Hello, you dear and faithful friends who are still checking this journal. Sorry for the dearth of updates lately. I’ve really wanted to write (or audio post), but I haven’t had the time, or the energy, often both. It’s not that I get off on being withholding — I’ve been running around like crazy for the past few weeks, which I’m sure you all already know or have guessed. We now have only three weeks until the shindig, and there are still loads of details large and small which need to be taken care of (mostly by me, unfortunately). My new students have their first paper due next week, on The Song of Roland (there seems to be an awful lot of cleaving-open of heads on this battlefield… eugh). I have an oral presentation in seminar in two weeks, on a project I’ve only just started (if “started” means “printed out some very vaguely related articles from JSTOR“… which of course I haven’t read yet). Also, we are moving. This is what has taken most of my time this week, even though I am supposed to be working on all those other things as well.
You’d think moving across the street would be less strenuous than regular moving, but I’m not so sure that it is. My body certainly doesn’t think so; I’m bone-weary and sore all over. Today I contact-papered five drawers (this took an hour at least, maybe two… I do not know why this takes so long, but it does), assembled and installed four IKEA wall fixtures, took apart and reassembled the dining table (so I could move it), mopped two floors, pushed the refrigerator from the living room to the kitchen (which involved my running an unnecessarily complicated loop through the back door and front door because I couldn’t push the thing over the door frame from the living-room side), met with the gas man (I had to get up at six-thirty for this, because the time window was 7 to 12 and I had to wait at the new place for him… naturally he arrived at 11.45),
–oh, God bless California Vegan, their delivery guy just came by (it was my favorite guy, too!) and now I have food–
and I moved ten million billion things across the street, in bags, boxes, and my bare hands, and still I’ve hardly made a dent in my things. I am SO TIRED. I was going to take pictures today to show you all my new place, but I simply forgot to bring the camera over during one of my million billion trips and now I’m too exhausted.
I think the reason this is so draining is that I’m trying to arrange and sort as I go, so that once everything is moved over we won’t have to do any unpacking at all and hardly any sorting. Usually what happens when you move, right, is you pack everything into boxes, move all the boxes in one go, and then spend the next six months unpacking a little at a time and not knowing where anything is. I don’t want to do that, plus I don’t know if that’s really an option. The only way to get numerous boxes across the street is to use a dolly, and I don’t have one, and anyway I can’t maneuver a loaded dolly down the flight of stairs from my place; I’d either kill myself or break everything. Or both.
Oh right and you know why else this is so tiring? Because I’M DOING IT SINGLEHANDEDLY. The gods of timing have decided to punish me with this move; Erik’s been completely stressed out and going nuts with work stuff for the past week, and just yesterday things got urgent enough that they needed him back in San Jose to get things ironed out. SO… four o’clock, he’s on the phone with his coworkers. Five o’clock, he’s buying plane tickets. Six-thirty, we’re in the car taking him to the airport. And just like that, moving is now up to me. Well, I don’t have to do all of it, because he’ll be back in a few days — not like I could move the futon by myself anyway, or my six-foot desk — but it certainly does make things a lot harder.
And okay, yes I know I’m not going about this all the most efficient way and there are definitely better ways to do this, but really, this is the easiest way for one person to move her possessions across the street — I just have to pay for it with the sweat of my brow.
And now I am eating way too much, just because I am SO HAPPY that I get to sit down and do anything as calm and normal as eat a plate of hot food. Okay fine a styrofoam take-out container of hot food, whatever.
[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
AHHHHH!!!! Moving singlehandedly!? I have NO idea how you are holding up – I was SO DRAINED when I moved most of our furniture from our second-floor walk-up to the U-Haul – and then into our new place 300 miles away…Ahhhhhh!!!!!!
Hehe… actually this is probably very much like moving stuff from a second-floor walk-up to a U-Haul. 🙂 I’m just lucky to have that second step removed; I only have to move everything once, and then I’m done. None of that driving my crap around. ;b
Thank you for the support though 🙂
*hugs* to you!
oh my poor duckling
Come visit me next weekend and I will make sure you have a hot plate of food in front of you for all your meals.
I guess this is karma getting back at you since you had the whole family to help you move into your apartment in berkeley. :] Wish I could be there to help! So what is your new address? (Um, email me that one. don’t post it. heh 😐 )
hugs and wellwishings,
Shra
Re: oh my poor duckling
Hehe, yes, karma is right. I’ve always had lots of help moving me in to new apartments.
Didn’t I put the new address on the card I sent you? Maybe I didn’t. Okay I will email it to you.
And I do very much want to come visit you on Picnic Day! Don’t know if we’ll be able to though, because the reason we’re going home is to get shindig things taken care of. So it will depend how that goes. But we’ll try. 🙂
*hugs*
[…] having to pay for a lost parking ticket. After Erik had to go out of town during my time of need, I went to the airport to pick him up. I was exhausted from moving. I drove into the parking garage […]