still alive!

And still no pictures, because I have yet to upload them from the iBook. The last few days have been a little bit hairier than expected. The original plan had been this:

Wednesday: paint everything we can.
Thursday: finish packing everything.
Friday: 8:30 am: (before rush hour) Pierre drops me and the cats off at the new house.
10 am to noon: piano movers transport the piano.
1 pm to 4 or 5 pm: Regular movers transport everything else.
Around 3 pm: Rogers cable/Internet guy shows up to prevent internet withdrawal.

And by 6 o'clock we would be done, in time for a decent dinner, maybe open the champagne (the first thing I put in our refrigerator, three weeks ago!) and revel in our admittedly messy, packed-up house.

That didn't happen. This is what actually happened:

Wednesday:
painted everything we could (as according to plan).

Thursday:
packed, but did not finish. We were so exhausted that we decided that we could move the kitchen ourselves on the weekend. Which turned out to be a half-decent idea, as we were running out of boxes anyhow. This is approximately when the plan started derailing.

Friday:
1) This was the day of the "snow storm," which normally would have made me happy but Friday was Not The Time. Have I ever mentioned that we're moving to a house that sits on a steep hill? We're in the Upper Beaches, and that whole area slopes down to the lake. If you have a Mini, it makes opening the back extra fun.
2) We woke up early and started packing, lost track of time and ... drove to the house in the middle of rush hour, instead of before it. It actually did take a full hour.
3) ... which turned out fine because Pierre didn't have to be back at the apartment for 10 am after all, as the snow made everybody late and the piano movers couldn't make it until noon.
4) ... which was also fine because then the regular movers were late and could not make it to the apartment until closer to 2 pm.
5) On the other hand, the Rogers guy was bright-spanking early and showed up at 11:30 am. Which was really surprising, not because he was early, but because the fact that he was going to show up at all had fallen completely out of my brain. He was also really nice. He did forget to check something utterly crucial to the functioning of the Internet inside our house, but at least he did it affably.

So at this point, it's about 2 pm, the movers have just gotten to the apartment and everything is running slightly later than anticipated, but it was still okay.

And then the movers took about 3 hours to load up the truck, which ended not because we ran out of things, but because they ran out of room in the truck. There were only 2 of them, they weren't terribly experienced, and they had a 16-ft truck, which — dudes. It may have been just a 800-square foot apartment, but it was an 800-square foot apartment with six bookshelves full of books. Do the math.

In the end it took them 8 hours to move us. That's without most of the kitchen. Pierre and I opened the champagne around 9:30 ... and then realized that maybe we should eat dinner. We ordered pizza. They delivered the wrong one, but we ate it anyway. (To the guy who ordered the mystery-meat (Italian sausage?) and sweet onion pizza: that combination was surprisingly good and I am now open to putting sweet onion on more pizzas. I hope you enjoyed our plethora of pepperoni.)

And then this entire weekend was spent packing up the kitchen (and then unpacking it), and cleaning up the old apartment — which was really anticlimatic, and a lot of it was done by Pierre's mother while we went off to watch the gold medal hockey game, for which I will be forever grateful.

(Actually, the packing and then cleaning was really, really exhausting and both Pierre and I are walking zombies. But there's nothing to elaborate on. We packed. Then we cleaned. There was an utterly hilarious moment when Pierre's mother opened her trunk and Pierre's soccer ball fell out of her car and went rolling straight down the steep hill, but she didn't seem as amused.)

So tonight we are hopefully unpacking and/or priming the den, and if I can find a place to plug in the iBook power cable that I found last night, and then locate the USB cable for the camera, I will be able to upload pictures. And a 34-second video of my manly men lifting up a washer through a hole in the floor. Seriously.