10 posts tagged “moving”

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

A lot.  A lot lot lot.  Which is why I am now going to write a novel about it.

1. I came home from the hospital to a little house in Bethany, Oklahoma, where the streets were and still are dirt.
2. When I was a year old, we moved to another tiny house on Polk Street in my "hometown" of Hugoton.
3. A year later we moved to a big old house on 10th Street, which had been cut into two apartments at some point.  Because I wasn't in school yet, I stayed home with my mother and my grandad, while they remodeled it back into a single house.  I remember quite vividly the day after they built an interior staircase, and I stood at the open doorway to what had been the exterior staircase, watching them rip the stairs off the side of the house.  Can you guess where I got my home remodeling urge?  At age three, my main toys were various sized nails and screws, a hammer and pliers, and some scraps of wood.
4. I'm going to count my grandparents' house, too, over on Harrison, just two blocks from the train tracks and the grain elevators.  It was my real childhood home, where I was always a child, spoiled and doted on.
   
5. After my parents got married, they decided to build a new house, but in the interim, we moved to a house on Trindle, which was much smaller than the 10th Street house.
6. Then the landlord on Trindle sold the house and we had to move again, because the new house wasn't finished yet.  We moved to the horrid little Blue House, where everything was blue.  The carpet, the paint, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything.  Also, it was only two bedrooms, and with seven of us, it was like hell on earth.  On top of each other all the time.  Also, the air conditioner didn't work for shit.  Also, the hot water heater didn't work at all.  Also, you couldn't run the drier and anything else at once.  Also, did I mention that everything was blue?  I hate blue.  That house was so bad I would have been ashamed to invite my friends over, if I'd had any friends.
7. At last, the new house was done.  Mom's new house.  It would never be our new house, because Mom had designed it and picked out everything in it.  All the carpet was the same, all the furniture the same, so that all the bedrooms looked the same.  It was like living in a motel.  Salmon carpet, ivory walls, and freaky faux-Danish furniture.  Oh, except in the kitchen where the floor was tiled in brown and the counter tops were orange.  Fucking 80's.
8. Then I left for college and lived in a dorm room for a while, which I don't really count.  My junior year, I moved in with Allen, my football buddy, and two architecture types: Ken and Jen from Colorado.  It was the first time in my entire life that I had my own room.  At 19, my first room.  It was about 9 x 10, with a sloping ceiling in the attic.  I had enough room for a twin bed, a small dresser and a milk crate for a night stand.  It was lovely.
9. After two years of that, I moved into my very own apartment: part of a huge Victorian, where my bedroom was the formal dining room, complete with chandelier, and my bathroom was the butler's pantry.  That's where I also had the cat ghost.
10. I made the mistake many college co-eds make.  I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.  He picked the house and it was a dump.  I'd moved out in about six months, and so I only count it as representative of why you should never trust someone else to pick out your living space.  It was located in the flood plain of the '51 flood and it flooded.  We didn't get water in the house, but we got it right up to the underside of the floor boards.  Mosquito central, nasty filthy place, and then we got a dog--which boyfriend also picked out without any consideration for my opinion.  Spastic little dog.  Nice enough, but never destined to be my dog.  Then, my cat got shot by some hillbilly neighbor.  I was done.
11. After that, I moved into one of my favorite homes: an apartment in the old Wareham Hotel.  Elevator.  Restaurant and bar downstairs.  Swank.  Soundproof.  Beautifully tiled old bathroom, walk in closet.  My own.  Pigeons walking by on the window sills outside.
12. Then I got a job in Japan and moved into a traditional Japanese apartment in Nakazawa, upstairs from the Quickie Mart and just down the hill from a massive Shinto shrine.  Tiny bathroom.  Tiny kitchen.  Two lovely 6-tatami rooms that opened out on a balcony that overlooked a few thousand acres of rice and the Honshu mountains.  I had tree frogs and mud swallows and a stray cat. 
    
13. I made another mistake.  I moved in with my sister and remodeled an apartment in a house I didn't own.  A story better not dramatized.  Another lovely living space, but one I had to leave when my sister got remarried and sold the house.  Au revoir.
14. I followed that with a dinky little subsidized apartment in a brick WW2 era complex.  Subsidized because I was making about $18K a year working for Planned Parenthood.
15. After two years there, I got married and moved to Florida, where Hubbicula and I resided in a craptastic apartment in a craptastic complex for about a year. 
    
16. During which year, I did mountains of research to figure out where to buy a house.  I drove endlessly through neighborhoods and researched property values and sales trends, and we looked at five houses.  House #5 was perfect, except that it didn't have a garage.  It was a lovely little Arts and Crafts Bungalow in a suspect neighborhood a block from the interstate.  Still, it was perfect, with oak floors, original tiled kitchen counter tops and ten-foot ceilings.  And thousands of little lizards living in my yard, sneaking up my walls, sleeping in my potted plants.  Loved that house.  Almost nothing to remodel in it, except for the urgent need to paint over every room in the house.  Pepto-bismal pink in the living and dining rooms.  Dining room had exquisite paneled walls with a plate rail and a lovely chandelier.  Hideous other colors throughout.  No remodeling until the end, when we got ready to sell it, then we redid the front porch and I redid the kitchen ceiling.
17. That brought us back to Kansas, where we spent two months living with my parents.  It was...okay.  Hubbicula might have other things to say about it, but living in the suburbs was never our plan.
18. So we bought the house we have now.  The tiny, adorable little limestone gnome cottage.  The house of the charming screened porch and the leaking basement.  I have mixed feelings about this house.  I'd probably love it if it weren't the size of a postage stamp.  Oh, and if I didn't wake up on rainy nights and panic. 
    

I believe that's an adequate survey of my various homes, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that I've lived in 18 different houses.  No wonder I'm tired of moving.

What's different about my home now and my childhood home?  Well, not a lot.  It's in Kansas, surrounded by Kansans.  It's a lot bigger town than my hometown.  90,000 people vs. 3,000 people.  It's humid here, but not brutally windy.  We've got eight movie screens instead of one.  We've got squirrels and cottontail rabbits instead of coyotes and jackrabbits.  I don't know everyone yet and I'm related to almost no one.  Still, it's Kansas.  I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I did.  You don't like it, you can fuck off.

Today is Phase One of the Sadly Only Temporary Evacuation of Brain Tumor Hall.  This means that all the GTA's in the building get relocated elsewhere.  So all morning, I've been running up and down the hill, dogging the movers, nagging the IT people, to get ten offices relocated to the Glorified Quonset Hut that will house the GTA's for the next 16 months.  (And really, it's not that glorified.)  I've sweated through my clothes and courtesy of the 99% humidity, I have an orange afro going on.  Add to this the fact that all of the movers are stoners who weren't very smart before they started smoking the weed.  They barely understand how a moving dolly works and every desk they've rolled around the corner of the main entrance, they've smacked into the wall.  Thus all the newer desks now have one dinged up corner, and all the old, steel WW2 battleship desks have left dents in the wall.  It's lovely.  Oh, and can you imagine what a hundred pound steel double-pedestal desk sounds like tumbling off a dolly and down two flights of concrete stairs in an enclosed space?  Yeah, like a migraine.

The best part: we get to do this over again come December.  Then the rest of the department--twenty more offices and all of our administrative space--temporarily moves out of the Brain Tumor Hall while the duct work is replaced.

No, wait.  Here's the best part: we get to do it all over again on a grand scale come next August, when the whole department returns to the places we're now vacating.  Supposedly, the end result will be fewer brain tumors.  I want to believe.

Petite_sunflower

Secretly and not so secretly, I long to be a petite flower.  A woman like my grandmother, with perfectly manicured hands and elegant ankles.  High heeled shoes and a dulcet voice.  I tried.  Really, I made an honest effort.  I manicured, pedicured, and I've always followed my grandmother's regimen against sun exposure.  I haven't been outside without a hat in probably ten years. 

Sometimes, I almost succeed.  I catch a glimpse of myself in a restaurant window and think, "Yes, I look rather elegant and feminine."  Usually, though, I revert back to my usual notions of Kansas womanhood.  I buy power tools.  I clean my guns.  I squat down in the garden and poke around at things.  I say things like, "Yup," and "don't got." 

Like my forebears, I won't say no to any request for help that's reasonable.  So when friend of Hubbicula's wanted to store stuff in our basement for the summer, I agreed.  Big deal.  I was a poor grad student once and stored things in people's basements, and I only lived 8 hours away from college.  This kid is German and he's going back to Germany for the summer.

He and his mother arrived with a small trailer full of the contents of his apartment.  Plenty of room in my basement for that.  Except for the sofa.  The Germans and I tried several different approaches to get it down the stairs and around the corner--why do basement stairs always have a sharp corner at the bottom.  To no avail.  The legs of the sofa were about three inches too long.  They kept snagging against the wall and the doorway.

We dragged it back up to the driveway and considered.  The sun was setting.  The Germans were supposed to fly home the next day.  Time to decide.

I said, "What if we cut the legs off?"

"Sure," said the German.  "Do you have a hand saw?"

Ha.  Ha ha ha.  Hand saw.  There I was in all the glory of my petite flower of womanhood.  I whipped out the circular saw, put on my goggles and zing zing zing zing--sawed off the legs of the sofa.  While the Germans stood back and stared, slightly open-mouthed.

I try, you know.  I painted my toenails last night.  The problem is, for every bit of genetic information I got from my elegant town grandma, I've got an equal share from my rough and tumble farm grandma.  A woman who rode a tractor until she was 78.  A woman who repaired lawnmowers and reupholstered furniture.  A woman who once climbed up the windmill to reconnect the pump line. 

I need some heavy duty nail polish.

My people, I'm being punished but it's been educational so far.  My punishment is this: my parents are moving.  After nine years in their house in the 'burbs of Kansas City, they have finally bought their retirement home in the country.  (Well, it's Momzilla's retirement home, but Dadzilla is five years younger, so he's transferring to a different office to finish out his time with the Oil & Gas Giant he works for.)

The move will put them 2.5 hours away from me, instead of half an hour.  That is good and bad. The punishment is that all the packing and sorting is going on half an hour from me.  The last two weekends I have been intimately, horribly, bleakly involved in that sorting and packing.  Given a choice, I think I would pick waterboarding.  After all, that's only simulated drowning.  Helping my mother sort through 65 years of crap, that's the real deal.

Here's what I've learned.  Get rid of it now.  Get rid of it.  Don't know what your kids would do with it after you're dead?  Get rid of it.  Don't use it?  Get rid of it.  Don't wear it?  Get rid of it.

Don't wait.  My mother has stuff she could have gotten rid of ten years ago, but she didn't.  Instead she moved it.  Stuff she could have gotten rid of thirty years ago, but she's moved it six times now.  At that point, it becomes hard to tell you don't need it.  If it was important enough to move six times, why not seven?

Now is as good a time as any to look at the things filling up cabinets and drawers in your house.  Look at them and ask whether they're not conspiring to be an anchor, chaining you to obligations you don't want.

The_return

They come with their futons and their mini fridges, trucks laden with plywood and cinder block bookshelves, bean bag chairs and microwaves.  Heaped on top are milk crates full of textbooks, battered posters of scantily clad women, and lamps of all denominations: Tensor, Pier One paper, lava and halogen.  The better to illuminate the late nights of collegial endeavor.

Damn them.  Damn the pitiless way in which they invade my town, usurp my favorite booth at my favorite restaurant, clog traffic, founder at unfamiliar intersections, and speed through the residential neighborhoods where I walk.  They are the bane of my existence and the source of my income.  They are college students.  They are legion.

Now that August has arrived in Lawrence, the college kids are back.  They're here to pillage and plunder, loiter, befoul, and manifest all forms of degrading, crapulent behavior.  Ostensibly, they're here to learn.

Although I was once a college kid myself, I was one of those who stayed year-round.  I came to college and didn't leave for 8 years.  I learned to enjoy those ghost town summers, when most college kids left, and the townies came out of hiding.  The summer seems shorter now, but the last two months have still been gloriously peaceful.  I look forward to next summer.

I don't know why I expected anything different.  The movers were supposed to come on Monday to begin moving our department's GTA furniture into their new offices, which were just vacated by the History department yesterday.  So, I came to work, got some coffee and started downstairs to make my final adjustments to the moving plan.  My boss changed his mind about where to house a new faculty hire, so I needed to relabel a bunch of things to account for that. 

Only on the way downstairs, I was met by a pair of movers hauling desks on dollies.  (Why not use the elevators?  Because the elevators in this building were deemed in "insufficiently good repair to carry labeled weight."  In short, the elevators are so far gone into disrepair that the College doesn't think it's safe to haul those old grey battleship desks in them.)  As I passed the movers, I noticed that the moving tag on it was for OUR DEPARTMENT.  That's right.  They were already moving our offices, more than a day ahead of schedule.  Good for them, working so efficiently, but FUCKING HELL--they couldn't have called me to say, "We're coming, start panicking NOW."

So instead, I've been running around the past two hours, frantically dashing up and down stairs, sticking new labels on things, crossing out room numbers, scribbling floor plans.  Then, just as I think I'm starting to get a grip on things, I hear a disembodied voice say, "Crack...uh...that's lunch.  Lock up the dollies in the main room and take an hour...crack."  Lunch at 11:00 am.

Should have got a bigger coffee.

I have been working since 8:00 am today.  If this keeps up, I will have put in an 8-hour day!   That is outrageous--I did not take this job to spend my days working.  Damn it!!  I need some down time.  I spent all morning pushing paperwork to get summer GTA's and lecturers paid.  As if that weren't bad enough, I then went down to their offices and discovered that most of them have made no effort to get ready for the impending doom move. 

Here in a mere two weeks, the GTA's will all be moving out of their scary, dark, dank basement offices into dark, abysmal offices on the second floor with the rest of the department.  For weeks I've been nagging them about getting everything packed.  Everything.  Today, I go into offices and find desk drawers full of crap, filing cabinets full of files, piles of books all over the place.  Now I'll have to go through every office and make sure things are ready to go.  Shiftless little fuckers.  Maybe their payroll paperwork won't get turned in on time.  The good news: I've now found a system to decide who ends up in the tiny, cell-like office right next to the elevators.  Ha-ah.  Should have cleaned out your desks.

Plus I'm still wasting way too much time on the phone trying to order a piece of audio-visual equipment.  Still, no one will return my calls.  My last message went like this: "This is Redzilla, from the University.  This is my 5th phone call this week.  I really need to receive a written quote as soon as possible.  If I don't get it by noon on Friday, I'm going to assume you don't want my $2,000 and call someone else."  Jerk.  I swear, if he were here, I would stab him in the jugular with a ballpoint pen.

I am in a dangerous mood.

Redzilla_tokyo

Relocation update:
At long last, the moving process is winding down. We've almost completely moved into our house in Lawrence, and after spending every evening and weekend in September either getting ready to move or moving, I am back to the old blog.

Oh, and I'm actually posting at work, so that helps. I figure, I haven't started posting nasty remarks about my new coworkers yet, so I can still blog from work. For those of you who were tuning in for the madness of the Church of the Valet, don't worry. I'll have a guest correspondent who still works there to keep us up on the latest stupidity being done in Jesus' name.

And now, without further ado...on to the real blog post.

I haven't started missing Florida, but then it's still in the 80's around here. Assuming global warming hasn't cancelled winter in Kansas just yet, I expect to miss Tampa as soon as the first flake of snow hits the ground.

In the meantime, I'm trying to puzzle out how to survive in Olathe, Kansas. Hopefully, I won't be living here long, but I'm here now. The Land of the Beautiful Parking Lot. It's not a joke. Olathe (and Overland Park and Lenexa and all the other sub-sub-suburbs of Kansas City) has acres of lovely parking lots. Rolling green hills, lush trees, plump shrubberies, all weaving in and out of parking spaces. At first glance, it seems nice.

Then you realize that it's the suburban equivalent of a drive-thru park.

Hubby and I went to the GIANT Cabela's store yesterday. My parents wanted to buy a gunsafe to hold their 3 or 4 dozen guns. (Did I mention that they're native Kansans? They believe in guns.)

Prior to buying the safe, we stopped off to eat lunch in the Cabela's complex--a massive strip mall emplacement of a dozen or so box stores and chain restaurants. There were no parking spaces in the lot nearest our chosen restaurant, so we drove on to the nearest parking lot with available spaces. As we were hiking back to the restaurant, I came to the conclusion that we had broken some sort of unspoken suburban law. We weren't supposed to be walking anywhere. The fact that there were no sidewalks connecting any of the parking lots should have been the first hint--we had to hike through grassy medians and rows of shrubs. The second clear hint were the vultures. All over the original parking lot we'd abandoned, people in SUV's hovered, waiting for someone to leave.

In the Land of Beautiful Parking Lot, you don't walk. If you walk, the terrorists have already won.

After lunch, we went on to Cabela's, and there hubby and I made a quiet and solemn pact that we would not ever allow ourselves to become part of that over-fed, under-informed, faux-redneck suburban mass, yearning to find the closest parking space and buy at discount.

resampled_20051130-icon-leader.jpg

There it is...Canada just voted in a Conservative Government. It hurts, especially I'm sure for those foolhardy Americans who were thinking they could just run away from the pain of fascism in America.

Granted, Canadians haven't completely handed over power to a massive Conservative machine standing at the ready to destroy every social support system in the country. That's America.

Plus, the Canadian idea of a Conservative Party is...frankly a hell of a lot less terrifying than the American idea. Canadian Conservatives don't really give the impression of being religious nutjobs who hate women and freedom. When the words "choice" and "families" come up in Canadian Conservatism, it's not the opening salvo of "why women can't be trusted to figure out if they're fit to bear children." All the same, Canada has just elected a pro-America government. It pains me to say it, but that isn't as attractive a prospect as it ought to be. When America=the Bush Family Evil Empire, you want as many anti-American friends as you can find.

Of course, now I've done it: put the phrase anti-American in my blog. (Hi, President Bush! Hey, how did you like yesterday's blog entry with the little pic of Janet Jackson's funbag? You want I should do more of that?)

For those of you who were in fact fantasizing or plotting or considering fleeing to Canada to get away from the catastrophe in America, let this be a lesson to you! Don't run away from horror in your homeland. If everybody did that, where would we be? You have to stay and fight, you damned sissies! What if George Washington had decided to cut and run when things got hairy with King George? What if Tom Paine had decided he'd rather just move somewhere else? What if-aw, fuck. Now I'm just giving you a homecoming pep talk. What I'm saying is: I hate cowardly emigration. I'm sick as hell about what's happening in this country, but you know what I'm thinking of doing? Moving back to Kansas to fight. Bring on the spirit of John Brown. We have to stay and put things right.

brown_john.jpg