Whew!

Moving Day was Friday! Whee!

(Note: There are even more (and larger) pictures with captions at https://www.autographedcat.com/gallery/newapt — don’t miss the exciting story of the cat’s first night!)

Thursday night, we made a couple of trips over to the new place, in order to transport some fragile items which needed to be hand carried, and also to give the cats a night to run around and inspect the place before we showed up with all the furniture. The cats were suitably freaked out, hiding in the carriers for long stretches between venturing out to explore the strange barren landscape to which they had been transported. We made sure they had the fleece blanket (which was a Christmas present from joyeuse13 and abovenyquist a couple of years ago, so they had something which smelled right to comfort them.

Friday morning, we got up bright and early, and I set about disassembling the computers and A/V stuff and putting it out in our cars before the truck arrived. I was in the process of reclaiming all the cables behind my desk when the enormous truck arrived, along with Dustin and Jamal, the two men we were promised. We took a quick tour of the old apartment, and then they began the effort of trucking out our many boxes of books on handcarts.

I was extremely impressed with their work. They started spot on at 9am and we all done within 2 hours. We made quick drive over to the new place, and they brought everything in through the garage and had it all unloaded within about half an hour. Once we paid them for their hard work (including a nice tip for each of them), Declaring it time for lunch, we went down to the nice Mexican place on the corner, and then headed back to the old apartment to collect our shower curtain and some bits of stuff that didn’t get moved with the first push. (There’s still a ton to do over there. But it’s mostly flotsam and jetsam, plus some repair work to be done on the walls where we’d mounted shelves, before having out housecleaners come in for one last spiff up before we turn in the keys.

After I had a shower, we went down to Bed Bath and Beyond to get some things we’d been putting off until after the move, like a new set of dishes, and a sandwich grill, and a large trashcan for the kitchen. We made good use of the 20% coupon BB&B sends us every couple of weeks, which saved us a bundle on the expensive trashcan, and then headed home to start the process of unpacking. I got the computers set up (we’ve already decided that we are changing our layout in that room — we’re so used to being in our cozy little dining room nook at the old place, where all we had to do to look at the other’s screen was swivel our chair. We’ve discovered, in the giant cavernous room that will be our combination guestroom/office, that it’s a hassle to have to get up to see the other’s screen. We’ve also discovered that we say “Hey, look at this” to each other a LOT.

Of course, we didn’t our Internet service yet, since we were switching from Bellsouth/AT&T to Comcast for both our phone and data services, There was a bit of hassle getting the order originally, because the people who moved out never bothered to tell Comcast they were leaving, and they couldn’t transfer my service to the new address while someone else had service there, and the apartment complex couldn’t tell them they had moved out until they actually vacated on July 1. Then, when I called after they’d left, I was told (apparently erroneously) that they couldn’t start a workorder to install service until the workorder to disconnect the previous service had been completed on July 13, which was the day of the move. Luckily, on the day of the move, when I called again to try and establish service, I got a very helpful CSR who asked me to check and see if they’d already done the disconnect. They hadn’t, so she canceled the disconnection and transferred the service into our name, and even managed to get a tech scheduled for Sunday to install the Internet and phone portions.

Since our only Internet connection at this point was a cup of wireless borrowed from our neighbor’s unsecured router, which gave us the ability to check mail and chat, but was too slow for anything more than very casual web surfing and utterly useless for playing World of Warcraft, we busied ourselves actually unpacking that stuff we could actually unpack. The kitchen has more or less been arranged, and we’ve gotten all the CDs, cassettes, DVDs and VHS tapes up on the wonderful media rack that telynor gave us a couple of years ago. I’m ignoring the urges to sit down and alphabetize them all right now, but I’m sure it will overwhelm me before too much longer. It’s just nice to start getting our stuff up and where we want it. We’ve started hanging artwork as well, as we find good places to put them. Most of the books are still in boxes in the garage until we suss out exactly what we want to do about shelving. We may just go with old fashioned brick-and-board shelves, since I lack the necessary getupandgonitude to actually build proper ones right now, and I really don’t want to go through all the hassle of mounting shelving on the walls again right now.

I spent a good bit of time Saturday night using the borrowed wireless to research washers and dryers, since we no longer had our own (our previous W/D was provided by the apartment, and thus had to be left behind). I found more or less the model we wanted, and we noticed that Best Buy was having some sort of special if you bought two or more appliances at once, so we headed down there Sunday morning to see what we could see. We lucked out in a major way. The units that were one step up from the ones I’d priced out were on clearance, and $200 off each. Then they found out they didn’t have the washer in stick, and offered to sell us the floor models, so that was an extra $100 off. And they sold us the floor models of the pedestals for $60 off each. And we got 10% on top of that from the sale, even though the sale had officially expired the day before. And free delivery. All told, we got about $2400 worth of appliance for just over $1600, with tax. I consider this a win. Hell, I consider this a coup. They will deliver them to us next Saturday.

Meanwhile, life gets back to normal here. We had a lovely peppercorn beef brisket as our first meal in the new place, and watched the 1987 Ackroyd/Hanks Dragnet spoof on TVland — I really need to get that on DVD, as they chopped it to bits for commercial television. Last night, I made tacos and we watched the final two-parter of Season 3 of Doctor Who, which was quite satisfying to me, even if there were bits of it that were rather corny, my inner six year old was cheering wildly, and Doctor Who has always been, at least in part, about the inner six year old.

Life is good.