Down to a suitcase

This is the week that i hope to pack all of my belongings and live out of a suitcase for a week before the actual move. Last week i packed up my whole kitchen with the help of my friend Lindsey so I've been eating off of paper plates and takeout with a single set of knife,fork, and spoon. I have one kitchen towel and a lot of empty spaces.

It was harder than i thought it would be to not have a single kitchen tool to work with. Not a can opener, not a skillet, not even a dish rack for when i washed the few items i had left out. Everything was gone. I don't think I've ever eaten so much take out in a single week as i did this week. And of course, this was the time when my body started craving steak, seared salmon, chicken and gnochi soup, spaghetti....all things that i currently have sitting in my freezer that if i had a pan to cook them in, i could have made and eaten to satisfy the cravings. But all my pans are in boxes, buried under more boxes, with packing supplies on top of those.

Last night, my dad came to help me take down the light fixture in the kitchen. We had replaced it shortly after i moved in because the light was so dim that i felt like nothing was gained by turning on the light. Instead we installed a 4 bulb florescent light fixture and that was heavenly light at the flip of a switch. In fact, i had forgotten how bad it was until we replaced the old fixture and turned on the light. I had thought that maybe my brain exaggerated the dimness, but nope...it was dead on accurate.

I'm also taking out the shelving i installed in the pantry. I was amazed to find that there was mold growing all over the bottom underneath the shelf. Mostly because the shelf was at least 4 inches off the ground and there was nothing trapping air. By all mold logic i had ever known...it should NOT have started to mold.

This is probably the only apartment i have ever had issues deal with mold. It's not like i'm unused to Northwest weather and it's propensity for mold, but generally, when i deal with mold, it doesn't come back this fast. I've been bleaching window frames ever since i moved in, and within a month, the mold is back. Clearly, it was some shoddy workmanship in that apartment. I'm going to have my work cut out for me when i clean that place.

Today, however, i'm taking a brief break from the packing to go with my wonderful friend Annie to see THE HUNGER GAMES!!!! She, as a major book worm, turned me on to these books before they took off and i absolutely loved them. I'm totally a sucker for female survivor stories. So it was only fitting that we went to see them together immediately after they came out. I can't wait!!!

I'm sorely in need of a break from all the packing.

Packing Schedule

So i move at the end of this month. 20 days away. It's no April fool's joke. And obviously i'll need a plan.

First off, i'm at work for at least 9 hours a day (not counting lunch hour). I pull four 9 hour days which bascially means i'm running around the whole day solving copier problems, putting in orders, running endless arrays of data, and reminding people for the millionth time that i am not responsible for keeping track of their bloody coffee cup!

Needless to say, by the end of the day, i'm exhausted. So any major packing for the week days just aint gonna happen. Which leaves the weekends for me to concentrate on.

This last weekend, i concentrated on packing up all the decorative things i have scattered around. Pictures, candles and holders, my ceramic dragon sculpture i made in art class in college, fake plants i've collected because there was no way to keep real plants alive in my dark dungeon of an apartment i have now. Then came my small collection of board games, and cards.
Then i started in on the art supplies and office supplies.

Which made me think that I developed my mother's pen hoarding tendency. I say this because i filled up an entire gallon sized ziplock bag with pens. woops.

My books were already packed, but i had to tape them shut. So by the end of the weekend, i had 8 boxes packed of things i won't need before the end of the month.

Next weekend, I'm probably going to go through everything that's under my bed. Which could get interesting, because the last time i tried to go through under there, i found a gallon of plain old sand. No idea why it was there, but for some reason i had it.

Overall this is going to be an interesting month as i continually pare down to what items i absolutely need in order to get by day to day in my current apartment, while more and more things end up in an ever increasing maze of boxes.

Not-so Breaking News!

FINALLY! FINALLY! I can talk about it.

Boyfriend Jon and I are moving in together!!!!!

We found a gorgeous apartment, in the perfect area, next to a creek with a trail, a fireplace, a huge kitchen and walking distance to a grocery store. It's huge, almost double the square footage that i'm currently living in. And in the next month, you're probably going to be reading about all the obsessive moving thoughts that will be running through my head.

I didn't want to break the news pre-maturely and possibly jinx it, and also because i hadn't told my parents yet. There were a lot of variables that had to come together in order for all of this to work.

But we got the lease papers last night and are going over them today. So it's pretty much official. We're moving in together.

I had a lot of concern about how my parents would react. They pretend that most dating milestones that are common for the 21st century don't exist. They like to pretend there's still the courting process prevalent in the 1950s. Sometimes the pretending goes to the extreme, in my opinion, but that's just the way that they are. And i am their baby, and this mold hasn't been broken in on the girls side of things. Thankfully, i seem to have caught them at a good time and overall the announcement went well. I had hoped for a genuinely happy response, but it was more reserved and cautious. Probably cause they've had no wind of this before, they don't realize that this has been in the works since August.

I'm so excited to move in with Boyfriend Jon. He's my best friend, companion, confidant, and winner of the best boyfriend award multiple times. This is going to be such a beneficial step. No more logistics of having two apartments, two refrigerators, two schedules...we'll be able to save money on rent, cook more cause all the ingredients are in one place, so many other pluses that i can't even count them right now cause i'm too giddy. And the place is huge by comparison to either of our places, and open, and there's two bedrooms so there's the option of our own private space. I have such a good feeling about this place.

I'm an artistic, right brained type. I love to spread out and have room to move. Which is kind of hard in a just over 500 sq/f apartment. Oh, did i mention its on the 3rd floor? This means there's the options of leaving the curtains open!!! Natrual light, oh happy day!

Right now thoughts of BBQs by the pool (did i mention there's a pool?), movie nights with friends where everyone can sit and enjoy the tv, baking parties, Halloween parties, eventually getting a puppy or two; all those things just keep running through my head.

I just can't wait for April!