Hello Monday

Wrote this a few weeks ago, thought I'd share.

First Thoughts

My body jerks.

Everything swims around me.

Eyesight is a blur.

Strange sounds echo in my ears.

The alarm clock!

Can it be Monday already?

Thanks to SodaHead.com for the great portrait of me waking up!

Dude, Where's My Floor?

I last posted the morning before bringing all the rest of our things from our old apartments. Seemed like the end was in sight. Suddenly I find myself living a real-life episode of Hoarders. There are boxes and bags everywhere I look. Spent an hour last night just finding the sofa! The kitchen table I was so happy to finally be getting over here is completely useless as a table, it is the repository of all the boxes of kitchen things we haven't found the room to put away. Did I mention that although our apartment is really gorgeous (under the boxes anyway) that there is a serious lack of space for all the goodies someone like me wants in their kitchen? We had fooled ourselves into thinking we were organized and on the first few loads had placed things out of the way. Now I have to find space to take everything out of the cabinets and start over. And to make things more interesting, the top half of my china hutch is still in the old Durango at the auto shop where it is being stored. I did find the jar of shelf supports so once that is all done I can actually start putting things on shelves again and out of boxes. Of course, back to the Hoarders theme, I hate to actually throw away all those perfectly good boxes!

Question, why do things we haven't even laid eyes on in 2 years hold such an emotional attachment? You realize they are totally non-essential and that you really have no place to put them. You know they have been gathering dust in boxes all that time and that they will most likely continue to do so, but you just can't toss them into the trash. I thought I had licked that one when I let go of almost everything I had to move to Oregon from Vegas a couple of years ago. Not that it was really an option, I was moving into a 23 ft RV at the time and was trying to move as cheaply as possible. But lo and behold here I am once again with all kinds of stuff. When did I collect it all? Oh well!

On the bright side, my old apartment is completely done. I cleaned the hell out of it and turned in the keys last Thursday. My deposit should arrive the first week of October. We (um, they) still have to finish cleaning their old apartment though and that will take many hours and all the cleaning products I own to accomplish I'm afraid. At least they have until October 6th to finish up, that's when their lease expires. I will consider it a minor miracle if half that deposit is returned!

Wish me luck!

Has It Only Been A Month?

Wow, seems like I posted my last entry a few days ago but the date stamp says it has been over a month. It appears things have gotten a little wibbly wobbly in the last few weeks of my life. No timey wimey though or I'd just use the time travel option to get past all the insanity currently in progress.

A quick recap:

Daughter got a job in Portland. She doesn't drive and can't afford to live in a nice place that's close to the bus line on her own. I have been wanting to move into Portland myself but kept stalling. So, our solution was to move there together (oh yeah, and her live-in boyfriend too, that's fun) and get a nice place between our 2 jobs. (He doesn't have one of those yet)

We finally find a place and start moving things over. Since I am travelling more than usual I decide to get my car serviced a little early, that was on a Monday. The next day my rear driver side tire decides to go naked, not flat, just naked. A lovely trail of black rubber chunks strewn across the freeway behind me. Got that fixed. Wednesday I hear a soft, unusual clicking sound coming from my engine. Again while on the freeway, of course! It proceeds to get louder so I exit the freeway and go to a friend's apartment just down the way. My just serviced radiator has overheated so I'm not too worried. Next day the mechanic tells me it's a blown head-gasket and quotes me a price, higher than the old Durango is worth, to fix it. Since I was already preparing for hundreds of dollars in routine maintenance (front and rear differential, crankcase and transmission service), needed all new tires and had something wrong in the front end causing the tires to wear very unevenly, I decided to add car shopping into the moving mix. All of this to be accomplished on scheduled days off, no vacation days for me. Note: I work 12 hour shifts, so normally these days off are spent doing much less strenuous activities!

I did find a great apartment, a nice little town home in a neat neighborhood. As of today, 95% of our stuff is here and the rest should be here by tonight. Then there is just the cleaning of the 2 old apartments left. And the piles of boxes surrounding me will need to be dealt with too.

Also found a dream car for myself and even got them down to a reasonable price. But as I am currently in the middle of a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, there is no such thing as choosing a car, making a deal and driving away in the little beauty. No! There are forms the dealer has to complete, I forward these to my attorney, she amends my court approved budget and forwards the whole mess to the court who in turn decide if they will allow my new expenditure of $323 a month. Which on the face seems reasonable; however, due to the time it took for all that administrative fun stuff, I had to put out an extra $464 in car rental fees because life doesn't stop because you are without a car. Oh yeah, have to pay to store the Durango indefinitely as well. Since it's on the bankruptcy I can't sell, trade or even scrap the thing until the title is released by the court; possibly 2 yrs from now! But it was all worth it to finally get a non-utilitarian vehicle that I seriously love. I decided it is my 50th birthday present, not a mid-life crisis.

All this is my way of saying I haven't abandoned my blog, just haven't had the extra energy to type!