Last night, first night
Jul. 28th, 2014 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterAs I prepared to move out of the Villa Maria house, the internet started getting flaky, so I didn't blog about much in the midst of the packing and cleaning. But there's one thing I want to note for myself - how the process of departing the Villa Maria house differed from the process of arriving.
In the departure, I keep re-living memories of the arrival: broke, absolutely exhausted and disoriented, with an unhappy cat in the cab of the moving truck. My original plan had been to do the first day of driving to Van Horn and then get a cheap motel room, which is what I did. I wasn't sure about day 2, but after consulting the map and the internet in the cheap motel room, I decided that Fredericksburg, TX, looked like a good stopping point. I'd made arrangements to meet up with my new landlord the day after that, in the early afternoon.
When I reached Fredericksburg, I noticed a lot of Oktoberfest-related activities happening. Eventually, I found a suitable motel, and maneuvered the moving truck into their parking lot, and even managed to magically maneuver it into some parking stalls towards the back of the small lot. I went in to the front desk, where I then learned the only room they had available was a king-sized smoking room. I'd forgotten that places still even had smoking rooms. They called around a bit for me, but couldn't track down any other options, so I decided to soldier on and keep looking for things closer to Austin. Now I know that Fredericksburg is a huge weekend destination town for Austinites. Small-town Texas can be very inhospitable to strangers. I suspect DM might agree.
I can't remember how many additional places I checked, but I wound up driving through Austin at around 9 pm (through a traffic jam and through the split freeway section, where I really didn't know what was going on with all that), and then got extremely confused as I approached the junction to highway 290, because there were signs about toll roads all over the place and I did not have any cash whatsoever to pay for tolls. Eventually I pulled off and called![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scrottie, who helped me pinpoint my location and confirmed the (non-toll) route, and I continued on. I tried stopping several additional places to spend the night, but kept hearing the phrase, "Bastrop fire,"
Bad news: a big section got eaten here. Sigh. Begin replacement text section.
I didn't know what the Bastrop fire was, at that point, or that wildfires of that sort are rare in this part of Texas. Eventually, I pulled over in a parking lot and attempted to get a couple of hours of sleep in the cab, propped against some pillows. Then in the early dawn, I kept going.
When I reached Bryan, I managed to find the new house on Villa Maria fairly easily, and eventually got the moving truck into the driveway. After a quick walk around the outside of the house, I determined that my best option would be to pull out my sleeping bag and sleeping pad, to try and get a few more hours of sleep on the front porch. While I tried to sleep, the Sunday morning church traffic flowed, then ebbed. Eventually, I had to pee, so I walked down the road to a convenience store, where I bought a bottle of chocolate milk and used a dilapidated restroom.
I managed to get electricity and water turned on fairly quickly, but gas took a couple of extra days, so I didn't have any way to use the gas stove, and had only cold water for showers. When the gas man finally showed up, I learned that he hadn't turned on the gas line to the neighboring house because he'd found leaks. The refrigerator was an ancient, rusted-out hunk of metal. There were cigarette butts and bottle caps strewn around the front and back landings. The grass was dead.
I wanted to return the moving truck expediently, but I didn't know anyone in town, so soon thereafter I had to set about unloading all of my belongings by myself - first the cat and the leafcutter ants, then the boxes and boxes. I didn't have a couch when I moved in, so for a very long time, the living room looked like the dwelling of a schizophrenic, with two chairs placed aimlessly that didn't face each other. I didn't have a dining room table, so the small Paris cafe table sat in the middle of the dining room. I didn't have a desk, so I turned the front room into an office of sorts, with boxes of miscellaneous office supplies stacked around. Pots and pans lived on the floor in the empty space next to the stove. All the windows were covered by cheap blinds, which meant the lights from car headlights would shine in through the bedroom window at night, whenever cars turned down the side street towards Villa Maria. I couldn't afford the internet, either, so it's strangely hilarious to have it act all flakey just as I move out. I never liked you, "Suddenly Disconnected" ISP.
No bookshelf, either - I'm still kicking myself for selling the solid-wood bookshelf back to another graduate student in Arizona.
When it came time to move out, I kept the door-desk I built from a door thatscrottie
End replacement text section.
and I salvaged during his first visit. I kept the dining room table-door, too. I kept the three-drawer filing cabinet and the loveseat from the Bryan Habitat Re-Store. I kept the pot rack, and the ridiculously cheap Ikea coffee table, and the beautiful cedar chest picked up at an estate sale. I kept the particle board bookshelf given to me by a friend, even though I want to replace it with another real wood one, eventually.
I still have the 55-gallon plastic blue barrel that friends gave me for a compost bin. It didn't work as originally intended (too anaerobic), but serves some functions. I also still have Mr. Pushy. But I gave away the Kitchen Thing I built to hold pots and pans, to my new housemates, who can use it as a workbench. I know I can build another in a weekend, if I need to. I still have the same twin bed I bought at the beginning of my second year of grad school. It is old and tired now, and needs to be replaced. I threw away its mattress pad, to force myself to get a replacement.
I woke up last night in the comfortable new bed, wondering about the location of certain items. I don't know where my purple lap quilt wound up - the one that LM gave to me. I wasn't sure about whether I'd managed to set aside the hardware for the pet gate, which I might want to use as an aid in the animal negotiations, but I found it this morning. I suspect I may have accidentally packed two of my bras in the pod, which means it's time to go bra-shopping, but I should probably go bra-shopping anyway.
None of the lamps wound up in the pod, other than the two jellyfish lamps, so I have a lot of extra lamps. I got the wire shelf to fit, but the black plastic shelf that scrottie abandoned wouldn't fit - it will go into J and K's garage for added storage space. The army ant didn't fit, either. There are a half-dozen kitchen items that I consider indispensable that J and K don't own or use, so I've already pulled them back out.
Fridge aggregation went pretty smoothly, although there are now three different kinds of Better Than Bullion in there, and three kinds of yogurt. Sometime soon I will get J to help me come up with a "use it up" inventory for this fridge, because he has also been the recent recipient of somebody else's unwanted extra kitchen items, and is reluctant to just throw things away. I'm also going to make him read Worms Eat My Garbage, and then I will build him a worm bin bench. Maybe after we get the garage all sorted out - we need to create storage capacity for 10 bicycles in there.
I think I will feel better by next weekend. I'm already starting to feel better. This new living arrangement comes with its own set of chores, but it also comes with a totally different household structure - other working people who leave for work promptly in the mornings, after letting the dog out, drinking coffee, and watering the plants, and who come home and go on bike rides and cook in the evenings.
In the departure, I keep re-living memories of the arrival: broke, absolutely exhausted and disoriented, with an unhappy cat in the cab of the moving truck. My original plan had been to do the first day of driving to Van Horn and then get a cheap motel room, which is what I did. I wasn't sure about day 2, but after consulting the map and the internet in the cheap motel room, I decided that Fredericksburg, TX, looked like a good stopping point. I'd made arrangements to meet up with my new landlord the day after that, in the early afternoon.
When I reached Fredericksburg, I noticed a lot of Oktoberfest-related activities happening. Eventually, I found a suitable motel, and maneuvered the moving truck into their parking lot, and even managed to magically maneuver it into some parking stalls towards the back of the small lot. I went in to the front desk, where I then learned the only room they had available was a king-sized smoking room. I'd forgotten that places still even had smoking rooms. They called around a bit for me, but couldn't track down any other options, so I decided to soldier on and keep looking for things closer to Austin. Now I know that Fredericksburg is a huge weekend destination town for Austinites. Small-town Texas can be very inhospitable to strangers. I suspect DM might agree.
I can't remember how many additional places I checked, but I wound up driving through Austin at around 9 pm (through a traffic jam and through the split freeway section, where I really didn't know what was going on with all that), and then got extremely confused as I approached the junction to highway 290, because there were signs about toll roads all over the place and I did not have any cash whatsoever to pay for tolls. Eventually I pulled off and called
scrottie, who helped me pinpoint my location and confirmed the (non-toll) route, and I continued on. I tried stopping several additional places to spend the night, but kept hearing the phrase, "Bastrop fire,"Bad news: a big section got eaten here. Sigh. Begin replacement text section.
I didn't know what the Bastrop fire was, at that point, or that wildfires of that sort are rare in this part of Texas. Eventually, I pulled over in a parking lot and attempted to get a couple of hours of sleep in the cab, propped against some pillows. Then in the early dawn, I kept going.
When I reached Bryan, I managed to find the new house on Villa Maria fairly easily, and eventually got the moving truck into the driveway. After a quick walk around the outside of the house, I determined that my best option would be to pull out my sleeping bag and sleeping pad, to try and get a few more hours of sleep on the front porch. While I tried to sleep, the Sunday morning church traffic flowed, then ebbed. Eventually, I had to pee, so I walked down the road to a convenience store, where I bought a bottle of chocolate milk and used a dilapidated restroom.
I managed to get electricity and water turned on fairly quickly, but gas took a couple of extra days, so I didn't have any way to use the gas stove, and had only cold water for showers. When the gas man finally showed up, I learned that he hadn't turned on the gas line to the neighboring house because he'd found leaks. The refrigerator was an ancient, rusted-out hunk of metal. There were cigarette butts and bottle caps strewn around the front and back landings. The grass was dead.
I wanted to return the moving truck expediently, but I didn't know anyone in town, so soon thereafter I had to set about unloading all of my belongings by myself - first the cat and the leafcutter ants, then the boxes and boxes. I didn't have a couch when I moved in, so for a very long time, the living room looked like the dwelling of a schizophrenic, with two chairs placed aimlessly that didn't face each other. I didn't have a dining room table, so the small Paris cafe table sat in the middle of the dining room. I didn't have a desk, so I turned the front room into an office of sorts, with boxes of miscellaneous office supplies stacked around. Pots and pans lived on the floor in the empty space next to the stove. All the windows were covered by cheap blinds, which meant the lights from car headlights would shine in through the bedroom window at night, whenever cars turned down the side street towards Villa Maria. I couldn't afford the internet, either, so it's strangely hilarious to have it act all flakey just as I move out. I never liked you, "Suddenly Disconnected" ISP.
No bookshelf, either - I'm still kicking myself for selling the solid-wood bookshelf back to another graduate student in Arizona.
When it came time to move out, I kept the door-desk I built from a door that
scrottieEnd replacement text section.
and I salvaged during his first visit. I kept the dining room table-door, too. I kept the three-drawer filing cabinet and the loveseat from the Bryan Habitat Re-Store. I kept the pot rack, and the ridiculously cheap Ikea coffee table, and the beautiful cedar chest picked up at an estate sale. I kept the particle board bookshelf given to me by a friend, even though I want to replace it with another real wood one, eventually.
I still have the 55-gallon plastic blue barrel that friends gave me for a compost bin. It didn't work as originally intended (too anaerobic), but serves some functions. I also still have Mr. Pushy. But I gave away the Kitchen Thing I built to hold pots and pans, to my new housemates, who can use it as a workbench. I know I can build another in a weekend, if I need to. I still have the same twin bed I bought at the beginning of my second year of grad school. It is old and tired now, and needs to be replaced. I threw away its mattress pad, to force myself to get a replacement.
I woke up last night in the comfortable new bed, wondering about the location of certain items. I don't know where my purple lap quilt wound up - the one that LM gave to me. I wasn't sure about whether I'd managed to set aside the hardware for the pet gate, which I might want to use as an aid in the animal negotiations, but I found it this morning. I suspect I may have accidentally packed two of my bras in the pod, which means it's time to go bra-shopping, but I should probably go bra-shopping anyway.
None of the lamps wound up in the pod, other than the two jellyfish lamps, so I have a lot of extra lamps. I got the wire shelf to fit, but the black plastic shelf that scrottie abandoned wouldn't fit - it will go into J and K's garage for added storage space. The army ant didn't fit, either. There are a half-dozen kitchen items that I consider indispensable that J and K don't own or use, so I've already pulled them back out.
Fridge aggregation went pretty smoothly, although there are now three different kinds of Better Than Bullion in there, and three kinds of yogurt. Sometime soon I will get J to help me come up with a "use it up" inventory for this fridge, because he has also been the recent recipient of somebody else's unwanted extra kitchen items, and is reluctant to just throw things away. I'm also going to make him read Worms Eat My Garbage, and then I will build him a worm bin bench. Maybe after we get the garage all sorted out - we need to create storage capacity for 10 bicycles in there.
I think I will feel better by next weekend. I'm already starting to feel better. This new living arrangement comes with its own set of chores, but it also comes with a totally different household structure - other working people who leave for work promptly in the mornings, after letting the dog out, drinking coffee, and watering the plants, and who come home and go on bike rides and cook in the evenings.
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no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 07:31 pm (UTC)The references to scrottie are fine now; I think it was probably a typo that sent LJ's markup parser into la-la land.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 07:43 pm (UTC)Time to try again.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 08:24 pm (UTC)Ever read, or hear of the book, Transitions, by William Bridges? It's also on the "soft" side of things (as I'd noted previously with Coming Home to Eat), but is useful for thinking about the structure of transitions and where people struggle or often get caught.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 10:18 pm (UTC)Something of both, since we moved into our previous place with a professionally-packed truck of stuff and left with only stuff that would fit into a mini-van. There was a fire in between, and most of the stuff in the van was actually donated.
The move in is especially memorable because I drove our car cross country some time after Dïe Überblönde and the truck of stuff arrived -- had work to finish up at my previous job -- and I got sick as a dog during the drive and had to drive through a snowstorm in the Appalachians for good measure. :P
Hadn't heard of the book before, though.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-29 03:07 pm (UTC)My impression with having things burn is that the lost photos are a pretty tough loss, but most of the rest of it is a bit easier to come to terms with, and it all makes a person focus more on relationships than stuff.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-29 03:43 pm (UTC)We never had much attachment to stuff; things are useful for what they can do, not what they are. So, yeah, we walked away from a burning apartment building and concluded we'd be fine with just each other. (I have a tiny amount of sweetness in my heart, and it's all for Dïe Überblönde. :) )