I’m on record, no pun intended, as stating that VAST’s debut release, Visual Audio Sensory Theater, is one of my favorites of all time. It was the right album at the right time with the right density & mixture of sounds, and I still love it.
My relationship with everything that’s come afterward is weirder.
(more…)It’s the end of an era: We handed in the keys to the apartment after several hours spent taking care of the final round of sweeping and scrubbing and what-have-you. Heck, we even replaced the drip trays on the electric stove.
Technically, the move is over. Of course, in practical terms, it just means we can really hunker down on the unboxing. On the upside this should mean that I can start doing stuff that isn’t Work, Eat, Sleep, Deal With Moving Tasks, Play Game To Unwind. We’ll see?
Quick status update:
Until next time, friends.
Some people use letters or numbers, others use colored stickers (we in fact did that for the boxes), but for keeping track of which shelves and which sets of shelving pegs belong with what bookshelf, Vyx broke out the washi tape. During the preparation for moving day, she used one roll of washi tape for each individual bookshelf, then stuck a strip of tape from that specific roll onto:
You might wonder why she went to all that trouble, but not all of our shelves were purchased from the same store or during the same timeframe. Even from year to year, Ikea’s bookshelf line can change somewhat. (Sometimes.) And not all of our shelves came from Ikea. (Most, yes, but not all.) All of this means that “just grab a couple of the black shelves” won’t guarantee that they’re the right fit for a given unit. Best to keep ’em organized.
Which wouldn’t be a problem but we have a lot of dingdanged bookshelves (and bookshelf-adjacent units, like my CD/DVD shelves). There are eight in the office alone, plus several more in Vyx’s bedroom, plus at least four in the living room. I might even be forgetting one or two somewhere.
During my lunch break I wanted to get one more of the office bookshelves squared away, so I looked at the washi tape stuck under the top of the shelf unit so I’d know what to go grab from the supplies stacked downstairs… then realized I probably wouldn’t remember by the time I got down to those stacked supplies from the office upstairs. So I did the purely logical thing:
I peeled the tape off of the shelf unit itself and stuck it to the back of my hand as a… well, handy reference while I looked for the correct shelves and pegs. Simple, practical, and since washi tape comes off very easily it wasn’t even painful.
And now, yet another shelf awaits its allotment of reading material.
We have so much yet to do, but progress is progress nonetheless.
(You know, except for the exhaustion and aches and pains.)
We are mostly in the house now. Beds are here, bathing happens here, eating happens here (though no actual cooking yet since most of the cookware and many of the ingredients are over there still). Boxes? Here. Shelving? Here.
Vacuum cleaner? Over there, awaiting us getting enough more stuff out of the apartment to make it ready for that last pass. Flowerpots? Over there, and we’re still debating where the heck they’re going once they make it here.
And not a day’s rest in three weeks. But we’re still extremely happy to be here, and not there.
Are we ready? Maybe not, but we’re trying to get there. By day’s end tomorrow, if all goes well, we should be (mostly) moved into the new place.
But for now, I have to shut down and unplug everything to prepare for the movers, who arrive about 24 hours from now as I write this (right around 9 o’clock).
See you from the new digs soon, I hope!
