In The Works, Part I

Spring semester: day sixty-one
Tax Day

Day sixty-one. Oh yes, the home stretch. I can see the light.

My past few days have been, understandably, pretty busy. On Saturday, I cleaned out the garage (or most of it, anyhow). On Sunday, Daisy came down in the afternoon, we spent a little time together, and then she passed out for about twelve hours. Yesterday we spent the day together doing the shopping that needed to be done, and then went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Today, Daisy goes home and I go back to work for my normal week of teaching, starting with my abysmally long day that I'll be out of the house for 12+ hours.

Ironically, while Daisy has slept well while she's been here, I really haven't -- her coming down basically in the middle of my weekend (instead of in the middle of my work week when she normally does) threw off my sleeping schedule big time. This isn't her fault, of course, as she starts her new position at her company tomorrow, but the weekend is generally the only time I can really get the rest I need, can sleep on my own schedule when I'm tired, and get up when I want to in order to do what I need to do. This weekend was very different for me, as it basically afforded me no real downtime -- I graded papers and did lesson-planning stuff on Friday, I cleaned the garage on Saturday, I cleaned the house as much as I could on Sunday before she arrived, and yesterday we were out and about all day to the point where I couldn't even go to bed until 10PM.

As most of you know, on Monday nights I usually go to bed before 6 so that I can sleep the whole night through and be rested and alert enough all day to be out of the house for over twelve hours, teaching two classes on each end of my day on two different campuses.

Eh. I'll manage.

Daisy got up with me this morning and ate some cereal before going back to bed a little while ago. I'll wake her in about an hour, as she plans to leave when I do (since I'm going to be gone all day/night anyhow, there's no point for her to stick around here needlessly).

The weather got cold. Very cold. On Saturday, it was 88 degrees. No, that's not a typo. It was actually 88 degrees. When I got up on Sunday, it was 75. And then it stormed, with pea-sized hail out of the blue, and rapidly got colder. By the time Daisy got here on Sunday afternoon, it was below 50. By the time I went to bed on Sunday night (eh, 4AM or so?) it was below 40. Yesterday morning when we got up there was half an inch of snow on the ground and on our cars.

No, I'm not making this up. Welcome to Kansas.

The snow melted off by yesterday afternoon and it was actually somewhat pleasant yesterday, but pretty windy. Right now it's 25 in Newton -- colder here than it's been in weeks. I had to turn on the furnace again yesterday, regrettably, because while the house holds warmth well most of the time, it doesn't hold it well enough to where it won't be in the 40s in the basement bedroom if I didn't turn it on. And, of course, as I already packed and put away the electric blanket and most of my winter clothes because temperature drops of over sixty degrees in the span of two days is not supposed to fucking happen, I've been cold and rather unhappy about this change of weather.

The sudden cold snap has wrecked my allergies, too, allergies which were almost completely gone by last week as the weather had basically normalized. Not anymore, oh no.

Anyway.

Most of the garage is clean now; most of it, anyway. There's some stuff I need to clean up and ready for the move, such as a spare bookcase, table, and file cabinet, but most everything else I had no use for was either trashed or recycled. I'm still not done with the garage, though -- again, I only have so much space in my trash/recycling cans every week, and once they were full, I had to stop. I still have the storage room to clean out, which will take a lot less time to clean and empty, and there are some things in the garage which were too large to simply trash last week as I didn't have the room then. That stuff I'll take care of this coming weekend, and then all that will really be left to do is sweep out the garage to get all of the leaves, dust/dirt, and spiderwebs gone from it. Anything left in there that I can't trash will either be sold/given away at the yard sale in three weeks, or it'll be thrown out when I move out.

Daisy got me seventeen boxes from Walmart on her way down here this weekend, as well.

"That should be enough, right?" she asked, in reference to those boxes being all I needed to move everything with.

I laughed.

"No, babe, I'll probably need two or three times that to get everything out of this house that I need to keep and move. Seriously."

She gave me a shocked look.

"Not kidding; my clothing and room stuff alone will probably be five of those boxes, easily. Then there's all of the kitchen stuff, living room stuff, spare room stuff, bathroom stuff, pots and pans, dishes and other kitchen stuff, dry food in the cupboard..."

I could've kept going, listing another five or six things/places, but I'm sure she got the point. Once again I stress that Daisy has but a bedroom full of stuff and some stuff in her parents' basement like small furniture and the like to move -- I have an entire house full of stuff that I have to figure out how to organize, pack, and get out of here while still keeping the stuff that I need.

"But some of them are really big boxes," she said.

And she's right, some of them are -- but that doesn't change the fact that I'll need more, and it doesn't change the fact that when we get the moving truck here to get everything out of this house, it will be full. That can't really be avoided. There's only so many things I can throw away, recycle, sell, or donate to charity -- and there's only so much time I have with which to do that. A lot of stuff I can get rid of...a lot of stuff I can't.

"Do we really need to steam-clean the carpets?" she asked.

"...absolutely," I said, "if we want to ensure I get my deposit back."

These carpets have five years' worth of dirt, cat hair, cat vomit, and smoke all in them that a simple vacuuming, even with a good vacuum, will not get out. Everything has to be cleaned; this is a task that will take just as long as it will to pack everything up and move it out.

"Do you think you'll get your full deposit back?" she asked.

"I should get most, if not all of it back," I said. "The landlord and his wife really like me; I pay my rent on time in full, I don't cause any trouble, if there's ever been an issue I needed them to work on or fix, I called them, etc. They've always been really sweet to me. But it's because of that why I want to make sure this house is basically impeccable when I leave it."

Besides, we could use the deposit money -- obviously -- to help pay rent and bills in our new place, and/or cover any outstanding wedding costs.

I wrote Daisy a check for $450 to cover the security and the photographer for the wedding in order to clear that from the list of outstanding expenses; I'll have to put about the same amount on my Discover card in a week or two in order to be able to reserve the moving truck in advance as well. I have the money to pay for this stuff, though that also means that my federal tax refund is now completely gone and used up, used to pay bills, credit cards, pay for groom's party gifts and to write the check to Daisy. I am, essentially, exactly where I was before, plus my paycheck from Friday. This isn't necessarily bad, of course -- I will be getting my state refund soon, after all -- but it hasn't arrived yet. As a plus, though, all of those bills I needed to pay have been paid for the moment, with the exception of my Discover card bill (which will arrive this week) and the electric bill (which will arrive next week).

Today is a medium-difficulty day for me; I don't have a ton to do in my classes, but I do have some stuff. I'm covering an article and a research paper out of my 102 textbook for that class, then going to main campus to teach my nigh 011 class, which involves two short lessons out of the book and conferencing with my students over their papers which are due next week. I surely have enough energy to be able to handle and take care of that stuff, I'm guessing, before I come home tonight and crash out. I'm not sure what Daisy's plans are for when she gets home; she'll get back to Omaha around the middle of my day, and doesn't start her new position at her job until tomorrow evening -- shortly before I leave for my evening 210 class.

At least it's supposed to warm up today -- in the 60s by this afternoon, and 70 or so tomorrow.