The Last Day

Today is our last day in this apartment.

Tomorrow, the movers come. By tomorrow evening, all our furniture will be in the new place. We will still have plenty more things to move, of course. Right now, we are just concentrating on getting everything off or out of the furniture.

And honestly, I am a bit worried about that. It’s almost 4 pm, and there are a lot of things still on or in bits of furniture. I offered to help Joe pack stuff up, but he did not seem enthused about the idea.

So I guess I am on the sidelines this time. All I can do is take care of the last few bits of packing I have left, and hope that it all sorts itself out.

I can’t help but worry about it. I am a worrier by nature. I fret. Not about everything, just about the big stuff when there is big stuff going down.

I suppose if I had my way, I would have this whole move organized into efficient work units and people would be loading stuff here and unloading stuff there nearly constantly. I would have it all clicking over in a way that gets things done in an orderly way and it would all seem easy and fun.

But I am not in charge, and with these damned earaches, I wouldn’t be doing a very good job if I was. Nothing like chronic pain to drain your mental resources and make it hard to be together and competent and all that good stuff.

I may decide to sneakily just start packing things up and see if anyone actually stops me. Chance are they won’t, and I can move from fretting to helping.

I will miss this place. I will certainly miss this space. Life will be a good deal more compact in the new place and that will take some getting used to.

But I have been looking around at all our stuff, and I am pretty sure that if we just get rid of the stuff that we don’t actually use (like the kitchen table), the amount of real loss will be minimal.

I am glad I got a chance to see the place again last night as we dropped off a few things. The place had shrunk in my neurotic mind and I was beginning to panic about how we could possibly set up a living room type space.

But it will be fine. Possibly a tad cozier than before… we will no longer have a big living room spreading us all out. So we might have to sort out some personal space issues. I imagine the exact living room setup will need fine tuning as we adjust to the new space.

But we will endure, and adapt.

Our new place is in a Strata building, and like I have mentioned before, I have mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, I am not huge on rules and I don’t like fussy little details, so things like a sign commanding residents to wait until the gate closes before driving away (you know, to make sure nobody SNEAKS IN) and informing us that violators will be fined really ruffles my rebel feathers.

Like seriously, do these people think there are waves of homeless people crouched behind bushes just waiting for the first chink in their security armor so they can stream in and immediately start urinating all over everything? What do they seriously think would happen if that sign wasn’t there?

For that matter, what do they think waiting for the gate to close is accomplishing? If someone wanted to get in on foot, us sitting there in the car isn’t going to stop them. They would be through the gate and into the secure parking before we could even react.

It’s just another case of the middle class need to imagine that everyone wants their material possessions, because otherwise they would lose their value.

So that’s one half of the equation. On the other hand, it being a Strata building insures that when things go wrong, they will be fixed promptly and well. It means that we will have a concierge to ask for help with things, a building manager who is polite and attentive, and the sorts of rules and regulations that keep things quiet, clean, and orderly.

I am all for rules and regulations that make things safe and quiet and comfortable and pleasant for everyone. It’s the unnecessary ones that bother me.

So we will see how I adjust. The most likely scenario is that it won’t matter much and I will forget all about the whole Strata issue a week after we move in.

But it’s not impossible that I will have a confrontation with some fussbudget who takes an issue with something or other that is none of their business.

And I would have a lot of trouble remaining reasonable in that situation.

One thing bugging me is that we will not have cable, land line, or Internet when we move in. I reminded Joe to take care of that a bunch of times over the last week or so, but it still hasn’t been done, so we are going to be in a dead zone for who knows how long before we are connected to the world again.

I would have taken care of it myself, but all our services are in Joe’s name. So I kind of lack the authority to transfer them.

It makes me wish that I had never mentioned the idea of getting all three via Telus. That seems to have given Joe the pretense to put the ball in my court.

Well I looked at the Telus website and it seems like we would be paying a lot more. On the other hand, they would give us a free PVR rental and… no shit… a 40 inch flatscreen TV for signing up.

So I don’t know. That’s a pretty good offer.

I guess it really IS my problem.

Oh well. I will talk to you nice people again…. sometime soonish?