Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This is day 3, or 4, of having slept fitfully the night before, in part because of some unexplained pains that are making it difficult to find a comfortable positio to sleep in. This morning, at least, I double-checked the digital clock on Andy's bedside table, rather than getting up at 5 or 6 because I thought it said 8. But I got little done yesterday, and it looks like I may have to lean on cattitude and adrian_turtle again today.

I don't like how much I've been needing that lately; there's still a lot of unpacking to do, weird sliding square puzzle stuff where I have moved some things from a drawer in (what has been) my dresser to a cubbyhole in Andy's, and am now waiting for him to move some of his shirts into that drawer so I can move more things into the other dresser. (We're doing this because there wasn't room for both dressers in our bedroom in the new place, and we both want to to have some of our clothes handy when we get up in the morning.)

Unpacking the kitchen is a similar problem--as part of combining households, we're planning to get out (for example) all the flatware from both apartments and decide what we want for everyday use, and how much of the rest to keep. Ditto plates, mugs, etc. The problem will be finding room to do that sorting, while we're using the available flat surfaces to make and eat meals. This is here in #leaky_raft because I was hoping to wait the sleep and odd pain problem out, and it's not working. The best I can say for this morning is that it may not be worse than 24 hours ago.

I spent some time this afternoon sorting through things. That included getting rid of some things, and rearranging some others. The stack of cards and stamps is now shorter, and a bit better organized, after I discarded some free (please donate!) greeting cards I wasn't going to use. I also tossed some food that was past its expiration date, including single-serving cups of applesauce, dried lentils, and turkey bacon.

I moved the bed enough that I could unplug and throw away the digital clock that broke a few weeks ago. (There's a similar, but still working, clock on cattitude's nightstand). And I cooked lunch and dinner, and had some groceries delivered in between.

I also cut up boxes for recycling, and took them and a bunch of trash out. Typing all this, I realize how much I've done today.

Cattitude spent the afternoon at the new apartment, measuring cupboards and closets, and documenting damage to the apartment, with photos. Some of it we need fixed, and the rest is just to have it on record so the landlord doesn't try to charge us for it years from now.

It's ten days to the solstice, and sunset is late enough that we went for a short walk, to a nearby garden with lots of honeysuckle. I suggested this to cattitude, who agreed that it sounded like a good idea.

*I just filled out and mailed a change-of-address form for the post office.

*We carried a broken bookcase to the curb this afternoon, for pickup tomorrow. I'd called to arrange the pickup last week, and discovered that while our actual collection was delayed by the Memorial Day holiday, that didn't change the deadline for calling to ask for that pickup.

*I tried to drop some clothes in a town clothing donation/recycling bin. "Tried," because when I got to the location, I discovered that the donation box had been removed sometime last winter. (I have never used this box, but I found the location on the town website a few days ago. It's still listed.) So I carried a parka and a bag of other clothes through the supermarket produce section, and back home on the bus.

*In looking through a pile of papers that had been in my desk for years, I found the photos of me and Velma that I thought I had lost. I carefully labeled the envelope before taping it closed again. (I want to scan some of the prints; I am not assuming I will get to that before we move.) I am recycling most of the other paper in that stack, which included some job evaluations from the 1990s, for a job I was laid off from in 2001.

I did move some things from that shelf to a different bit of my desk, mostly so I won't try to examine them three more times before the movers come to pack everything next Friday.

They management company sent me a gas meter number, but it's not at all clear that it's the right number:

I spent ten or fifteen minutes on the phone with National Grid, with a customer service rep who tried entering that number into their system, and then tried every variation she could think of. The number I was given is a B and then seven digits, and she tried entering just the digits, and she tried adding zeros at the beginning or end of the number, before telling me that none of it had worked. Neither did looking under the name of the management company. The customer service rep sent me back to building management, hoping that there was a typo in the number, or failing that, maybe they have a record of an old National Grid account for that apartment, or could figure out what incorrect street address our building is listed under. *sigh*

I sent that email around 1:30, formatted as a numbered list in the hope that it will be a comprehensible explanation of a ridiculous situation. I haven't gotten a reply yet, and at this point am hoping for Tuesday morning. I suspect the person at the building management company is swearing at National Grid's incompetence, or it's taking a while to find an answer to this stupid query, or both. I got the impression that National Grid just shrug and say "oh well" when they hit one of those incorrect listings, rather than correcting the listings so the system shows the actual location they're delivering gas to, or even adding a note in their system saying that, using her example, when someone looks up "55 Main Street" it should return the entries for "1 Main Street."

adrian_turtle said that she is going to take a look tomorrow and make sure nobody snuck an electric stove in when we weren't looking. That's incredibly unlikely, but this entire saga is unlikely, and she has to go over there tomorrow and put out flyers saying that we have reserved parking for the moving truck.

I think our next move may be to knock on our new neighbors' doors, or slip notes under the doors, saying something like "hi, we're your new downstairs neighbors. I know this is weird, but National Grid can't find us in their system. Do you know what address they think this building is at?" That's on the theory that since the utility can't find a listing for the building now, they probably couldn't find it last year or the year before either.

We're moving in three weeks and I still have a lot to do, including talk to two utility companies. But we have hired a moving company and I reserved parking for the moving truck for the day of the move, and the signs and flyers were in today's mail.

A few people have come to look at the apartment, and yesterday the realtor came over to record a video tour, which I'm in favor of because it may mean fewer people in the apartment before we leave. I've mostly ducked outside during these visits, while cattitude kept an eye on things and made sure they didn't let the cats out.

The move isn't the only reason I'm not going to Scintillation--the travel and the amount of time indoors in groups seemed risky--but it was a factor. This way, I won't only be thinking that I want to be in Montreal with my friends.

A smaller but pleasing thing is that adrian_turtle knows someone who would like, and will wear, the silk shirts that no longer fit me. They're in my pack, and I will give them to her tomorrow, to pass along.

adrian_turtle, cattitude, and I have signed a lease on a new apartment! We still need to landlord to sign it, but at this stage I'm confident it's going to happen. (A couple of other things have fallen through.)

It's in Boston, specifically in Brighton, which I keep having to tell myself is not at/near a beach. We'll be moving in June.

I have dealt with the RMV bureaucracy, and now have a paper temporary ID while I wait for the plastic card to arrive in the mail ("about ten days"). The clerk looked at, and then kept, my previous ID, with the Somerville address; fortunately, I did the COA when we moved from Arlington to Somerville online, so I have that card and put it in my wallet when I got home.

The whole thing took longer than I expected, partly because the MBTA website had actively confusing directions, so I spent an annoying amount of time wandering around Watertown Square before I found the correct bus stop, long enough that I decided to stop for lunch before getting on the bus. (It didn't help that both ends of the 70 bus route are "Central Square," one in Cambridge and the other in Waltham.)

Once at the MBTA, it was mostly tedious: they check paperwork first, and hand out numbers like "S-64" or "M-45," and then announce "now serving M-50 at window 11." There are enough lines, moving fast enough, to produce frequent announcements, which is good but made it hard to read while I waited.

When I got to the counter, the clerk suggested I wait until November, because "there's no rush" and it would be cheaper. Getting a new ID card because of a change of address (with or without "real ID") costs $25, as do renewals without moving (or, I think, getting a new "real ID" card without moving), but a renewal with change of address costs $25, not $50. My ID expires on my birthday in 2020, about 15 months from now, and a COA less than a year before the expiration date would count as a renewal, which this doesn't. I told him I still wanted to do it, which was as much because of the amount of time I'd already put in as because I want to have this before I renew my passport.

After my previous post, thinking about the amount of paperwork they're demanding for this, I realized something odd: it looks as though someone could get a "real ID" using the name and paperwork of a family member or housemate. The RMV will accept the combination of an official birth certificate, social security card, utility bill, and W-2 form, all of which someone might have at home where a friend, relative, or even burglar could find them. However, they won't accept a current US passport (which is proof of both identity and "right of residence" in the US), plus a utility bill and credit card statement, even though they can and did check online that the social security number I gave them goes with my name.

Because it's not about protecting individuals from identity theft, it's about more about making it harder for people to get ID--the new federally-imposed requirement for two different kinds of proof of address makes that pretty clear.

We now have a microwave, which was delivered this morning. We didn't have one in the Somerville apartment because there was no room for one; that kitchen was tiny, and significantly short of counter space.

This afternoon I finished editing the ninth and last chapter of the book I'm working on, and sent it back to the client. He's going to look at it, accept or reject my edits, and then send me all the edited chapters for a final pass, including the bits where I go back to chapter 2 to check consistency with something I spotted and fixed in chapter 5.

cattitude and I walked around a little bit this morning, exploring the neighborhood, and did some shopping at the CVS. Most of this exploring is going to be just looking at houses, gardens, and trees; the businesses in this bit of Belmont are either on or very near Trapelo Road, which is also this end of the 73 bus route.

I bought a bunch of zinnias at the farmers market yesterday. Kaja keeps jumping on the table and biting through the stems, and when we got back from our walk we found the vase on its side, a large puddle of water on the table, and another on the floor under it. I don't understand why she attacks flowers: this is not a cat who is otherwise interested in fruit or vegetables. Zinnias are cat-safe, though I didn't check before buying them. It's probably a good thing I didn't buy one of the mixed bouquets: even if nothing in them is poisonous to cats, we'd have had to identify all the plants in order to check that.

Today has been quite productive, which doesn't fit with my original intentions of making this a rest day. My joints and muscles are rested, yes, but I started the day by renewing the purple dye in my hair. It had gotten pretty pale, and I had a feeling that if I didn't do it today, I wouldn't get to it until several days after the move.

I then did a few hours worth of copyediting/proofreading, spread out over twice as much time. (Since I'm not charging by the hour for this job, I haven't bothered to track the time, because it's one less thing to deal with right now.)

Meanwhile, cattitude spent more time working on the diagrams of our new apartment, enabling us to get out the little furniture models* from last time and starting deciding what goes where. The current solution is labeled "tentative," but it's workable, and is most of what we'll need to be able to tell the movers Tuesday: we have designated one bedroom as our bedroom and the other as a study, figured out where the bed and dressers go, and decided where we probably want our desks. (There turns out to be one reasonable answer to the bedroom question, given a queen-size bed, our two dressers, and two bedside tables.)

At that point I was running low on executive function, so we decided that the rest can wait until tomorrow or Friday. We need to figure out where the couch goes, and approximately where we want the dining table and my recliner. The table and recliner are less urgent than the couch because we can rearrange them ourselves; the couch and desks are too heavy and/or awkward for us to move.

Last night I emailed a cleaning company that gingicat recommended; they wrote back today, saying they have availability, and asked some questions so they can give me a price estimate.

Maybe I can make Saturday a rest day.

*"Models" sounds impressive and 3D. We have rectangles, circles, and a couple of odd shapes cut out of graph paper, with labels like "V chair" and "red rug."

Three weeks ago, I wrote "I spoke to the staff at Oath Pizza, that had a sign about having said 'sayonara' to the straw. I pointed out that this is a disability issue. The manager said that they have straws for people who need them, and I suggested that they put up a sign saying so, instead of the one saying they don't, because if I had needed a straw and seen that, I would probably have gone elsewhere instead of asking for one. He allowed as how this was a good idea, but I don't know if they'll act on it." I went in again last week, and the "sayonara" sign was still up, but I didn't have the energy to talk to them about it again. *sigh*

cattitude and I are making progress on planning the move. After setting dates for packing and moving, noticed that the deadline for paying the monthly fee for our storage unit will be the day we're moving, so I went ahead and paid that this afternoon, and am feeling pleasantly organized. (This is one of many things to do, but it is one, and I have done it.)

adrian_turtle and I went to a party this past weekend; there were a few people I already knew, most of whom I said little more than hello to. But I had a nice long conversation with a woman named Masha; bits of conversation with various people, in the drifting-through-things way that can happen at parties; and then talked for a while to gingicat, including a bit about her kids.

Adrian and I took a Lyft home (dropping her off at Porter Square before taking me home); I left my daypack at her place rather than carry it to the party, so yesterday's errands included going to Arlington to retrieve that. Along the way, I stopped at the eye doctor's office to give them back an unopened sample bottle of eye drops that were left from after my cataract surgery. Something that took only a few minutes, as long as I was taking the bus along Mass Ave anyhow, but would have taken an annoying amount of time, for a small errand, if not combined.

Last night Cattitude and I had dinner with his sister Nancy and her husband. We went to Dali, a tapas place someone had recommended at Elizabeth's Christmas dim sum brunch. It was very good, but pricey, more so than I quite expected: that may be partly because we were quite hungry, and perhaps also because, drinking so little myself, I tend to forget about drinks when estimating the price of a meal out. My favorite of the things we had was the gorditas, bacon-wrapped prunes (stuffed with a little bit of cheese and almond); Cattitude and I ordered a second plate of those for dessert, because they tempted me more than anything on the dessert part of the menu. The food and conversation were both good, but I was exhausted even before the end of dinner--and then had a hard time falling asleep last night. (425 Washington Street, Somerville, or maybe Cambridge, depending which map or program you're looking at.)