That damned parade is coming ’round again…

In the midst of chaos: Life goes on, except when it doesn’t. Auntie Emm wrote last night to say that my grandmother has had it with petering out slowly and painfully, and has stopped taking food and medicine. I think this is an amazing and right decision on Joan’s part–not that it’s for me to say. But, for myself and for K, ouch.

Long and short of it: I feel much grief already, of course, and expect to be winging it to Saint Albert in a state of woe in the not too distant.

Edited to add the thing I told Ana: One of the dumb move things that is making it harder is that our stuff was, originally, supposed to have arrived last week. If Great Canadian Van Lines had delivered as promised, I would at least have a black dress and the freedom to jet off to Alberta any time I wished. As it is, the stuff hasn’t arrived and Kelly is having a ferociously hellish time getting the mover and the building move-in coordinator on the same page.

She must, at this point, have made twenty phone calls or more trying to get the driver to commit to a time when the elevator’s free. We need to know when the stuff will come so we can know when I might hypothetically go.

Casualties of move: Rumble is very pleased to announce he has finally managed to bust one of our possessions. And as a bonus, it’s a mouse! He knocked it off the desk this morning and now it does not right click.

Speaking of cats, here’s one of the neighbors:
"Worship me, Subcreature!" Quoth a neighborhood cat.

Sugar Sugar Yogi Yogi

A bit of random in this post: The new yoga studio looks like it’s going to work out. We’ve only gone twice, and we miss the little bits of meditate-y spiritual guidance we used to get at Open Door (we miss many things about Open Door) but the two classes at Downward Dog were the right mix of do-able and challenging. It’s not hot yoga, but the small studio there has some ventilation challenges. This is nice for me, as I like a warm room. It’s maybe less nice for K.

Speaking of nice, here are some baby robins I shot yesterday. It was a crummy day, in a way, with bad sandwiches and lots of jerking around from hither to yon, but I wandered into a community garden and scored bigtime.

Last Import-6

Toronto has wind! I am realizing that what passed in B.C. for wind was, you know, not.

Finally, we now have something to sleep on. The Sleep Country guys delivered our bed (the second one, the one we didn’t have to demand a refund on) yesterday, after Kelly paid them a $100 bribe to not drive off when they saw they’d have to wait their turn for the building loading dock.

In addition to lying OMG on a real mattress last night, we slept with artificial rain noise. Our bedroom is right near the stairwell, and what with both elevators being down it means every single person in the building has to tramp past us to get to their home. The building is largely unoccupied, but we needed some white noise. Snuffy recommended a program called Sleepmaker and we set it to play a heavy rainstorm with frequent swells of thunder all the night through.

My Novel II class is going well–I have about nine students now, and they’ve all got pretty intriguing books on the go. They’re disciplined, hardworking, and ask a lot of questions–a dream come true while I bounce through this transition.

More Moving Things to Elevate Your Day

Awesome: One of the friends who has been taking such excellent care of us is the brilliant and thoroughly wonderful Linda Carson (whose Ignite Waterloo talk Art… WTF? is five minutes you’ll never regret.)

Here’s a shot of Linda and Kelly at the Art Gallery of Ontario on our first (failed) attempt to go there and partake of the wonder. Failed, because AGO is closed on Mondays.

My lovely @kellyoyo and beloved friend @lccarson outside AGO, with new friend Henry Miller and my pink backpack.

Problematic: There’s an elevator repairhuman strike ongoing in Ontario. In order to keep our building’s elevators in service, the management company has been running them like old timey elevators, with security guys parked inside to keep the rogue tenants from abusing the hardware. For a week we’ve had to get them summoned, via radio, to come to the ground floor and convey us up to two. But now both elevators are out of service anyway, so I expect they’ll open up a stairwell and allow us to rampage up and down.

Makes you wonder how often elevators do in fact break down, doesn’t it?

The happy bit for us is that we are on the second floor right next to the stairwell. The climbing is negligible and it shouldn’t even be that sucky for our bed delivery guys, Saint Someone Please Let them Come Today, to haul our mattress and boxspring up to the new, cavernous, furniture-free Chez Dua.

The less happy bit is that everyone else will be tramping by too, pretty much along the wall to our bedroom. Said tramping woke Kelly at three last night. We will be looking into a white noise app, I think, to replace the comforting drone of traffic that lulled us to sleep on First Avenue.

The Ugly: It’s not actually all that ugly, but our moving truck hasn’t actually left B.C. yet. Delivery will be a week later than projected by Great Canadian Van Lines, and we shall be camping amid the emptiness for at least another week. I am beginning to question whether we needed to bring anything at all. Surely if I’ve done without all that stuff for this long, it’s not necessary to my health and well-being. What was in all those frogboxes anyway?

What we're taking with us to Toronto. #yyz

Three things about the transition to Toronto

The Awesome: West King Street is so terrific. It’s like having all the awesome of Commercial Drive stretching endlessly in just about every direction, and then you slam into downtown.

The Problematic: So our building is under construction. Okay, noise and dust, who cares. But, actually, our suite’s not quite finished either! We had guys in today replastering the ceiling. During the one stretch of time when I actually had to be home to make important phone calls and send important e-mails, I did it closed up in the bathroom, with le Throne as my office chair and somebody’s sandbox as my desk.

Our building is being constructed around us, day by day.

The rest of the period of plaster-guy exile I spent, with K, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. About which, OMG. It deserves its own entry in the category of Awesome.

The Ugly: The bed that was supposed to be delivered on the 16th? Well, it just wasn’t. It looks as though the situation’s gonna be resolved as of tomorrow–so I won’t say much about it–and we have a temporary workaround to sleep on in the meantime. But we have suffered an epic, faith-in-humanity-shattering customer service fail.

One foot in the door, one foot down the street…

We are 32% moved! Or thereabouts. We are in the new apartment as much as is possible for two women whose bed, purchased courtesy Condobeds, did not arrive when promised. We are staying in an AirB&B down the road as a result–they’re saying they’ll pay, and the bed is due after the long weekend.

The place still pretty much looks like this.
The new apartment awaits the arrival of our stuff... sometime next week.

The kids are adjusting. Rumble got brave comparatively early, but Minnow has only just emerged from behind the dryer. Interestingly, she wedged herself on the kitchen counter between the stove and the fridge, which was where she hunkered down in the old apartment after we took away all the stuff. It’s architecturally familiar!

I gave Rum the equivalent of a bath just now and petted Minnow’s fur with wet hands as much as I could. Double duty–they get more hydration licking the water off, and they get clean.

When we first arrived and I looked at WiFi networks in the building–to access ours using its temporary name and password–I got a brief vanishing glimpse of one named ISIS Mainframe. So now our network is named ODIN Mainframe. We are extremely amused by this.

Umm…. what else? The water wasn’t turned on for the washer and dryer, so some hilarious but undamaging washing machine hijinx ensued before we got the thing working. And today has mostly been an exercise in walking out to places to get things we need and then walking the frack back. Peter Watts helped us out a ton and he is a god. We will be feeding him delicious food as soon as our kitchen arrives.