I've been packing since Monday--although today has been my only full-day effort--and doing so has forced me to confront just how much stuff I have. I have very little real furniture and I'm moving even less, but to make up for it I have, oh, let's see. . . eighteen champagne flutes. An extremely heavy cut-glass punch bowl with fifteen matching cups. An even heavier Underwood typewriter from the 1920s. Probably two dozen purses and a dozen hats. Way too many framed prints and pieces of artwork. And let's not even get started on my files, which include some fifteen years' worth of correspondence and newspaper and magazine articles.
(And here's the worst part about packing: once you're done, then you have to go and unpack!)
Thankfully, however, this back-breaking labor has been interrupted nearly every day, and in ways that make me feel that I'm at least making the most of my final week here. Last weekend Amelia--a college friend whom I don't see nearly enough--was visiting from Other Eastern City and we went out with Bert and Julio on Friday and Saturday, getting to bed around 3 a.m. both nights. Then on Tuesday, after Bob gave me the second greatest haircut of my life (which he promises will last the 10 weeks until I'm back in town for a wedding), HK took me as her date to a schmancy law-firm-sponsored dinner. Mmmm: let's hear it for the chef's tasting menu.
Last night Jonesy and I went to see the new print of Louise Brooks' Pandora's Box, the showing of which featured an awesome live piano player--today I stayed in and packed--tomorrow night HK and I are hosting a joint farewell drinks session--and then Saturday, I'm gone.
[A pause, while Flavia contemplates that statement.]
Well. There's no help for it, so I might as well look forward to it.
7 comments:
Okay, I know moving sucks, and you're leaving a place you love, and that is a sad thing - but I'm just boggling at the champagne flutes and the punch bowl!! Do they get used very often?
NK: I've had the punch bowl for 2.5 years and I've used it twice, which isn't bad! As for the flutes--I've had 6 for a long time, and I do use them occasionally--although generally only two or three at a time. But I've thrown a few New Year's parties, and then for my 30th birthday I was serving (fake) champagne, so I went and bought the other 12.
I should add that these are all totally faux hierlooms--the punch bowl was a $15 eBay steal (including shipping!), the first 6 flutes I liberated from my parents' house, and the remaining 12 flutes (although real crystal & very handsome) I bought at a thrift store for fifty cents apiece.
So, yeah. I guess I have a thing for glassware.
Oh, I've been wanting to see Pandora's Box, but I haven't been able to decide whether it's cooler to see the live piano player, or hear his score on a player piano... good to hear you enjoyed the live performance!
You can never have too many champagne flutes! Just pack them carefully and say a small prayer for their safety. My extremely gorgeous pair of Stuart crystal flutes have survived six moves (none of them done professionally) over the past eleven years, so your flutes will be fine.
Packing is a pain. You never really realize how much stuff you have until you have to pack and then, as you say, unpack! Oh my!
So much sympathy on the packing thing. I agree, with Cats & Dogma, that deploying stuff around the new place is fun, but that wars with my long-time loathing of any task that has involves doing something just to undo it, or vice-versa. I once spent a summer working as a sound technician for an outdoor theater. Every morning I had to lay cable, and every evening I had to coil it up again. The process induced in my a kind of existential dread.
Hope your move went okay/is going okay. We are finally out of the house and my stuff is quasi moved into the new apartment. So nice to have a nice clean place, even if it does have a serious lack of furniture, electronics, dishes, etc. Hopefully talk to you this weekend, though my phone doesn't work in my apartment, I'll have to switch to Verizon which seems to work.
-scr
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