Homaha, Part I

So. Here I am.

The internet was installed here this morning. It maybe took an hour's work at most from the cable guy -- he got here earlier than the original expected time, he put it in and turned it on, and then he left. And, miraculously, internet restored.

The move? Well...

I'll say here and now that everything is in the house that was coming into the house, I have put away about 90% of the stuff, I have hooked up all pertinent electronics, and finally, after sleeping here for three nights, the place is beginning to feel more and more like a home. But the road here wasn't easy -- both literally and figuratively. So, I'll start from the beginning. Buckle in, folks. This will be a long one.

When I last left you on Sunday night (with my last post here), we were getting ready to go to bed. We had been told that our U-Haul truck wouldn't be available until noon on Monday, and as much of the stuff had already been packed and readied, we were trying to wear ourselves down as much as possible in order to get decent sleep and be energized for the next three days ahead of us -- days which would be grueling and terrible and deal with. So, upon our return to Kansas that Sunday night, we stopped at Subway. I got a footlong Philly cheesesteak and a Coke.

How much work was it? That -- aside from a handful of almonds, some coffee/soda, and some water -- was my only meal for over 48 hours straight. I didn't sit down and actually eat after Sunday night until about 2AM on Wednesday morning, when we were (finally) done with everything.

Yeah. I'm not kidding.

We picked up the truck at noon on Monday, brought it back up to the house, and loaded it from then until well after dark, busting our asses. The washer and dryer, as well as the bed and bed frame (which we had to disassemble -- and broke -- in the process) were very difficult to load, as were some of the other large boxes and furniture. During the moving of the mattress, Daisy was trying to turn it one way and I was trying to turn it the other, which led me to lunge forward to catch it...and made me bash my face on the downstairs doorjamb, cutting open the bridge of my nose and making it bleed. I also slipped and fell down the interior stairs while carrying a large, heavy box of stuff, and badly injured my bicep/shoulder/etc. For a time I thought I'd pulled it out, then snapped it back into, the socket.

Battle wounds.

By around 10PM we had loaded most of the stuff into the truck, and closed it up for the night...and then spent until 2AM cleaning the house, only getting it partially cleaned (probably, oh, 1/3 cleaned) before we were completely out of energy. This process was expedited by the fact that we couldn't get the steam cleaner to work (as it's the old-school kind that connects to a sink faucet, and we didn't have the right sized adapter), so we just had to say "screw it" and give up on that.

Throughout all of the packing and cleaning, the cats were locked into the downstairs bathroom, where they seemed traumatized by all of the moving, banging, and cleaning noises (vacuums and the like). We basically had to catch them and throw them in there, slamming the door shut quickly, as they aren't exactly fans of being cooped up anywhere, let alone in a tiny little bathroom with some food and litter. I gave them some tuna when we put them in there, but it took them hours to actually eat it, and they were so nervous and frazzled that they pooped on the floor (instead of the pan) in two different places. Poor scared little babies. I could hear them fighting too, on occasion. I would stop by the door every once in a while and tell them that everything was okay, and that I'd let them out soon.

During the packing of the truck, at Daisy's insistence, I'd called my landlord to set up a time for him to come over in the morning to do his final walkthrough and inspection of everything. Daisy also wanted to get out of Newton as early as possible on Tuesday morning, as in doing so we could possibly unload everything that day/night and be done, taking the truck back to drop it off on Wednesday. Well, he wanted to come at 8:30 AM, which was good for Daisy as she wanted to leave Kansas around 9 or so, but was terrible for us overall because it meant we'd get no real sleep whatsoever -- not that we really had anywhere to sleep anyhow as the bed and almost all of the other furniture had already been loaded into the truck. I had an air mattress and two different comforters we left out, and the spare room was the only room that didn't really need to be cleaned and still had some stuff in it, so that's where we chose to go. I inflated the mattress and put the comforters on the floor, and we had two side-by-side makeshift beds. Beds which, of course, weren't comfortable at all, and were even less so after working all goddamned day and night.

Of course, we would only get a few hours' sleep anyway -- because we didn't wrap up our cleaning enough to let the cats out and go to sleep until around 2, and because the landlord was coming by around 8:30, we had to set the alarm for 6 to finish as much cleaning as we could and finish getting everything else on the truck by the time he got there. We wanted to be done, have everything swept out and on the truck, and be ready to go once he was done with his walkthrough.

This was also easier said than done. We were both exhausted, we could barely sleep, the cats were freaked out because everything in the house was gone, so they huddled around us in the spare room all night on our uncomfortable beds and meowed, crawling on top of us trying to make sense of things, but to no real avail. I couldn't really rest at all -- I dozed off for maybe an hour at a time, getting no real REM sleep and no actual rest, just downtime where I wasn't lifting, carrying, or moving anything. There's little that could be done about that.

In the morning, I will say that I was rapidly reaching my "fuck it" point when we resumed cleaning -- the point where I just wanted to say "fuck it, this isn't getting any better than it already is." And to a certain extent, I did reach that point. I rapidly cleaned the cat room out as much as I could, Daisy wiped down the fridge and freezer, and we loaded the last of what needed to be in the truck into the truck just as the landlord arrived at 8:30.

It was an awkward visit, that's for sure. Look, my landlord liked me -- I didn't give him any shit the entire time I lived there, his wife adored me, I always paid my rent on time, and if there was a major issue I was always sure to let him know (on the few times I had to do that, of course). I also (to my knowledge, anyway) never generated any complaints about noise or music or anything along those lines, as I'm sure I would've heard about it if I had. So, he came, he put the "for rent" sign in the un-mowed yard (as I hadn't had time to mow it and I'd also sold the mower at the yard sale to the people across the street), and we went through the house. I also gave him my work list, the list of stuff I'd compiled that needed to be worked on or otherwise fixed, but weren't major issues, and that also included the list of stuff I'd already done to help out. He did tell me that overall, the house looked pretty good, pretty clean...and then he got to the Man Cave -- where I smoked for five years, and despite attempts by both myself and Daisy to scrub down the walls, was still awful -- and asked "what happened in here?"

My response: "uhhhhh...."

Yeah. I totally avoided the question, though it was pretty clear what the answer was. Tobacco. Lots of tobacco happened in there. Five years' worth, in fact.

Overall, the verdict was pretty good (at least I think so, anyway). He told me there would be some charges off my deposit, but insinuated that they wouldn't be major ones. We'll see, of course, when I get what's left of my deposit back in the mail sometime eventually. I told Daisy this afternoon that whatever I got back, I wasn't going to dispute it -- I mean, the house was a wreck in certain spots, and while I did what I could to make it better in the weeks and days before moving out, I would fully understand and accept it if he took a large chunk out of it for repairs and remodeling of certain rooms and spaces, namely my Man Cave. I expect to get at least a decent amount back, I think, though one way or the other it's all behind me now. I mean, literally and figuratively -- I no longer live there.

So we handed over the keys, I shook his hand and we wished each other well, he wished us well on the wedding and marriage, and left. About ten minutes later, once we had the cats situated in their carriers in the back of Daisy's car, I got buckled in and she got into the truck...and we left my former home in Newton behind forever.

What happened next? Well, that's a story for part II.