Oh my God, it’s finally over.
Yes, the Move ™ is at long, long last complete. Except for all the boxes that still need unpacking…and the furniture that needs arranging…and the subscriptions that need changing…and the jobs that need finding. Other than that, it’s all over.
We’re now in the lovely town of Syracuse, NY. We’ve actually been here since last Friday, but I haven’t been able to go online because our phone lines were actually broken and required servicing, which didn’t get done until just this afternoon. Thus I was able to use time that I would probably have otherwise used for posting to Byzantium’s Shores to actually unpack. Some random thoughts on the move:
:: My God, I own a ton of books. I still have many of my college texts (mostly the ones from my philosophy classes, complete with marginalia scrawled ten years ago). I also have a lot of books that I simply no longer want, so I’m planning to make my first foray into selling things on Ebay sometime in the next month.
:: Moving in the space of a single week does not give one enough time to go through one’s belongings and weed them out. You end up moving everything, and only when you’re unpacking it all do you say, “Hmmm, I still own this? Well, to the dumpster with it!”
:: It’s fairly convenient that roughly every two years or so I start to thinking that we should really get a couch…and then we have to move, which firmly banishes the thought of couch-ownership for another two years. I’m back to my “happy with the papasan chair and the crappy recliner” state of mind.
:: One of the sadder duties in life is trying to explain to one’s three-year-old why she can’t go to the park down the street anymore…because it is now 130 miles down the street.
:: Design flaws are us: The second day after the move I got the TV and VCR hooked up, mainly so I could distract the three-year-old with her Disney movies while we unpacked. She was thrilled when I announced that I had all the wires hooked up, and all I had to do was turn everything on — whereupon I learn that the VCR, when unplugged long enough before being replugged, goes into its handy “setup” mode upon being turned on that first time. The bad part is that to work the setup mode, the remote control is required. And the remote control was still at the bottom of some box, somewhere, someplace. Not only is there no way to work the setup mode with the VCR’s front panel buttons, there is no way to cancel the setup mode — until the setup mode’s second screen, where you can cancel the thing by pressing “Clear” on the remote.
:: Design flaws, part two. Actually, I’m not sure if this is a design flaw, but our phone lines were out of order until today. Yesterday morning, the knob on our new apartment’s front door broke and was inoperable — with all of us inside. So we’re locked in, and we can’t call the maintenance people. We had to wait twenty minutes or so until someone actually wandered by outside, at which point we shouted for them to call the maintenance folks. Ugh. (The maintenance folks, though, arrived within five minutes of our flagging down the neighbor.)
:: Our property is shared by a golf course. So far I’ve counted four golfers who have managed to land their shots on our building’s front lawn, which is not remotely in the same direction as the hole toward which they are theoretically shooting. And I’m sorry, golfers, but I consider the golf cart to be one of the most ridiculous inventions of all time. I watch these guys shoot, return to the cart, put their club away, hop in and drive to the ball’s present location in roughly the same amount of time that I could have walked there in the first place. Unless you’re that pro golfer with the ailment that makes the cart necessary, you don’t need the cart.
:: Good stuff I’ve discovered about Syracuse: the Barnes&Noble here is larger than either of the B&N’s in Buffalo, which surprised me immensely. The main shopping mall, the Carousel Center, is one of the most beautiful malls I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been in a lot of malls). A project is afoot to expand the Carousel Center until it becomes the largest mall in North America, which wouldn’t bother me at all (although I wonder a bit why they’d want to build such a thing in a small town like Syracuse, which is roughly the same size as Cedar Rapids, Iowa). The Buffalo Bills are still on TV here, and to the best of my knowledge there is as yet no Krispy Kreme store in Syracuse. (Believe me, that’s a good thing. Of course, I’ll also consider it a good thing when they get one.)
And, for those dying to know what Syracuse looks like, here’s a photograph of what is apparently the tallest building in the city. The photo links to a site where various images of the city can be found.
