Man, I can't believe it's already November. And it's actually damn cold here in LA right now. It was barely even 60 when I got into my car this morning. I can't turn the heat on in my new apartment because the smoke detectors go off and it smells like something is burning.. they'll fix it in a few days, until then I will have to bundle up.
Moving was a fucking ordeal and a half. Wilson and I began the process on Thursday the 30th with packing (which we did quite well I must say). I woke up on Friday at 6am to finish packing and start cleaning the old apartment. We went down to the new place just after 9 to sign the lease and get the keys. We then proceeded to the U-haul to pick up the truck.
This is where things started to go wrong. There was no truck for us. The bitch who rented it the day before hadnt returned it, and the shady Armenian U-haul dealer didnt have anything else for us. By noon we had found another truck, a smaller 10' one.
So we spent the next while loading the truck with boxes. The hand truck and dolly combo we rented ended up proving to be great. The problem now was that the Comcast people were due to come between 1 and 5, and we were way behind loading. So I asked Kevin to sit in my empty apartment until they came. I went down to meet him and give him the necessary cash to give to Comcast. Grabbed some grub on the way back to the old apartment.
We spent the next few hours loading the truck. We were quickly approaching 5pm, our supposed deadline to move out, and we had so much left to do.
We finished off the load by putting in the beds.. all three of them. Only once we had loaded Stone's bed did we realise how stupid it was to have loaded his bed (since he wasnt around, and his bed was not supposed to go to my new apartment). We drove down to unload the load, and left Stone's bed in the truck. Stone eventually met us at the place and helped us do some unloading.
Oh ya, did I mention it was raining most of the time? After 100+ days of no rain, the skies pick my moving day to start doing something.
The rain was getting heavier, and the kids were trick-or-treating. The unload process went sort of quick, but not really fast enough. On the way back to the old apartment, we stopped by Stone's new apartment to drop off his bed.. he didnt have keys to the place yet, so we left it in the courtyard there.
By 6 or 7, we were back at the old apartment..... only to realise that we had left the hand truck and dolly in the god damn new apartment. No big deal right? We're only moving 6 miles away... but it's Halloween and I am moving to Hollywood, the place to be on Halloween. Well, it took me 2 hours to make the 12-15 mile round trip through the pouring rain. During this, the cable guy called to say he had left equipment at the new apartment and hadnt finished installing things because we had no tv there at the time.. he wanted to come back the next morning at 10am.
Our second load consisted of the more oddly shaped crap, and unfortunately it looked like we had to make a third load because our two refrigerators wouldnt fit with all the other stuff.. bummer. When we finished loading the bulk of Wilson's stuff, we went to my old apartment to find that the electricity was off. Now we had no light, until we could bring a power cable back from the new apartment. It was not fun.
The second load went sort of quick. Stone left at this point to go move his bed into his apartment. We began moving the fridges down to get ready to load. The third load didnt have much stuff.. but the rain was a problem. It was just pouring down, so we lost a lot of time waiting for dry patches to get electronics and the like into the truck.
By 6am we had the last of it loaded, and we had vacuumed and such at the old place. We had everything, including the fridges, unloaded by 7:30am. We had the U-haul returned by 8am, and after a bit of a breakfast we were back at the apartment by 9. Wilson soon fell asleep, and I began re-arranging the mess of boxes in the living room while I waited for the cable guy.
10 o'clock went by, and I began calling the number I had for him 45 minutes later. The person on the other end of the phone was the cable guy's friend.. he tried to get ahold of the cable guy for me. Eventually, after almost dozing off, the guy arrived and set up the cable. By now it was past noon, and I was dead tired.. I crashed and woke up six hours later..
My hands are sort of swollen, and my skin was rubbed raw.. Wilson found some old raspberry body lotion in his bathroom, so that helped a bit.. I got a good amount of sleep last night (went to bed by 1am), so I'm sort of rested right now.. but my body is still sore from the 28 hours of physical labour.
Now.. should I have hired movers? It would have cost over $750 probably, so with that money we saved we can do something way more fun. Next time, if I have real furniture (like couches and crap), I will have to hire movers I think..
Anyway, now it's sunday and I should do some unpacking.. especially since I have a bit of a project to complete early this week. I'll post about that when that's done.