can't stop til we get enough

I'm in the new apartment, blogging on my laptop via bluetooth connection to my smartphone since the cable guy doesn't come until tomorrow. And I must say, the new apartment is totally awesome; in the late afternoon, the light is incredible, and so even though there's tons to do and the place is nowhere near put together, it was quite enjoyable to sit for a few moments and simply stare at the walls. Terry bought champagne to celebrate, so we took a champagne break around five p.m., ordered a pizza that came around 7:00pm, and took another break with more champagne then. Then, I forced myself to keep unpacking until ten, took a shower, and am now lazing in my glorious bed and ignoring how much I have left to do to clean up zee log cabin before I can kiss it on the nose and bid it farewell.

The start to the day was rough; I slept about as poorly last night as I ever have, and so even though I could have gotten seven hours of sleep, it felt like much less. But, I successfully got up around 6:15am (shocking, I know), showered, and got most of the stuff done that I wanted to finish before the movers arrived at 8am. They were all super friendly, and the lead guy's mother writes women's fiction, so I gave him my romance card and said she was welcome to contact me. That's the thing with movers - maybe you shouldn't give info to strangers, but they already have your address and your phone number, so what's the harm in giving him my romance email address as well? Besides, he mentioned that he was reading something like his fourteenth novel by Emile Zola, and I have a weakness for guys who are better (or at least differently) read than I am.

sssanyway, the poor bastards had to repack the whole truck because Terry's movers weren't exactly incentivized to economize on space. They filled every square inch of that truck, although we weren't able to get the rocking chair, the patio chairs, or two of Terry's boxes of clothes. Still, they worked wonders, we tipped them well, and then they left, glad that they were not the ones who were going to have to unload the truck and haul all that stuff up 2-4 flights of stairs in the new place (two flights = from the street to the front door, although there's an elevator for the first part of that, which they made use of; then there's another flight from the living room to the bedrooms, and a final flight from the bedrooms to the roof deck).

But, Terry got a call from her movers right after that to confirm the time, and recognized the voice -- and it turns out that, unbeknownest to anyone, we had independently selected the exact same movers, and those poor bastards were on their way to unload us. Ha. They stopped for lunch (as did we, at Joanie's - the staff may have been surprised that I showed up with someone else for once, and that I was completely slovenly today, but they took it in stride), and on the way to the city they dragooned a fourth dude into helping them. Amazingly, they unloaded the entire truck, put together the beds, set everything up, etc., in three hours, which proves yet again that hiring movers is worth every single fucking penny.

What is dubiously worthwhile is paying for a towaway permit; when we got here, every single space in our properly-designated, signed towaway zone was filled. I called SFPD and they sent a parking cop over, who promptly ticketed all of them -- but, the street we live on isn't particularly busy, we were already double parked and unloading without being hampered by the cars, and so I told the parking cop that they wouldn't have to be towed as long as our moving truck wouldn't get a ticket for double parking. He agreed to that, and we weren't harassed at all during the move, so I suppose the cost of the permit was worth it even though it didn't work exactly as intended.

So the movers finished around four, and Terry and I took the truck back to the Uhaul (on one of the sketchiest streets I've seen in the city -- so sketchy I refused to leave my car unattended, so Terry had to go into Uhaul alone), and then came back and started unpacking. All told, I've already unpacked almost all my books. Turns out that unpacking books goes a lot faster if you remember that the goal is to empty boxes, not to organize every book alphabetically by genre. Unpacking the books and my bedding/towels cleared out enough boxes to let me move my desk and file cabinet into the proper positions, which means that I'm equipped to unpack the items that go into those pieces, which means I can make even more progress in the coming days.

But now, I desperately need to sleep; I'm training with Alyssa at 10am, so Terry and I are leaving here around 8:30 to go to the glorious south bay, where she will work out too before we go back to my place and grab another load of stuff. Yay. Goodnight!