Moving In
Tuesday, July 19th, 2005To say that this past weekend was eventful is to fall prey to the worst form of understatement imaginable. Actually, the true depth of the understatement really isn’t even at all imaginable. Much like the visage of Cthulhu or the name of God, knowledge of such a thing would irrevocably break your tiny mortal mind in the most tragic (and possibly homoerotic) of ways.
On Friday, we bade farewell to a dear friend of mine. I decided to throw out my old floor model record player (with built-in eight-track cassette player!) that I bought at a yard sale in high school for the paltry sum of just ten dollars. The monstrosity was solid wood, heavy enough to fear moving it up stairs, and absolutely of no imaginable practical value to my household. Nonetheless I loved it with a love that was more than a love, and it nearly broke my heart to actually say goodbye to the old girl that had enabled me to listen to more Zipgun and Green Day than even the most dedicated of little alternapunk should.
Saturday was the day that never ended. If I wanted a fair approximation of how Sisyphus must feel, I would just have to figure out how to create a feedback loop of infinite Saturdays such as I managed to live through. Allyson and I moved nearly everything in our apartment over to the new place. We have enough furniture and random crap to fill a fourteen-foot U-Haul truck twice, and we had to move that stuff up to a third-floor apartment. We broke apart both of our desks, and I assure you that when the particleboard on my desk snapped with just one more set of eight steps to maneuver it up, I unleashed some words that would make Satan himself blush and look away uncomfortably even though I never really liked my desk particularly. God apparently doesn’t mind such language because he clearly came to the rescue in the form of a phone call from my mother. She mentioned that they were in town and asked if we needed any help. I got my dad to help me take up our entertainment center in one piece, saving us from having to replace yet another piece of furniture. I owe the man some chocolate.
Upon deciding to head out for a bite to eat on Saturday, my car unleashed the most nerve-mangling of screeching noises. Recognizing it for a belt problem, I convinced Allyson to turn the car off, and we made arrangements to have the car towed to Sears the next morning to have them look at it rather than risk screwing the whole thing up by attempting to drive it over to the mall ourselves. Not knowing when we’d have access to a vehicle again and completely yielding to some form of collective insanity, Allyson and I decided to move the rest of our stuff over that night. At several points, after carrying televisions and 50 kg boxes out to the truck, I was in such pain that I had to just sit down on the floor for a bit before I could get up and do the same thing over again. We finished up at three in the morning. And by “finished”, I do mean that we just filled up our new place with boxes that must be unpacked. My knees had stopped working. My feet were throbbing. My freaking nipples were chaffed!
The alarm went off at eight, a scant four hours after we had finally managed to fall into bed, and we immediately rolled into tag team action. I took the U-Haul truck back to the rental place and caught a cab back to our apartment. Meanwhile, Allyson had the car towed to Sears, waited an hour for them to open, and then got the car fixed for twenty-eight dollars. It was just a misaligned belt that had slipped. No need to replace it. Just needed some adjustment. Allyson drove home, and we took a nap.
After said nap, we decided to go get some Italian food. We got into the car and were again greeted by the sound that can only be likened to the mating call of a harpy. We decided to roll the dice and tempt the fates by driving it to Sears. The fates, however, were not amused. We got about ten meters out before the car started smoking and ceased all operation. A scorching hot hour in the Florida sun later, we were on our way to Sears in a tow truck at Sears’ expense. The problem turned out to be our air compressor. You see, it froze and locked, stopping all the important bits of my car to stop turning. Sears (at no charge, mind you) bypassed the air compressor and allowed my car to run without air conditioning. The funny thing is that the car feels like it did five years ago now. It handles beautifully. It’s silent running again. The acceleration is simply beautiful. It’s just hotter than tentacle monster at a schoolgirl’s convention.
Our current plan is to drive our car for a couple more months before trading it in on something new and sexy. My car is ten years old now, and the repair bills are going to just keep building. I figure that we’ve beaten the car companies now. I think that the universe is telling me that it’s time to actually take on a car payment. Right now, we’re pondering either another Corolla or a VW Beetle, but we really haven’t pondered too much at all.
The payoff to all of this madness, however, comes every night when I fall asleep in shorts on top of my covers without even the slightest thought that some murderous arthropod will go vampire on me in my sleep. It comes when I walk from my car to my apartment door and hear nothing but the sound of children playing on a swing many meters in the distance. It comes when I realize that from anywhere in my apartment I have a full wireless signal to both my laptop and my mobile phone. It comes when I decide to cook in my kitchen and even with boxes everywhere find that I have plenty of room to move and prepare delicious food. We might well move out of the state in a year, but for right now, I’m content enough in my apartment to not care about the burning humid Hell that awaits outside my door.
Engraved Invitation to Be Fat
Tonight in my hunger, I exclaimed to Allyson that what I wanted most was an engraved invitation from God himself to just be fat.
-0.77 kg/week with an average daily calorie shortfall of -991 kcal. Not bad at all considering the fact that I was rendered unable to exercise for almost half the week due to the event chronicled above.
