A Movable Thanksgiving Feast

Well, while everyone else was feasting on turkey and watching football, kitanzi and I set out upon the oddest errand

Last year, I don’t think it would have been conceivable that I would agree to such an errand. But over the last few months, relations between me and deidrecorwyn have improved. She’s really made an effort to reach out and mend fences, and my feeling is that if she’s willing to be friends, then she gets all the friends benefits. Unfortunately, because I’m a real friend, that does include help moving. 🙂

I took a half day off on Wednesday, so that we could take our cat Dayna to the vet. No one remembers the last time she’d been to see a vet, and she’s five years old and hasn’t been fixed yet. We got her all of her shots and a general health checkover, and an appointment to take her in for spaying on Monday. The vet pronounced her in very good health and was pleased that we have a similar philosophy on things such as diet and the wisdom of allowing cats out of doors (which is to say: don’t). I’ve been to this vet’s before and really like them. If anyone in the North Atlanta area wants a really good feline doctor, I heartily recommend The Cat Clinic of Roswell, a vet practice that only takes feline patients.

Stopped to check the mail in the Gafilk mailbox, then headed back up home in time for Kit to go to her doctor’s appointment. I decided to take a short nap while she was gone.

She got home and we immediately set out for Norcross. deidrecorwyn was still living in the same townhouse we had been in when we broke up. Unfortunately, the crazy landlords had gotten even more batty since the last time I had to deal with them. deidrecorwyn had ended up taking them to court over a number of issues, and as a result got a settlement allowing her to vacate her lease without penalty. Unfortunately, she had to get out of the old place by December 1, which meant moving over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Showed up over there about 4:30, where I found an old friend, Teri S., who had been helping with the packing. Unfortunately, she was just having to go. So Kit and I set about loading the truck with as much furniture and boxes as were available. We got the truck more or less full of stuff by about 9, and headed over to the new place to unload it. (In truth, we could have gotten a lot more in there, but we wanted to make sure we could UNLOAD it and still get to bed at a not-ridiculous time. Another old friend, Stuart, came over to the new place to help with the unloading after he got off work, so we were completely done with the process by about 11:30. We went back to the old house, picked up our car, and headed home, arriving at about half-past-midnight and immediately fell into bed.

I got up the next morning about 10am (which many of you know is absurdly late in the day for me), and we had breakfast, then set out for phase two of the move. We got to Norcross at 12:30pm, and joined deidrecorwyn and Stuart, who had been working on getting boxes taped up. Stuart had also gone by the U-Haul place and gotten the one important missing tool from yesterday: an appliance dolly. With this, it was reasonably easy to get the washer and dryer loaded into the truck. We also got all the rest of the furniture that wasn’t taken the night before.

Unfortunately, Stuart had to leave at 3pm, and being Thanksgiving Day, we didn’t have any other options for additional hands, so in spite of the fact that we had a lot of empty truck, we went ahead over to unload. My feeling was that boxes can easily be moved by whatever number of people one has, but the big heavy stuff really wanted the maximum number of people.

We got everything unloaded by 3pm, so that Stuart could go on to his family obligations. He was a tremendous help, though, and it was very nice to see him again.

We took the truck back to the Uhaul place, and then set off in search of dinner. We ended up at TGI Fridays, where we had the decidedly non-traditional Thanksgiving meal of fried shrimp. Yum. I tasked deidrecorwyn with spending the rest of Thursday and any time she had off on Friday after work to getting everything left in the house packed and ready. We’ll marshal as many troops as we can on Saturday to move the very last of it all and complete the process with time to spare. Go team!

Impressions of the personal dynamics

Wednesday was the first time that deidrecorwyn and kitanzi had really met (although they had been introduced way back at Gafilk 3), so I was really worried that it would be one of those really awkward situations where no one really knows what to say. None of that ever happened though. Everyone seemed to fall quite easily into a friendly and easygoing mood which made all the work go that much easier. deidrecorwyn and I have now got enough time between us since the breakup that we can joke about things that we used to fight about.

deidrecorwyn started therapy shortly before we split up, and has been on one variety or another of antidepressants. I don’t know how much is just growing, how much is the positive effect of the drugs, and how much is the result of good therepy, but she is acting much more like the person I met 15 years ago than the person I lived with during the last several years of our relationship. Kit said that to her surprise, she genuinely likes deidrecorwyn, which is also a good sign. We’ll see if things continue to remain friendly after the job is done, but I have my hopes that a friendship has been salvaged.