A really half-assed adventure.

On the subject of moving.

It's easy to tell who a good friend is. They're the ones who will willingly help you lug twenty-some boxes of books, plus furniture, plus everything else in your house up a flight or two of stairs that are barely wide enough to accommodate a large man. Thankfully, in this case at least, I'm not a particularly large man. Then again, being big and beefy would help the cause of moving as I summoned the power of Heracles and hurled book laden boxes through the second story window, barely breaking a sweat as I did.

That push-up I did a couple years ago didn't really help as much as I had thought.

Stupid exercise.

Evil and I had been living in a house on the northern side of town, in a peaceful neighborhood on a dead end street for like two years. We were there with a third friend, Zombie-Clone42(here on ZC42). ZC42 is a friend of Evil's from college, they were in the local Renn group together, and after I decided to move down from the great white north they got together and we went in on renting a house together, a 50s era Bungalow made built by a man who didn't know jack about building houses. The walls were a literal three inches thick, interior and exterior. Hell, it took us eighteen months to finally find the one electrical outlet jack in the bathroom. I won't miss the house.

But I do hate moving, and in March ZC42 informed us that she was going to move in with another friend to go back to school - after her beau finally got into his house. That process wasn't easy and pushed back our move from April/May to August. It's rather stressful not knowing where you're going to be and when, but in the grand scheme of things, no big deal.

We got the new place about four days before we were expected to move out of the old. Cutting it close, I know. In the end were were reduced to searching the skeaziest place on the net, well one of them anyhow, craigslist. NerdMoment Surfing Craigslist for housing felt like hitting up Mos Eisly Cantina, dirty, grimy and sketchy. All while wondering if you were going to be raped and murdered by a profoundly ugly man with an attitude problem. /NerdMoment

But we found a place, in the SE part of town, in a place where the old Money meets the ghetto, literally, we're between two neighborhoods, with Hippi-land off further East. The streets are lined with giant old Victorian Era homes. Yeah, we found ourselves a colorful neighborhood, one with multiple personality disorder. But it seems to be safe and mostly quiet. With the exception of a couple of loud neighbors. (One dude woke us up at around 3 in the morning one day, yelling at someone across the street that she owed him money and that he didn't like her any more - that went on for fifteen minutes.) Oh, and the house next door? That seemed to house a geriatric dude who was selling pot. Schizophrenic neighborhood indeed.

There was a clear window of weather on Saturday, where the heat of the day rose to the threshold of a mere high seventies low eighties. Even some spots of rain, so we lucked out and got ourselves a good day to move. We rented a truck from UHaul - a seventeen footer, that wasn't available till around 4PM. That we loaded up with the furniture. I was exhausted by the time it was full, after three or so car loads of the heavier boxes(damn my OCD nature when it comes to my library. War and Peace abridged? I'm never going to read that! Why do I still have it? In case of a zombie uprising, duh! Gonna need a wide variety of reading material to pass the time when the world ends.).

So, I was beat before we began to make the biggest and largest push, so I left the really heavy stuff to the people who are actually in reasonably good shape. Curse the last month of sitting on my ass as I waited for the never ending heat-wave to pass. It has not aided my endurance. Sad day. Worse because Josh of the Goth was running in circles after we got the last of the mess hauled in. Running in circles. Aren't members of the Goth counterculture supposed to be generally against physical exertion and other activities that might take them out under the fearful the sun?

Needless to say, I was rather sore the next morning.

We've been here for two weeks now, the house was about squared away. That first luxury, broadband internet, was installed six days after we moved in. How I miss the internet. It is my connection with the world at large. It is a luxury that I can live without if need be. I am not yet so far addicted that i can't take a few days off without logging on. But thankfully I didn't need to since one of our neighbors had an open port on their wireless router. Huzzah for free internet! At least until our own came. Huzzah for a solid internet connection and a freedom from the paranoia that the open port has a packet-sniffer attached.

The biggest loss in the move? My super gunky comfortable couch of awesome. The cradle of my ass. The place where I ensconced myself and wrote at least two different novels, played countless games and watched even more movies. Super awesome couch of extreme comfort: You will be missed by myself and my extremely discerning ass.

A slight stumbling block on the road to comfort was when DTE informed me that it would take them ten days to finally switch on our gas. Ten days without being able to cook meals(correction, we used the crockpot for two weeks - note: cooking rice in a crock pot was inadvisable, 2 cups took three hours and turned to a mush). Ten days of cold showers. Hot showers are the symbol of civilization itself. To hell with sliced bread. But I can live with cold showers. Or even going without, though I like my comfort, and who doesn't?

Several days was all it took before the house was more or less in order. Two weeks were out before I made my last visit to the old house. Now I begin to wander around with some familiarity, as I navigate in the darkness to find a drink of water. I know where everything is already, not difficult since the furnishings are rather sparse in this apartment, leaving a lot of open floor space that has yet to be commandeered by any piece of furniture.

I was wondering though, how long does it take for a house to become a home? I still refer to this apartment as 'the apartment' rather than home. Though I've not really thought to any of my last several domiciles as homes, but houses and apartments. Maybe because I rented? Or didn't intend to stay too very long to make it a home? That isn't to fair, I stayed in my crappy rathole studio apartment for around five or six years and maybe I considered it to be home. But how long did it take before I stopped waking up in the middle of the night and trying to remember where I was? Only to wonder when it came back to me? I did that quite a bit at the old house, but not at all here. I rather like the new apartment, it's open and airy. We have a library/game room. The rent is cheap, though the digs are a little run down. Hey, it perfectly suits my needs, and even some of my wants.

But how long until the newness fades completely and I begin to think of this strange new house as my home? What does that take? What sort of things need to click in the mind? Just day in and day out boring old familiarity? Like a new pair of underwear? Or does it take willingness on my part?

A pity we're still in GR I guess. But then, in more interesting environs, we wouldn't get this space for the right price. Everything has a trade off.

Unless something drastically changes, such as my finally deciding to move out to the Pacific North West, or Evil gets married, I don't plan to leave any time soon. The one bright point is that moving boxes downstairs has to be a lot easier than carrying them up.