I moved (with pictures!)

One week ago on Monday, Jack and I moved into our brand new apartment.

I will preface this post: it's a beautiful apartment. It feels more like a home than any place I've lived so far. Everything was worth it.

That said, this was the most goddamn horrific move ever. Ever. I know I'm prone to hyperbole, but seriously, I have never wanted to kill myself or someone else so many times in the span of 48 hours.

This is how Damon decided to move -- he rented the largest moving truck known to man, and he got it the day before our deadline. We could have learned a lot from Damon.

Hey, at least I was labeling.

This is not a good job of labeling.

This is what our truck looked like at our noon deadline. Whoops.

Carissa bailed our asses out like crazy, tetris-ing the shit out of our moving truck. Head Bitch in Charge, for real.

Labeling becomes livejournal.

Full goddamn truck. Everything literally JUST fit.

Beers for breakfast at 1pm.

Bye bye, living room.

Bye bye, other side of the living room.

Bye bye, kitchen.

Adios, porch-slash-patio.

We transported the fish in a Blue Bunny ice cream bucket. One of thirteen survived. He is called Dazzler, and he is a fucking trooper. During the transportation, I only got fish water splashed on me about thrice, which is a very small number considering how long they sat on my lap.

EMPTY TRUCK. Thank you Jesus and Kyle Johnson, who may be the same person.

The other side of the new place. Sigh.

Oh yeah, I dropped a couch on my leg.

Close up, to accentuate the epic failure.

This fucking bookshelf deserves a blog post all to itself, and someday it may happen. Let's just say the moral of the story is: don't buy anything pre-assembled from Ikea if you're not sure whether or not it will fit in your vehicle. We disassembled the entire goddamn bookshelf in the parking ramp and had to reassemble it when we got it home. Son of a bitch.

Re-assembling this piece of Satan was almost as annoying as unassembling it. Trust me. (Also now it is brown and red, not that horrific white.)

All this said, I love my new place, I love my new neighborhood, and it was all fucking worth it.

I'm moving.

Literally, like right now. I'm moving right now. I'm mid-packing, mid-cleaning, mid-nervous breakdowning, mid-sneezing, mid-organizing, mid-annoyance. In less than 24 hours, my stress will be completely gone and I'll be drinking a beer with BFF & Co., celebrating the one birthday that is louder (and longer) than mine. I'm holding on to that with all of my might. That shit is my reward.

I was making excellent progress. I've been doing shit non-stop since 7:30 this morning (with one small fifteen minute pizza break), not to mention the solid six hours we put in yesterday. We have lime green duct tape. We have boxes labeled in expletives and exhaustion. We have dust everywhere.

I was making excellent progress. I ran across a big folder full of cards that I had kept because a) I'm a fucking pack rat, and b) I'm a fucking pack rat. No more pack ratty-ness!! I only began going through them in order to make sure I had no loose cash in any of them. Naturally.

I started tearing up when I found a card from my father from my birthday a few years ago. It was a very simplistic card but for some reason, it hit me then, and it hit me now. Keep.

I threw away a bunch of other cards until I ran across a card from my late grandmother, the light of my life, my hero. As I studied her handwriting, remembering her smile, the tears started to come again. Keep.

I found a bunch of mix tapes I made in high school to people who once upon a time were very important to me. Blurred vision encouraged by melancholy memories. Keep.

I ran across a small card that I didn't recognize. The handwriting inside was familiar. The lines were not straight and the penmanship suffered, but the card came back to me immediately. "You are the best thing that's ever happened to me," it read. A goodbye, good luck, Jesus fucking Christ I don't want you to go card. As I read, the tears became unstoppable. I cried into the dusty silence and texted the BFF, reminding her that I fucking fiercely love her. Keep.

Thirty minutes later, I was still crying. I couldn't stop. I haven't had a really hard cry in a long time, and it was apparently due. Stress from moving, stress from work, stress from money, stress from family, stress from boys, stress from impending separation anxiety, stress stress stress, cry cry cry.

I'm growing up all of a sudden. I am a 24 year old independent woman with a bus pass and a bicycle and a job and bills and a desktop computer and a checklist and furniture that belongs to me. I am very different than I was when I was 22 and moved into this breathtakingly beautiful apartment with the oversized lavender Adirondack chair and the vine-covered walls and the picture-perfect deck and the yellow kitchen and the tiger wood shelving units and the long long long hallway and that lake... that lake.

Throw shit away, start new. Throw shit away, start new. Throw shit away. Start new.

Throw shit away.

Start new.

my life through the eyes of my blackberry pearl:

The cloudbike and Jack.


Food art - exhibit a.


This is Electric Six, aka one of the best live bands ever. You must - must -- must --- must see them.


You just... had to be there.


Food art - exhibit b.


Once upon a time in Minneapolis, I found this on the side of a bar.


The Stealth Dogs. We love them.


Food art - exhibit c.


The bane of my existence.

We got new carts at work.

That's literally the most exciting thing in the whole world. Sad? No -- that's just how awesome it is.

Let me back up. I need a cart for three & a half hours per shift. Okay, that's not entirely true -- I just need it for ten minutes at the beginning and ten minutes at the end, but, without exaggeration, it's completely crucial that I have it at those times, so I hide it for three & a half hours until I need it again. Necessary? Yes. Fair? Probably not.

For the last fifteen months, finding a cart at the beginning of the shift was difficult, to say the least. I had to be crafty. Bribing, bargaining, threatening, and just downright stealing had all been standard. "I'll bring it right back when I'm done!" I've promised countless times, knowing full well that I wouldn't. Hey, don't judge me -- the service industry is a cutthroat world. I gotta step on a few toes to get what I need.

As of late, I've been trying to be more understanding. Keeping my promises, for example, and bargaining without threats. Asking nicely. Thanking. Trying to build cart credit in order to cash it in when necessary. It's very hard for me to be nice when I'm so used to being a bitch, but the chef boys and other bartenders understand the hardship of the situation, so we growl at each other in the moment but exchange a look that says, "I get that this sucks and they are filthy jerks for not providing us with the equipment we need to do the jobs that they require."

Catering is another story. The restaurant's relationship with the catering staff is much like "West Side Story." I've actually used the phrase "What are you doing on my turf?" more than once. Not only do they appear when and where they are not wanted, but they take my things. Not only do they take my things, but they take my things without any warning. They are phantom thieves! They steal things without returning them, and nobody seems to see them do it, but it's them, we know it. This is not said without evidence, believe me.

So I see these kleptomaniacs with one of our precious few carts full of my glassware and I get mad. My cart. My things. On my cart. My things on my cart being pushed around my building by some morose chump in a Star Trek uniform. Do I sigh, annoyed, and attempt to find a different cart? Fuck no. Rage overtakes me and I devise plans to a) get back at them (revenge/winning is always first) and then b) Jedi that cart. What usually happens is a cat-and-mouse game of stalking and hiding, ending in me waiting for them to go into a closet to retrieve something and hurriedly emptying the cart, making off with it before they can come back to a pile of their things on the ground while they shake their fists at the heavens and rue the day that they crossed me. Listen, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. And anyway, they started it.

Lo and behold, after fifteen months of this bullshit, someone decided to do something proactive about repairing the relationships between those employees who require carts. I will say that life is a little less exciting with a few more carts in the mix, but my blood pressure seems to be better. Perhaps this gives me an opportunity to repair some of those burned bridges, but honestly, I probably won't. They still are my sworn work enemies. I mean, you have to have something to keep things interesting.