It was bad enough when I had to move back and forth from college. My whole life had to fit in the back of a van, and worse, it had to fit behind my brother's seat because EVERYONE needed to come help me move in every time without fail. It was enough stuff that you needed x-ray vision to see out the back window.
What was worse was that every time I went off to college, I came back with even more stuff. Somehow as the year progressed, I ended up with more and more little things. Which meant more boxes and bags and cramming things into the van. Quite a few of the crap I hauled back with me was textbook and old homework based, which didn't help.
Overflowing in tests and papers that, let's be honest, no one wants to see again
In short, I embraced the old family tradition of not being able to throw things away. So I'd get home and have to wade through drifts of college paraphernalia to sort out what I needed and what I really should chuck. It probably would've been easier if I just did that before I left school, but hey! Procrastination makes perfect, right?
Yeah, I should know better by now
So now I moved to a new apartment. Actually moved this time, not the half-moving I've been doing for the last two weeks. I have an actual bed, an actual bureau, and all of my stuff in one place again. It is wonderful. I'm no longer running around my apartment looking for things that I already packed up and shifted.
So on Saturday the Great Move began with a text at 8am saying my new bed will be delivered around noon and my dad would be arriving at 11am.
Come talk to me at a more reasonable hour. Like, after 10am
I hauled myself outta bed and caught a cab over to my new apartment with yet another suitcase full of stuff. I got in, emptied every box/bag/suitcase I had brought with me in the last two weeks, and repacked them together to go back to the old apartment. My dad arrived with the bureau I've had since I was little and a bookcase from home. Into the apartment we carried them. The items I knew exactly where they'd go went directly into my room - everything else was dumped into the living room area. Once the bed came, we hopped in the van and drove back to the old apartment.
It was chaos. Absolute chaos.
There were half filled boxes everywhere, the dining room table was buried, large furniture was crowding the hallway, and there was a dad taking apart a loft in the bedroom on his own.
Complicating this was what I will call the Subletter debacle. Basically, a subletter was subletting Roommate A's spot via Roommate B, but no one bothered to communicate with each other. Thus the day of the move, the roommates were annoyed and flustered, and the subletter decided to go on an all day adventure instead of getting her stuff transferred to her new place. All around, just problems.
We worked all day. My dad, my new roommate, and I made three trips back and forth from my new place to my old place, which ended up looking like someone's storage cube even as the old place emptied out.
I have far too much stuff......
Beds, dressers, desks, lamps, food, everything was forcibly removed, fought over, and inevitably moved elsewhere. The old apartment slowly started to show carpeting again, though by this point that thing was dingy and stained and will probably be ripped up, much to the unhappiness of our wallets. Some part of me is still hopeful I'll get some of my deposit back. The rest of me is resigned to the fact that pigs will fly before the complex'll let go of my deposit.
So the old apartment began to turn back into empty walls and empty halls. All that was left were boxes and tired people. Which meant it was a perfect time for a surprise!
You see, it was my dad's birthday last week. I miss not being home for family birthdays - my family lets the birthday person choose what to have for dinner that night, and usually I'm the one that makes their cake. Kinda hard to do that while I'm in Washington and they're in New England. So I stayed up until 3am last Friday to prep a cake for my dad. I even had a mild panic attack because we only had one cake tin and so much Pam, and the first batch stuck. I even mixed the batter in a wok because I didn't have my mixing bowls at the old place anymore.
How's that for lack of baking utensils
While my dad ran out to the car with another bag, I got everyone else to stall him. I fished the cake outta the back of the fridge, cleared off the still-not-moved coffee table, and tried to light it. Sadly, lighting cakes with little lighters is a bad idea, and I burnt my thumb wicked bad on the superheated metal. But hey, removing a fingerprint was worth the look of surprise on my dad's face when he came back in and saw I made a whole cake for him. He had no clue.
After that, things wound down fast. Everything got packed away. We vacuumed the whole place in the dark. The keys got handed in. And that was that. Good riddance.
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