of reading material, since I’ll have the cross-country travel days, stuck in the Phoenix airport with CNN blaring from the TVs strapped to the ceiling.

I feel a great need to take a bunch of crap to the storage place, and maybe get a few things out, like a stereo for this office, but I really don’t want to do anything.  I wish I could write down the series of dreams I’ve had in the last few days – this morning, I had this vivid dream of reading this rough draft of Naked Lunch, the whole thing so colorful, this journey that Burroughs took as a kid through the southwest, exploded into pieces in a drug-fueled frenzy and carefully reassembled into this twisted, descriptive narrative.  Maybe I need to buy one of those lucid dreaming machines or get into a sensory deprivation tank or do something that will enable me to capture this stuff and turn it into books.

We moved, sort of.  I mean, everything is in the new unit, but it’s going to take a while to get set up and running.  For one, we don’t have a fridge yet; they ordered it late, or there was a delay or something, and I have no estimate except for “maybe next week.”  I can still go down to the old unit and use the fridge there, but that’s a huge pain in the ass.  We also don’t have our washer/dryer, but once again, they are in the old unit.  (And moving the fridge is not an option; one, the new fridge is a different model, so I’m not paying more to keep the old one and give the more expensive one to the new people, and I’m not scratching both floors and throwing out my back times two and risking damage and breaking door jambs and cleaning out the fridge twice just to have a fridge for a couple of days.)

The big thing is the mountains of boxes and sea of cables and uninstalled equipment and everything else, and it’s going to take me some time to dig out of this.  We lost a closet in the move, and that closet (under the stairs) was a dumping ground for everything, and that dumping ground is now my office, so I’m going to be working out of a little hole I’ve carved among the boxes until further notice.

The move was very nerve-wracking for me.  The Comcast appointment was a comedy of errors involving us giving them our home number so they could get in the building and them disconnecting it that morning.  And then we have no cell coverage at our house, so I’d be hauling stuff back and forth and then realize I had a dozen missed calls from Comcast and never got a single ring.  (I need to get an AT&T microcell.  Better yet, I need to figure out how to complain to AT&T that we’re paying them whatever insane amount for no service at home so they just send me one for free, which I guess some people have done. And yeah, DOOD IPHONE SUX GET A VERIZON but they are just as bad here, plus I would have to deal with some Android phone that Verizon screwed up with their own stink.)  We also had a scheduling issue with the movers; they originally planned to send a team after they finished a move, then when they called to confirm, they said “we’ll be there at 8:00 AM”, and of course when I wake up early on a Sunday to get ready… no movers.  Call to confirm, and they’re at another job blah blah be there at two or three.  Of course.

The cats were a problem, or at least Squeak was.  Loca was very excited about the move, and we brought her over to see the new place on Saturday and she was very happy and running all around and quacking and checking out every corner and room.  Squeak… well, after getting her in the carrier, it looked like I went arms-first through one of those old pre-safety glass windshields.  When we got her to the new place, she basically went catatonic, then ran in a closet and hid all day.  By evening, she came out, walking all low with her tail down, sneaking around behind things and trying to figure out what the hell happened.  She was also hilarious with the new stairs – we have one of those metal staircases that’s just treads (the horizontal part) with no risers (the vertical part) and it took her like twenty minutes to climb up the stairs the first time.  She’s fine now, running around crazy.  The main problem is that both of them especially her, want to climb around the ledges, and that absolutely petrifies me to the problem of full-blown anxiety attacks, because nothing fuels anxiety more than waking up with blood everywhere like a slasher movie and finding a cat with a protruding bone sticking out of their leg, which was exactly the scenario with Squeak a year ago.  She is not the most nimble cat in the world, and is always doing stuff like falling off the couch when she rolls over asleep, so I am not thrilled about having her sleep on a ledge a dozen feet above a metal staircase.  My only choice here is to find a doctor that will prescribe me large amounts of Xanax.

I’ve spent the whole post bitching and haven’t even gotten to the part where I hit my head on the metal staircase, or that it’s a bad allergy day and I can barely see through the teargas effect the pollen’s having on my eyes.  But I am out of time and must go work now.

I have keys to the new place.  They just finished painting, and a cleaning crew is going through it right now.  I’m just finishing up work, then I get to make the short trip down four doors, roughly 745,921 times in the next couple of days.  Wish me luck!

We are moving again.  This will be the sixth time I move in five years.  But, as I said last time, this will be the last time I move for a long time.

Let me first preface this by saying I am not moving back to New York.  I work in New York, but I AM NOT moving back to New York.  For some reason, everyone thinks I am moving back to New York. I AM NOT.  I have a feeling I will repeat that eight thousand times in the next six months.  I am actually moving four doors down in the same building, which is possibly even more absurd.

Here’s the deal: we are out of space in our ~800 square foot loft, and I work from home, and I have no office, and I don’t even really have a desk.  And all of our stuff is crammed together.  And as much as I dreamed about finding a bunch of dual-purpose, European-crafted high-end boathouse furniture that would magically transform my TV center into a kitchen island or whatever the hell would give me a few extra feet, we needed more space.

First we looked into buying the place next to ours, which was in contract for a long time but then went back on the market.  It’s a near-clone of our current layout, and we thought we could just buy it, knock a hole in the wall, and double our square footage.  But this plane was full of huge issues.  One problem is that the left wall of our place can’t be cut open because it goes into the stairs and closet of the next unit, meaning you’d have to do some major surgery in moving a set of stairs or something, which would probably involve tens of thousands of dollars in engineering studies and permits and grief.  There’s also the issue that we’d just barely be able to afford two mortgages, and two HOA payments would total us.  And getting a second mortgage effectively removes all of that first time/primary residence goodness; a second mortgage would not be an FHA home loan, but would be some crazy investment property thing that would involve putting down a third of the money up front.  So no place next door.

Then the possibility came up of buying the place four doors down and selling our current place.  I thought this plan would be fraught with disaster, of me trying to work from home and getting kicked out of the house four hours at a time to show the place, having to put half of our crap in storage indefinitely, all of that.  But the new place is new, never lived in and unoccupied.  So we swung a deal where we’d move into the new place, lease it for six months, and then completely patch/paint the old place and put it on the market, and our close of the new place would be contingent on the sale of the old place.

So we’re in escrow on the new place, we’ve entered a sales agreement on the old place, and life has been a huge ball of stress ever since.  We don’t know when we will move, because we’re waiting on them to install the floors on the new place.  When that happens, I’m not sure how we will move.  Moving companies are really big on weeks of advance warning, so calling them up and saying “get over here tomorrow” is not good.  And we don’t need a truck and a fire brigade chain of people from the street to the elevator, it’s literally a few dozen feet over.  But we also can’t just grab three dishes from the sink, walk next door, repeat 32,734 times.  And I’ll be damned if I try to move that stupid mattress myself.  So we need to get some illegal immigrants or something.

Other crap I need to do, in no particular order:

• Pack everything, but don’t pack anything I might need in the foreseeable future, which is everything, because the second I box up the, say, printer, I will need to print some documents.
• Buy a shit-ton of new furniture at Ikea and assemble it.
• Figure out how the hell to switch over Comcast without ending up internet-less for seventeen days.  And I am almost certain they will make me return all of my boxes and modems to some center in Death Valley that’s only open two hours a month and charge me a $79 return fee so they can then show up and give me the same exact equipment.
• Get drapes installed.
• Get a sliding glass door installed.  More on that in a second.
• Fill out roughly 742 pages of documentation for the loan company, including a seventeen-page HUD document asserting that in the event of alien invasion, we are still responsible for timely mortgage payments.
• Write another thousand dollar check every single day for another fee or deposit I was not aware of.

So the new place: it is about 1400 square feet, or almost double our current space, at about 30% more cost.  It’s the same rough layout as our current place, with the same front windows and the same loft and pillars and all of that.  But it is HUGE compared to our current place, completely cavernous.  Other big changes include a full walk-in closet; a full bath downstairs instead of a half-bath; a more open-concept kitchen; a second bedroom downstairs (office!), and the stairs are metal instead of wood.  Minuses are there’s no closet under the stairs, and we lose our glorious skylight.  But it’s huge, and I get a god damned office.  Oh, the office area is more like a 9×12 alcove by the front entrance, three walls and open, so the first order of business is to install a set of sliding glass room divider doors, which will happen soon.

So I need to move.  And I need to sell this place.  The move could happen in a matter of weeks, depending on how soon that floor goes in.  Like I said, lots and lots of stress until then.

My desk showed up yesterday.  I can’t assemble it until we get into the new place, though.  It’s a 60″ wide Anthro Fit, with the light grey (“fog”) top, and I added one six-inch drawer.  I may add more shelves after we get situated.  If you’re in the mood for a new desk, Anthro is having a deal in September on the Fit line, 30% off.  Their desks are insanely expensive, but are built like goddamn tanks, and over-engineered in a way an engineer would love.  The one I got even came with tools, and I’m not talking those tiny l-shaped Ikea wrenches the size of a car key; I’m talking about an actual full-sized mallet and screwdriver.

Work at the new/old place is going good, too.  I am surprised at how fast the stuff is coming back to me.  Working on the kitchen table can be a bear, and I don’t have a work computer yet.  But finishing work at 3 and being done versus finishing at six and then facing an hour or two of traffic is huge.

Speaking of, gotta get to it.

I’m back. I’ve decided to try and get back on the horse again, as far as running this journal. I don’t know if I will have the time, but I need to write, and Facebook just isn’t cutting it as far as getting my thoughts down. I am still busy with work (which I will, as previously, attempt to not talk about here, and keep a tight line between it and not-work life) but I have some time every morning that maybe I should use to update this, instead of obsessively searching for what idiotic blather John “I’m a competitive eater and don’t know it” Kruk has said about baseball the day before.

So now I feel like I need to post about eight months of catch-up. A lot’s been going on, so I will just hit the highlights as I eat a frozen burrito lunch, and maybe I will go into detail in the days/weeks/years to come.

The biggest thing is that we bought a house, and I’ve moved to West Oakland. I now live here. We bought a 1 bed/1.5 bath signature loft, which is a thousand square feet, but feels much bigger, because it’s an open-plan loft, very white, very high ceiling, and a lot of open space. We also have a full wall of windows facing west, and a skylight, which makes things look extremely bright. It’s a loft conversion of an old warehouse, and we purchased it as new construction, so we got to pick the floors, and nobody has lived here before. We’re sort of hedging our bets by moving in to a pre-gentrified neighborhood that’s basically a whole lot of nothing right now. But Emeryville is very gentrified and is just north of us, and it’s slowly creeping south. We currently have to drive to Emeryville or downtown Oakland for basic services, but I imagine by the time we finish paying PMI payments, there will be a Trader Joe’s within a mile of here.

Here are some pre-purchase photos without the floors or other finishing touches installed. And here are some exterior photos of our place, and the neighboring construction site and other stuff. No interior shots yet until we get the place figured out and fully unpacked, which might be around 2012. (We moved in May 2, BTW.) [Photo link gone, sorry…]

I all but totalled the Yaris in April. I was driving in stop-and-go traffic and looked in my rear-view for a split second, and then went from about 40 to 0 into the back of an SUV. I was fine, no airbag deployment, but I did not hurt anything. The car had about $10K of damage, and I was certain the insurance would total it, but they paid to fix it. It spent a month in the body shop, and all of this happened right before we moved – I got it back I think a day or two before we moved in. I got it back with a defective windshield, which looked all wavy and made me think I had some optamological issue, but the shop quickly replaced it. I’m getting the occasional check engine light (something with the evaporative emissions, probably a loose wire) but it’s otherwise fine. It’s actually averaging 2-3 MPG better than before, but that might be my new I-880 commute versus the 101.

One of our cats (squeak, the little one) got a compound fracture of her leg. I woke up one morning and there was blood everywhere and she was huddled under the couch with a bone sticking out of her leg. She had emergency surgery that cost way too much, and has been in a cast since this happened (the week after the car.) We’ve had to keep her in a little tenty-playpen thing to keep her from running around, which is not the easiest thing to do with a two-year-old cat. Her cast comes off tomorrow, and she has been doing much better. She can even deal with the stairs on three legs now, which is imporessive.

My weight loss has stabilized at about 170 now, and has remained +/-5 pounds of that since October. I don’t religiously follow WW anymore or count points, but I pretty much know what I can and cannot do as far as food intake is concerned. I have fears that I will fall off the deep end, but then I get back on track and cut the crap food, and all is fine. Honestly, just keeping on diet soda and avoiding fast food keeps it all pretty much in check.

I’ve struggled with writing. I don’t have the time to do it anymore, and I totally ignore the whole publishing world/blog thing, and do not network whatsoever. I’ve been knocking around two book projects. One is a book a lot like Summer Rain, but about high school. That’s hard to do because I don’t want to make it about my life, but I think the only people who would be interested in reading it would be all up in my shit about the factual accuracy or whatever, and I don’t want to spend the next ten years researching when certain Helloween albums were released in the US or whatever. The other is a book like Rumored, but slightly more plot-oriented. That’s hard just because I really have to be in the zone to write that stuff, and I never am.

I’ll have to post at a later date with a roundup of various media consumption, including books, movies, and podcasts…

I have moved. Well, mostly. As of Saturday, the place in Playa Del Rey is stripped bare, the shelves wiped clean, and the keys turned in. With the help of Sarah’s dad, we drove the two-car convoy up to San Francisco with no major incidents, feline or otherwise. The new place, which bears a strong resemblance to the old place, now has a new Ikea mattress, a new Ikea computer cabinet, and a bunch of clothes, minor kitchenware, and other crap that came up in a total of four carloads, plus the usual Target and Costco ventures. Tomorrow or the day after, we are supposed to get the big truckload of everything else, which will be great fun.

I got a new job. As per the normal drill, I won’t mention it here, but if you are curious, you can email me. It’s going to be an interesting venture, which means I might not post again for another six months. And it’s 45 minutes away, so even if it was banker’s hours, that’s a huge hit. But I am excited about it, so we’ll see.

Right before we left LA, I reached lifetime status at Weight Watchers. That means I stayed under my goal for long enough, and now I don’t have to pay. (I posted about this in LiveJournal.) I have not eaten as well since, because I have either been on the road or have not had a kitchen available to me. But I think I am still maintaining, and now need to get in the groove of eating correctly in the new office situation. I still don’t feel thin. And I am afraid to go buy new clothes, even though my current ones are hanging off of me.

There are two new phones in the family. Sarah got an iPhone, and I got a Samsung Blackjack 2, which is a Windows Mobile phone. They both have interesting features to me, but the 3G speed is a huge wonder to me. It’s strange to hold a tiny device that’s smaller than a box of cough drops that can download files twice as fast as my first DSL connection. I’m still working on using a Windows Mobile computer while syncing to a Mac, but I have that almost figured out with Missing Sync. I’m almost at the “so what do I do with it?” phase, and I will need to adjust my data hoarding accordingly. The iPhone is neat, and I like the Mac-centric interface, but I can’t type at all on the virtual keyboard. If it had a slide-out, it might be more viable for me. Oh well.

Time to go install more crap I don’t need on the phone. I have almost two weeks off until work starts, and it starts with me flying to Dallas for training. Maybe I should buy a memory card and fill it with ripped and shrunk DVDs for the trip.

Well, I am moving again. This time I will be going up to San Francisco, and in short order – with luck, we will be out of our LA place by the end of this month. Because we are transferring apartments within our current company’s system, it is going faster than usual, and there were no deposits or background checks or whatever else. I looked at places last week, found one, signed a piece of paper, and we are now underway.

My mission as of late is to further compress my life into fewer boxes and shelves. My office has six bookshelves, and my goal has been to eliminate the tallest one, which I got made for me when I lived in Astoria. It is falling apart, looks like hell, and is always in danger of falling over. I also would like to free up that space and reduce my bookcase footprint. A huge pile of books have gone to Amazon for resale, and a bunch more have been recycled or wait to be donated. I also moved a bunch of DVD box sets off of one shelf and into plastic tubs for storage in a closet. I don’t need immediate access to every single DVD I own, and although at one time I felt some need to have every spine displayed of every DVD in my collection, I’d now rather have every single thing hidden in a storage unit of some sort. With that shift, there are now no longer any books on that shelf, and it will go to the chipper soon.

I also have a bunch of “misc” boxes that have followed me across the country ten times over, at least since college. When I got to LA, I had this down to two printer paper boxes and six smaller plastic tubs. I managed to eliminate one of the paper boxes yesterday, which was a major triumph. One of the problems, aside from that I’m wasting entire days trying to eliminate half a cubic foot of storage, is the nostalgia aspect of the whole thing, and how hard it is for me to let go of some things that meant so much to me at one time.

Some of this isn’t hard. I have ten copies of every death metal zine that passed through my hands in 1993, and I really don’t give a shit about any of them anymore, so they all went to the recycler, unless I wrote something in them. I have a lot of zines and papers in which I had a review or short piece in a column, and it was easier for me to tear out that page and chuck the rest than it was to keep hauling around the whole thing. But there were other things. I found this shirt in a box, a polo shirt that I wore a lot in 1992, and I mentioned in Summer Rain frequently. I don’t know why I kept it, except that in 1999 when I was writing the book, it was easy to pull out this shirt and think of 1992. Now, I can pitch it. It’s hard to do, but sometimes keeping just the memory is better than keeping the associated hardware.

I also went through all of my photos yesterday, meaning that every single analog photo I’ve taken from 1982 to 2000 passed through my hands. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pitch, like pictures of blackness or a flash against a glass window. I eliminated doubles when I could. I threw out photos of people I never met in person. All of the blurry artistic stuff went in the garbage. All of these decisions were helped by the fact that I scanned in all of my negatives a year ago, and all of this old stuff was in iPhoto. I managed to remove about 25% of the space in my photo storage area, which is huge.

It was also weird. I am an overly nostalgic person sometimes, so to look at all of these photos from 1983 and 1988 and 1993 and 1996 made me feel weird. I had some severly negative feelings about my prom in 1989, but I found dozens of photos from it. In all of them, I looked the same, this deer-in-headlights look, like someone at a blackjack table who just bet too much and watched the dealer with a ten showing turn over an ace. I found pictures I took in 1983 with my Kodak 110 camera of the state Future Problem Solver’s competition, on the big giant metro campus of IU-Purdue at Fort Wayne. Twenty years later, I’d be standing on a beach in Hawaii, trying to shake a long plane ride out of my head, but at that moment, 90 minutes in a stationwagon was like a trip to the moon. And there’s a stack of pictures (and doubles) from a trip to Canada in 1988, my first, in which it looks like I spent the whole trip saying “wow, they have 7-Eleven in Canada! Let me take 100 pictures of it! I wonder if Geddy Lee ever shops here?”

Another task as of late is rating or re-rating thousands of songs in iTunes. I figure I have at least a couple of six-hour drives ahead of me, so it would be good to get some playlists and podcasts and new ratings in my iPod for that. So if you see anything weird in my playlist to the right, that’s why.

Back to work…