Unpacking!

My last post was about getting down to the dregs of packing, cleaning, and trying to not accidentally pack my sanity into a box. Despite my efforts not to, things got a little frazzled. and i was literally going day to day trying to stay on top of things without freaking out.

Now, sounds a bit pathetic right? Like i can't handle the simple stress from a basic move? Well there was a bit more to it than that.

I think the most eventful thing that happened since my last update is that my mother had a pretty serious accident. She was climbing onto the roof (we're still not sure why she was up there alone) and the ladder went out from underneath her and she landed hard on her right side, breaking one of the bones in her leg and shattering her upper arm bone. Thankfully, my sister was right there and was able to get immediate help and my mother tried to boss the paramedics around on how to move her to the ER, much to their amusement and my dad's chagrin.

This led to three days in the hospital, probably close to 100 x-rays, and very little pain meds because my mom has bad reactions to them. My dad stayed by her side all day every day. Then they came home for about a week to wait for the swelling to go down. (Two days ago she went in for shoulder replacement surgery, and she's now back home and recovering from that as well.) Meanwhile, my sister and I went for several visits both to the hospital and to the house to take turns babysitting my mom who was still stubbornly trying to get around without help.

Let me tell you she had the single most livid bruise i have ever seen. Her whole upper arm was PURPLE and green. I can't believe how doctors looked at that and didn't worry too much. I'm so glad my mom is ok if a little worse for wear. She's been working even! Participating in conference calls and dictating emails. That's either extreme dedication to her job or anything to get dad to stop fussing over her. I made sure to make the joke that she didn't want to help me move so much she had to go and get injured to get out of it. It made her laugh.

During ALL OF THAT, is when i moved. And as if things couldn't get much worse, we had quite an adventure with the U-Haul truck. First they tell us that we CAN'T get it Saturday and Sunday because i waited too long to to make a reservation. Next they tells we CAN get Friday night to Saturday afternoon. But when we show up the manager says no way! Finally we arrange that we can get it first thing Saturday morning, to Saturday afternoon and we'll get the smaller truck. We show up to get the truck and they can't find the reservation which is in Jon's name. Getting REALLY ticked off by this point, we repeat his last name several times before I say his full name last then first. Suddenly, they find our reservation because it was filed under his first name. By this point we weren't going to argue or wonder if we had gotten another "John/Jon"'s reservation and we went off to get our keys.

The new apartment was really the only good part of my last two weeks. With a few small maintenance requests which have been getting taken care of much faster than my old place....I'm in love with this place. It already is starting to feel like home.

Then came the move. We had a small army of friends who came through for us. Thank you so much; Dad, Sister, Lee, Naomi, Tyler, Lindsey, Shelly, Ian, Josh and Annie. You are the best. Two days, two apartments, probably near 100 boxes, a bunch of furniture which was a pain to navigate, three pizzas, some KFC, Pho and a lot of aspirin later....WE'RE MOVED IN!!!!!-ish

Boyfriend Jon and I have been spending every single day trying to deal with the mountain of boxes everywhere, trying to decide what we needed most, and battling hoards of crumpled newspaper. We're well on our way to making our apartment a happy home.

Last night, i finished unpacking the kitchen and made my first meal in about six weeks. It was simple, delicious and probably the healthiest thing I've eaten in those six weeks. No more take out and TV dinners for me for a while. I'm cooking with.....well...it's electric, but i feel as good as when i cook with gas! :D

I'll post before and after pics soon!

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!

The Saga of the Purple Couch

A few years ago, while i was dealing with the Roommate Katherine, a co-worker asked me if i would like to take her twin size hide a bed love-seat off her hands. I went over and checked it out and it was indeed a beautiful couch. A nice dusty plum color with ample cushioning and no large stains or tears. Unfortunately, i didn't have that much room so i declined to take it.

Now that my furniture space has changed and i'm able to fit something like that, i started thinking about how nice it would be when guests stay over/or there's someone snoring in my bedroom, to have a secondary bed area that's easily available even during the half awake stumble that occurs in the middle of the night.

So i went back to the co-worker and asked if she still had the couch. Unfortunately she didn't, but she had given it to another co-worker of ours, (we'll call her Cindy). As it turned out, Cindy was looking to get rid of the very same couch well within the time frame that i was looking at and she would be very happy if i could take it off her hands. She assured me that it was still in good condition, and that she'd get her husband to clean it before they gave it to me. I thought i had just won the jackpot.

An exaggerated example
of the "children" stains i'm referring to.

I borrowed my dad's van and pulled up to their house to take the couch. Looking back now, i should have gone to look at the couch before hand. But i trusted Cindy because she's a wonderful lady and i had no reason to believe anything less than the best from her. I could see a couple smudges from little children fingers, but overall the couch looked in good shape. So the couch got loaded up and i started to drive off.

Then i started to notice a very strong odor. My first thought was that i had gone through a skunk plume. Then i realized the smell was not skunk, but dog and it was coming from the couch behind me. I ended up driving down the highway with the windows down several inches and the rear wing windows open in the pouring rain because the stench was overwhelming. At this point, i didn't feel that i could go back, but i seriously thought about letting it accidentally fall out the back of the van. I think it might just be one of those cases where someone who lives with the smell, no longer notices it after a while. Cindy is too sweet a person to intentionally mislead someone.

Still it was a couch that was complementary in color to my Red Couch Of Awesomeness. It was originally an 800$ couch and it had a fold out bed, and i was getting it free of charge. Surely i could salvage this couch. Surely even if i had to spend a little bit of money, this couch would be worth it in the end.

So despite Boyfriend Jon's dubious looks and tactful silences when i explained my plan to him, i set the plan in motion. I borrowed my mothers industrial rinse and vac machine, created solutions of hot water, a mild citrus scented soap, and a little Fabreeze and went to work cleaning this couch.

The stuffing from the back cushion went straight into the garbage because it smelled like dog piss. I figure that i can find replacement stuffing for less than 20$ so that's no big loss. And then i sprayed my cleaning solution and used a scrub brush on every single inch of fabric on that entire couch, inside and out. The rinse and vac has a clear cover where you can see what you're sucking up. I can't clearly convey the gross factor of what i saw, but needless to say, i went over certain areas several times until the water was coming out clear.

For five hours i worked on cleaning this couch. I know because i watched the entire extended edition original DUNE movie plus over two episodes of Battlestar Galatica. I worked hard the entire time, soaking, scrubbing, suctioning, and fabreezing the entire couch, top to bottom, inside and out. I even cleaned all the hardware inside for the hide a bed.

By the end, my back was screaming, my sense of smell was completely GONE, i had a massive headache, and my knuckles were scraped raw. I had hauled gallons of water for rinsing my scrub brush, filled my water spray bottle dozens of times and gone through over half a bottle of fabreeze.

BUT!!!!

This is not my couch, but an example
of the difference before and after

This couch looks GOOD now. All of the children and pet dander stains came out after the scrubbing, and i'm positive that i managed to get almost all the body oils and other stains out of the fabric. I'm going to have to trash the mattress and replace it with a foam pad, but overall, i think this couch is saved.

I might just be optimistic, but it's going to depend on getting my mother's amazing nose in there to tell if it still smells cause i still can't smell a thing. If it still smells after that, i'll probably get rid of it. But i'm hopeful that all that work will pay off and i'll have a new couch. Fingers crossed because this couch looks good, it's just all dependent on the lack of odor.