An Update on the Great Move of 2004

For those friends out there who are kind enough to check out my blog on a regular basis, I'm sorry that I have not been a regular poster as of late. We finally moved to our place in Chicago, and we won't have a reliable internet hook-up for a week or so. I am actually posting today from my folks' place in Kenosha, after enjoying a very wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends. Yesterday our friends Dan and Heb had a baby "meet and greet" for their new daughter, Julia, and we couldn't believe how big she had gotten already! We also got to visit with our friends Carrie and Erik and meet their daughter, Hazel, who is by far the smiliest little creature I have ever met---an absolute delight. I also caught up with some dear theater friends of mine---people who helped to make my childhood joyful when it seemed that junior high was going to suck it into the abyss. It was a great day.

So, to clear things up about our housing situation, we now HAVE a condo. We closed on the sale on the 17th, and have been slowly but surely unpacking boxes and settling in. It's a fantastic place, but needs some work, and we're putting our time and money into the most important things. Like, let's say, the fridge. It was pretty smelly and dirty when we took over the place (the previous owner was still moving his stuff out during walkthrough, so cleaning didn't really happen before the turnover), so Mike committed two-thirds of a day to getting it into shape. The next day, as he walked up the three flights of stairs to our place with our first groceries, the doors fell off the fridge. That's right, the doors fell off. It was upsetting at first, but then we just laughed. I mean, that's what we do. We buy houses, then systematically replace every appliance within them. It's good times.

We don't have a dishwasher, and our stove is roughly 30 years old and leaking a bit. How do we know it's leaking? Well, nothing has blown up yet, but we often say, "do you smell gas? I smell gas in this kitchen?" Again, good times.

So last week, I pulled an extreme home makeover, walked into Sears, and bought a fridge, a stove, and a dishwasher. Tomorrow they arrive and the fridge and stove are installed, and Tuesday a guy comes to cut a place for the dishwasher in our cabinets and install it along with a garbage disposal. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a functional kitchen soon.

We have a great new couch and chair thanks to my folks, and my brother is coming to paint at the close of the week. In addition, both sets of parents came up and cleaned and caulked and worked their behinds off to make the place nice. It's been great.

Our only great struggle right now is for cable. The cable folks have come twice, and while they've figured out how the cable gets from our unit to the basement, they can't seem to get our cable connection in our basement to the input in our alley. Tomorrow they return, and our maintenance guy, Adolph, is going to open up the other sections of the basement in hopes that cable will be ours.

The whole cable debacle has been interesting, because apparently, we have loads of neighbors who say that they don't have cable and don't watch much television. Well, that's great. I'm glad all the University of Chicago intellectuals out there are beyond programming that's not PBS, but that's not me. Call me shallow. Call me vapid. Call me devoid of a long attention span or an appreciation for finer culture. I want my cable television. I want my Bravo, I want my A&E, I even want an occasional Saturday of Real World/Road Rules Challenge marathons on MTV. So, if I have to go to our condo association and ask that they allow us to sling our cable across the roof tops in time for Dancer and Prancer to use the cables as breaks (much like fighter jets use cables on aircraft carriers), I'm going to do it. All I want for Christmas is eight million channels, plus a small dose of HBO.

I'm heading back to DC in a week to help out my old company through a crunch, and I'm really looking forward to it. Should be a great time seeing friends, and I haven't gotten to do any design in a long time, which will make it fun.

So, that's the update for now. More will come soon.