Limbo

Ok, people, I am here ... but my stuff doesn't get here until Wed afternoon, and I don't get internet hooked up until Thursday afternoon.

Sigh. We'll just have to wait. I tried updating a quick post for you via phone but couldn't get the log in right on that tiny screen and ended up locking the account. So, you'll just have to wait for connectivity for some news. I am in a starbucks right now. I guess the good thing about The Hot Place is that there are many starbuckses. The bad thing is that it is lacking anything outside of the grottiest cheapest fast food chains. I used to reward myself by going out with friends every week or so to a nice restaurant, hopefully local and delicious. Now that doesn't seem to be an option, so I will be cooking at home and then celebrating by cooking more at home.

I guess I should be working on my fall syllabi while waiting for all my boxes of stuff, but I am also seven million different kinds of sick. I hate traveling! And waiting! Argh!

also, I miss my cats, who are here but I am not getting them out of the vet boarding until my furniture is moved in and all the clompy moving people gone. :( Poor kitties.

Oooh!

Oh people, I have found a treasure. I will post some pics when I get somewhere more feasible.

Sheesh! What am I getting myself into?

Oy. And it looks like the whole entire country is having sweaty crappy hot weather, just in time for me to drive across it. Hoo boy.

Will post real info soon, but I am in the middle of packing everything and then cleaning and loading and running amuck.

Packing and Planning Apace!

Hey you lazy guys!You are no help! Why aren't you helping with the packing and the loading and all the other crazy work I have to do?

Yawwwwwwn... sigh. We don't do that. We're cats.

 

You realize, of course, that all this packing means I'm going to pack you guys up too and put you on  planes, right?

?Que????

Did you say ... how many planes are we talkin about, ese? How long will this torment last?

Oh, you don't eeeeeven want to know, kittens. You don't want to know.

Completely inappropriate indulgences

Ok, ok, I know that I should not be spending any extra money and that I should not be adding to my packing piles in any way. But the downside of being trapped inside with not a lot to do and no one around to do anything with (to say nothing of choosing to stay here while they re-sealed the complex's pavement, which effectively trapped me here for about 48 hours), is that I end up looking around on various online shopping sites. And sometimes you find something on the sale page that is just too amazingly cute to pass up:

 

Please ignore all the various mosquito bites and weird peeling patches; my skin gets all nasty with the summer weather and/or summer AC and I hadn't really planned on getting a package and having a photo shoot today.

They are so cute! And they were called "papaya"; you can see it is a bright beachy shiny color. It looks more orange in these pictures and more pinky coral in person.

You can see that they actually coordinate with the bag I bought a month or so back! Which is cute, but doesn't actually go with any of the colors in my current wardrobe really. I have just been saying to hell with it and wearing it with my primary-colored shirts and even with my striped stuff, although it probably clashes horribly.

In sad related shoe news, I tossed about five pairs of flats when I bagged up my clothes. So sad. They were all from about 2010 when all the flats were really popular and had cute funky patterns on them, and I haven't been able to find any stuff as cute since. This means that they were incredibly beat up and coming apart when I tossed them ---- I have never thrown out that many shoes at once before ---- but I hadn't wanted to toss without replacing. I'm sure they looked so shredded and crappy by the end I shouldn't have been going out in them at all, but it is tough for me to throw away the beloved clothing that makes me happy and then I wear it literally to pieces. And then the stuff I don't like gets no wear and tear so it always looks too nice to get rid of. Never say I am not a weird person.

I think I have three or four more pairs to chuck still; I have been wearing the broken flip flops everywhere around the apartment complex (and really, what else should you use when they have re-tarred the whole complex?) and one last crap slip-on pair because I refuse to wear anything with straps or laces through airport security, and my tennis shoes are looking very bad too but they are still holding together well enough for summer moving purposes, I say. It would be more logical to hold off on any replacements after I have moved and replenished my shoe funds, you might say, but I say, oooh, look at this shiny mango-papaya!

Apartment scavenger hunt!

The other day I emailed the leasing office at the new apartment to remind them of something, and they asked if I had filled out the move-in checklist yet. The what? I don't think they had sent it to me yet. Good thing I asked, because the list of things they want me to bring is long and insane. I have never had so many requirements for renting anyplace before. In fact, I think I usually just show up and hand them money. Here's the list, for those of you playing along at home:

- your City of Hot Place resident e-number (I don't even know what this is)
- city gas account number
- eye of newt
- renter's insurance for new address
(minimum 100,000 liability policy required before receiving keys)
- a virgin sacrifice
- copy of vehicle registration and photo of car
- a shrubbery (not too small, not too large, must fit in tiered space with other shrubberies to get a two-level effect with a little path running down the middle)
- photos of pets, labeled (they didn't ask, but I added their vet phone and microchip number)
- remaining move-in funds in cashier's check or money order only. No personal checks at move-in.

Say what????

Is this requiring renter's insurance a thing now? My current place sent out a memo to everyone that in order to be able to renew our leases we would have to provide proof of renter's insurance or pay in to
something they had chosen for us. I found that annoying, and was looking for a cheaper place this summer anyway (before getting the job offer), and I saw that mentioned in several other ads. Harrumph. Yes, I know you really should get renter's insurance; I've just always found that to be a hassle of time and money I didn't really have as a grad student and so relied on luck rather than insurance. Also ---- 100,000 in liability? I think I own maybe ... $5,000 worth of stuff. Maybe 4. It's just weird to have it forced on me as something mandatory.

I don't even know how to go about getting a cashier's check, especially when I have about 3 dollars of money in my bank account. This should be interesting. Guess what I'm going to be dealing with all day on Monday!!!

Lamping

Today I went to a Local Historical Site instead of planning anything further about my trip. It was pretty fun. It was also hot! Whiiiiiiine! Why does it have to be so hot and sweaty?!?

Ok, done with that.

Right now I am procrastinating working on Things by thinking about Other Things (no connection to the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things). Specifically, I am contemplating lamps. I'm just thinking out loud here, so you might want to ignore this post.

Currently in my living room I have a couple of cheap Target lamps, bought to replace the cheap Target lamps that were destroyed in my move out here. I'm figuring, given that track record, that I might as well just pass these along to the other postdoc --- who doesn't need a couple free lamps? --- and replace them once I get to The Hot Place rather that trying to move them.

However, after that point I get thrown into a tizzy of indecision, because styles and colors go through these waves and everything I absolutely love was from about two years ago and is no longer being sold. Le sigh. 

For Christmas my sister bought me this very nice wiggly lamp I had mentioned I liked. And I do like it, although I was sorta mean and complained that she shouldn't have gotten me a lamp with a glass lampshade that I would then have to lug across the country. (I should apologize to her for that.) Anyway, she fished out all the packaging and we mailed it to Postdoc City and it actually made it here just fine! That means it should make it through the move ok. Here it is, being wiggly:

The nice thing about that lamp is that the glass shade makes the room really bright, but diffuses the light in a non-harsh way. The stupid crappy Target lamp I moved downstairs gives off hardly any light in comparison, because it has this dark fabric shade.

Notice the end table. That set of tv tables I bought my junior year of undergrad have been decorating staples for most of my adult life. Heh. They are also my sofa side tables. You can also see the Mossimo for Target bedspread I love. Do the chevrons and the wigglies go together or clash? I am unsure.

I am also unsure about whether it should be my bedside lamp, because, hey, silvery wiggly lamps probably go great with red couches. So do I move it to the living room and get a matching lamp to wiggle on the other side? Do I get a similar-but-not-exact lamp for the other side to do the non-matching eclectic thing? Or do I get two new completely different lamps and leave the wiggly lamp in the bedroom? And if I do that, what style or color or finish would they be? Aiiiiiigh! Too many options!

I am totally overthinking this. But what else do I have to do?

The middle of things

There are many places in America I would like to visit. Unfortunately, they are not in the "crossing-the-middle-of-America" states:

(stolen from a political blog. I would totally color in Texas there too. I have driven through the upper part and it is very empty.)

Now, no offense, people who live in the crossing-the-middle states. There are probably some lovely towns and cities and cute things to see in those places. But, when you need to transport your car from one end of the country to the other and need to cross those states, stopping off in a neat little town or historic site doesn't help with the crossing part, which is long and flat and boring.

Also, it is now July and very hot. And America is full of heat waves and all sorts of nasty traveling weather. Great. Why could I not be given the job offer in April and swoosh outta here as soon as I possibly could in early May??? Sigh.

I was looking around at crossing routes that might take me through some actual interesting scenery and finally decided I was just going to have to go up, up, up, portage my canoe across the Canadian border,* drive along the bottom of Canada and then travel all the way down the West Coast. 

I would kinda like to add to my list of states I have been to, but I also kinda just want to get there, you know? I have been given one piece of advice, to stay off the 80, which kinda sucks as I have previously driven through Kansas (and been bored) and sorta wanted to knock Nebraska off my list. Also, I could go through Wyoming but on inspection of the various tourist web sites for the states, there are actually a lot of things I would like to go visit in that state ---- Grand Tetons! Yellowstone! Cool Rock Formations! ---- but none of them are actually near the 80. In fact, the 80 appears to go through the most boring part of Wyoming of all and if you use a trip like that to count off your 50 states card I think you should get docked points instead. But I have weird rules like that. Airports don't count, for example.

Still don't know. But at least I have managed to force my self to start looking and planning. There are some other things I have to deal with before then ---- like taking a friend to the airport and having the apartment complex be repaved and sealed, which involves all of us not being able to park in here for four days, for example ---- but at least I am not hiding under a rock and avoiding it all any more.

I did plan to go to see Local Tourist Historical Site today, though, and after getting up nice and early in the cool of the day I managed to fall asleep again on the couch with my cats and waste most of the morning. I am clearly not a morning person nor a go-getter traveler. At this rate, it might take me a month to cross the country just because I sleep so late!



*When my sister was a teenager and in Girl Scouts, she did a two-week canoeing trip up along the border that involved portaging the canoes for an entire afternoon along some trail before hitting a navigable part of the river again. I have no clue where this was exactly. It has become family shorthand for any huge and sweaty expenditure of effort. Also, mosquitoes.