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.

Remains of the living room…

Kelly has most of our stuff packed. We’re more or less down to the things we will need in the days before we fly and our first days in Toronto (because we’re arriving before the truck.) While she’s been doing that I’ve been working on my novel, teaching up a storm, and making efforts to find good homes for our passes to the incandescent Open Door Yoga.

The remainder is what we’re calling “camping stuff.” You know the drill. Two plates, two forks, one pot, two towels, a suitcase each of clothes…

… and of course the cats and a mountain of electronics.

Remains of the living room. We are 80% packed. @kellyoyo has loaded almost everything!

If you are local, there is still stuff you could have for free, just for the low low price of coming to get it: there’s a wooden bedside table with one drawer, a quite pretty wooden shelf, a very efficient–if somewhat heavy–Ikea desk with two shelves, a trio of lamps and a couple of plants.

Some of us get evil twins, Buffy gets a perky twin

slayerI’m up to “Intervention” on the Buffy Rewatch.

Plas related to our relocation are coming along. We have firmed up locations and dates for services, arranged some important banking and medical stuff, and acquired a bed. (Our frame is busted and isn’t coming with. Anyone want a pristine queen-sized futon?) Tomorrow the Frog Boxes arrive and we start packing.

I am obsessing over the bird checklist at the Leslie Street Spit. There will be owl photos.

In the midst of this, my mother-in-law is in town, which is super-delightful! We’re cat-sitting for friends for a bunch of days. And we are saying a lot of goodbyes. Holy crap do I know a lot of people in this neighborhood.