Unpackings

The process of unpacking has begun. In terms of square footage, I don’t know if this place is larger or smaller than our last apartment, but the bedroom is significantly smaller, which is just fine with me.

Having a bunch of people come and pack your stuff up initially seems like a good idea, but one downside is a lot of the tossing-out that generally comes with a move didn’t happen this time, since we weren’t supposed to pack anything ourselves. I’ve opened several boxes that were just full of…stuff that had obviously accumulated in a drawer in the kitchen or on a shelf and hadn’t been sorted through in quite some time.

A few weeks before we moved, I went through and got rid of a lot of books that I hadn’t touched in years, partially at least to prove to myself that I’m not a hoarder-in-training. More of that is going to have to happen on this end, too, because while we have a nice set of IKEA shelves that hold all sorts of things, we’re overall going to have less closet storage space and less cabinet space in the kitchen.

There are a lot of things about this apartment that simply aren’t as nice as the old apartment, but this place feels a lot more our speed than the wall-to-wall cinderblock joint in Arlington. The landlord appears to be pretty hands-off, with all of the benefits and disadvantages that come with that. I’m sure we can get away with doing almost anything to the apartment and it won’t be a thing, but we also have to deal with a refrigerator that’s crappier than previously anticipated. We may end up just picking up a better compact fridge on Craigslist for $200, but learning to live with less fridge space probably isn’t a bad idea anyway.

Yesterday, catastrophe struck: a bottle of fish sauce leaked onto the surrounding packing paper. If you've ever had Thai or Vietnamese food, you've probably eaten fish sauce--it's an important flavor; you might use it the same way you'd use chicken stock to improve the body and flavor of a dish. You also don't ever use very much of it at a time, because it's strong, salty, and smells like fishy death. My fear was that the dog would manage to eat up all of the contaminated paper, but luckily I was able to get it out of the box and double-bagged fast enough that she hadn't pieced it together. I tossed out a few spice containers that had been wrapped in the damp fish sauce paper, but our belongings mostly escaped unscathed.

Tonight I am meeting someone from Craigslist to buy a countertop dishwasher. I wasn’t able to get anything else move-related done today because the car had to be un-stuck from the ice while it was only -14, and the dog had to go to the vet because her tummy is still upset and she hasn’t gained back any of the weight she lost (about 8 pounds at this point). She’s also been drinking water like there’s no tomorrow, so the vet is running tests and we’ll see what is up. Hope it’s just stress and not something underlying that.

Once this place is set up and the dog is feeling better, then it is going to be a lovely home. I need to keep working on both of those for a while, and we’ll get there. I just wish I'd remembered to set aside the can opener, instead of allowing it to be packed in one of the twenty boxes labeled "kit. ware."