The Move: Part 2

The Big Day

After two agonizing weeks of anticipation, the day was finally upon us. Time to move all of our IKEA furniture and disassemble the "fortress made of boxes", as Mike termed it.

I woke up at 6am, determined to walk to my favorite corner bagel shop and get some sustenance and caffeine for our 7am appointment to sign paperwork. Apparently, I had invented the idea that the place opened at 5am and ended up going to the Plaid Pantry, which is an extremely poor man's Sheetz/7-11. I returned to our studio with mini donuts and machine-sputtered cappuccino, and we headed to meet our building manager.

At 10, we got the U-Haul, and Mike spent the next few hours being a champ at driving it.

So, it turns out I didn't really get any pictures of moving things, since my hands were pretty full the whole time. So instead, here's a picture from our lunch break:

And a picture of 2/3 of the moving team:

And this sighting of Mario:

We managed to get everything done in about 4 hours, including a lunch break. We only had to carry the boxspring and mattress up the six flights of stairs - the couch and TV stand magically fit in the tiny elevator, which was cause for celebration. We followed tradition and unpacked the TV and PS3 first so that we could take a movie break over pizza and cider. We finished moving out of the old place on Sunday and started the arduous task of unpacking...

TO BE CONTINUED

The Move: Part 1

Packing Up

If you've been reading Mike's blog, you already know that we have found a new apartment and are moving in next Saturday. That means that, in the meantime, we are packing. Vaguely related items are going into uniform white bankers' boxes, where they will be irretrievable until every last box is unpacked in the new place. Our tiny studio is slowly being overtaken by towers of these mislabeled boxes - they were lent to us by my boss, who just moved this summer and had been organized enough to label her boxes. We haven't bothered to scratch out her labels and try to categorize the mishmash of items in each box.

We have a growing pile of items to donate: things that have become redundant over the past seven months in our little studio or that won't have a place in our new apartment. One such thing was an old desk of Mike's, which he doesn't entirely need for his laptop and doesn't tend to use as a work surface. We have just returned from a failed attempt to donate this desk to the thrift store two blocks down the street. After a grueling 15 minutes of lugging the thing down the street, navigating the crowded terrain of Portland's absurdly narrow and unkempt sidewalks, this perfectly good desk was deemed too shabby by what is apparently the world's pickiest thrift store. So we lugged it back and placed it next to the dumpster in front of our apartment, hoping some needy soul will find it and give it a good home.

It's remarkable how much stuff we have. We didn't move out here with many things - Mike filled about 1/8 of a moving truck container (most of that space was due to the couch and bed), and I basically filled the trunk area of a minivan. But between wedding gifts and several trips to IKEA for much-needed furniture, we now need to rent a U-Haul and possibly make several trips with it. How do you fill a 300 square foot apartment with that much stuff?

Stay tuned for an update about Saturday and the move itself!

Whoops!

I've fallen woefully behind on updating this blog. Life has been rather busy since my last post, with travel for Thanksgiving and Christmas and lots of year-end projects and events at work.

Now, I can postpone no longer, so it seems time for a year-end wrap-up.

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was marked by a redeye flight to Baltimore and immediate vows to never take such a flight again. Holy cow. Who knew how many parents would opt to take their screaming babies on a plane at 11:30 at night? Don't get me wrong, I feel for the babies ... and the parents might not have had many options, but that was the loudest flight I've ever been on. Long story short, after 15 grueling hours of travel we finally made it to my parents' house. Food, movies, Sean's birthday, more food, more movies. Thanksgiving day was marked by watching the Macy's parade after 4 hours of sleep, preparing my favorite foods with Mom (baked corn!), and Mike killing us all at the family tradition of stating what you're thankful for. He had the poor fortune to go first after never hearing of this tradition before (I forgot about it) and subsequently whipped out a tear-jerking speech.

On Friday, we saw the new Harry Potter movie, then went to the inappropriately-named "Christmas Tree Store", which only had 3 Christmas trees and was a bit like an over-sized Walgreens with a holiday-themed sign. Weird.

Saturday, we drove out to Philadelphia for Thanksgivingston. This is the second year that I've been able to attend the annual event, and the first time that Mike has gotten to join. It was pretty relaxing, full of games, wonderful home-cooked meal, ridiculous conversation, and generally was a great time. PS drove us back to the airport in the morning, where a TSA agent laughed at my luggage and we made it home without a hitch. We rather expected some hitches given the new security measures - we were completely prepared to opt out of the carcinogenic scanners at BWI, which they have but apparently don't use. We faced no long security lines and it seemed like a pretty normal travel day.

Christmas

Well, before we get right into Christmas, let me tell you about work. I had three alumni events in 5 days, the final of which ended at 10pm the night before our flight to Chicago. They all went rather well but I was exhausted from the extra hours and from fighting off a cold for the two weeks leading up to Christmas. We flew in to Chicago on Wednesday morning, hung out with Nate and Dana for an evening and went to Wauconda in the morning. Present wrapping, copious amounts of Rock Band 3 with the entire Armstrong family, dogs, food, Christmas lights, Christmas Eve church service and carols. Fresh "noodles" (the Armstrong traditional holiday dish), containers and containers of sugar cookies. Excellent presents and stocking stuffers. Naps. Hanging out with Mike's childhood friends, who are awesome. I think the only thing that wasn't great was that I got slammed with a head cold on Christmas night. I had planned to go ice skating with Mike but stayed home to sleep instead. The next day I attempted to swallow a Dayquil pill, not realizing how swollen my throat was. Turns out, Mike's pretty good with the Heimlich maneuver. We switched to liquid Dayquil and Nyquil after that.

When it came time to fly back home, we ended up standing in line outside Midway for an hour in line for curbside check-in. The line inside was phenomenally long thanks to the East Coast weather aftermath. Our plane into Denver was delayed an hour and we missed our connection to Portland. The next flight didn't leave for another 7 hours, so we ended up getting home at 11:30pm instead of 2:30pm.

New Year's

I was still sick by the time New Year's Eve rolled around, so we just stayed in, watched movies, made our traditional milkshakes and toasted with some sparkling apple juice at midnight. On Sunday we managed to get out of the apartment and go ice skating at the Lloyd Center.

All-in-all, a rather eventful series of holidays. Now it's back to the daily grind, peppered by such exciting events as a visit from Mom and Mike's graduate school applications. We're also looking to move into a bigger apartment sometime in February or March.

With any luck, I'll be posting more frequently ... call it a New Year resolution, if you will. But if you don't, I won't be as embarrassed if I fail.

Running

I've always hated running just for running's sake. I can trace this hatred back to the first form of

organized sports I ever played. I have vivid memories of practicing with my 8-year-old AYSO soccer team - we ran from the sideline of the field, down a long hill to a pile of grass (seriously, it was just a huge stack of dead grass next to a poorly-seeded soccer field) and back up again. I was always dead last and couldn't breathe for the rest of practice.

Fast forward all the way to early high school years, when I was training for my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Part of the week-long blackbelt test included running 3 miles. I practiced for months to run the requisite number of laps around the parking lot. Most of the time, my stomach would make these weird noises after my training sessions, as if it wanted to collapse on itself. I believe I listened to a lot of Linkin Park and/or Blink-182 to get me through it.

Leap ahead again to 11th grade at Mercersburg. Tennis preseason, my first days as a student at the school, trying to make new friends. 3 laps around the soccer field in 90-degree weather. Let's just say that the entire team regretted my decision to have pasta with red sauce for lunch that day. Later that year, I tried lacrosse and broke my foot when we ran 7 miles over a mountain.

When I got to college and played Ultimate Frisbee, I mostly avoided the distance-running thing. Many of my teammates were doing it for conditioning, but I found the prospect of running laps utterly boring (not to mention possibly embarrassing, as I've been told both that I run like the Terminator and like a gazelle, neither of which were meant in a terribly positive light). Now, give me a disc to run after and I would chase it down with what some have referred to as "freakish" speed for someone of my height. I sort of love sprinting. But I could do that four or five times in a row before I started having flashbacks to that 11th grade tennis incident, because I wasn't conditioning myself for endurance. I considered it a few times but determined that the only way I could get motivated to run would be to have a very convincing recording of a buzzing chainsaw and someone growling "you can run, but you can't hide!" Teammates were on the lookout to snatch the headphones from my ears and tell me that everything was okay.

So with all of this bodily betrayal and public humiliation behind me, why am I suddenly jogging? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I spent my first year out of college doing next to nothing physically, and I suppose that scared me a little. Mike and I have determined to work together to stay (relatively) in shape, and jogging has always been the most obvious option for lack of gym membership. So I tried doing a mile a few weeks ago when Mike was out, just to see how much wind I'd be sucking when it was over. And it wasn't so bad... aside from the two guys who whistled at me as I was on the home stretch. Now Mike and I have jogged together two weeks in a row and are slowly increasing our distance. The prospect of seeing more interesting parts of the city on our jogs is a great incentive to build up endurance. So far we've done 1.2 miles max, hoping to hit 2.5 by the end of December.

And we're avoiding the pasta with red sauce on running days.