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June 27, 2005

Moving, Again

Moving is driving me nuts. It's hot and I'm sitting in a room full of boxes. It's raining. At the moment, I don't feel like I have a home. I'm cranky and pissed off at real estate investors for forcing me to move. I'm mad at brokers for getting a broker fee out of us twice in two years. I'm mad at Derek for no particular reason. I hope this real estate bubble bursts and all the speculators lose lots of money.

I think the problem is that I don't have a knitting project. Plus, all the yarn is moved already so I can't start one and do something mindless for a while.

This evening got off to a promising start. I picked up a pizza on the way home -- I've been craving pizza for weeks -- and we drank soda and ate before packing. Then, stuffed, we packed up glasses and clothes and musical instruments and made two trips to the new place. We're trying to move the breakables ourselves so we don't have to worry about packing them properly for the movers (they're coming Wednesday).

I think the lifting and the two flights of stairs in the new building went a long way toward dampening my mood. Plus, people kept beeping when passing our double-parked car, even though they had plenty of room to pass. And there was a particularly stressful Fresh Direct incident, where the truck just barely squeezed by within about half an inch of the side mirror. Oh, and it was drizzling. And did I mention that it was hot and we were wearing jeans? And our new place feels like it's five miles from Prospect Park or anything familiar.

I'm trying to cheer myself up with purple Kool-Aid. A nagging voice in my head is telling me we should have bought our place.

Which reminds me. I have a whole new plumbing story to tell. On my way down the hall yesterday evening, just as we were about to leave to get dinner and check out our new digs, I felt a drop of something on my foot. I mentioned it to Derek. After inspecting my foot and a damp spot in the luggage in the hallway, we looked up. The lighting fixture was dripping. This has happened once before -- when there's some sort of water-related problem upstairs, the water finds its way to the lights in our hallway. So we postponed dinner, called the building people and the landlord, and enlisted a bucket. Pretty soon we had three buckets -- one under each light -- and had noticed that the water was kind of ... brown. It didn't smell bad, though, so we figured it was probably just dirty water from a burst pipe.

The drip was steady, but slow, so we eventually went out for dinner. I bit my nails the entire time and kept imagining all my books getting soaked. When we came back, it was still dripping slowly but it smelled faintly (to me anyway -- and my sense of smell is acute) like I imagine that bathroom smelling in that scene in Pulp Fiction Trainspotting (you know the scene I mean?). It was basically raining sewage in our hallway.

It dripped on and off through the night. We shut ourselves up in our air-conditioned (and non-smelly) bedroom and tried not to think about how "opening up the ceiling" -- one of the possibilities our neighbor had suggested -- would affect our move. I mean, the timing of this particular plumbing adventure -- and we've had four this year by my count -- could not have been worse. Well, unless the buyers decide they don't want the place as a result and we can snap it up for half the price (riiiiight).

We still have the buckets out but at the moment there's no dripping, which is why we were able to do the moving we did tonight. The landlord has been coordinating with the owners of the apartments above us, so maybe they worked something out. We're thinking the dripping has to do with someone's toilet upstairs. Hopefully this was a fluke and we can get rid of the obstacle course of buckets in the hall before the movers show up. It would really suck if we had to rig some sort of tarp over there or have emergency plumbers milling around.

Okay, maybe that wasn't as exciting as the clog, or the time I used dish soap for the dishwasher and ended up with four inches of white soap bubbles in the kitchen (exactly like that I Love Lucy episode). It made us feel a tiny bit better about moving and not buying -- I mean, it'll be nice to live on the top floor, without any chance of a flood from someone else's toilet coming through our ceiling. And on a clear day we'll be able to see the Empire State building from our bedroom window. If we squint. So it's not all that bad.

Posted by csageday at June 27, 2005 10:36 PM

Comments

Posted by: Joanna at June 28, 2005 01:00 PM

Posted by: Cindy at June 28, 2005 01:46 PM

Posted by: Joanna at June 28, 2005 02:47 PM