UPDATE: Monday, May 29, 2023 · 7:00:57 PM +00:00
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MargaretPOA
Update on Kuroneko: Today she is behaving much more normally. Exhibiting curiosity rather than trepidation. Exploring for exploration’s sake and not identifying dangers. I’m glad too because I have to go back to work tomorrow, I think she’s going to be okay.
Has anybody here ever lived in one place for 15 years or more, (as an adult, I mean)? Let me tell you about how much crap one can accumulate in that time. In 667 square feet, I had amassed a mass of useful but unused items that would make any Hoarder envious. I am not a Hoarder to be very clear but sometimes the only reason that I am not is due to me being brutal with myself about hanging on to broken or otherwise useless items for sentimental or other less than practical reasons. I want to be very careful about exaggerating here so when I say that I bought a box of 40 large trash bags and used almost all of them, you’ll have some measure of the amount of crap that I had to trim down before moving housing. And my 667 square feet was called “tidy” by an astonished friend who was familiar with my old living space. Now that there is some context established, on with the tale.
16 years ago this month, I moved from Austin to San Antonio due to relocating for a job offer. I had never intended to stay in San Antonio for 16 years, let alone in my apartment. I’m from Houston but later I found that Austin was absolutely the largest city that I wanted to live in. One day though, when I was in my mid, shading into late 40s, I was offered a job here that paid much more than I was making in Austin and so I moved with the idea of getting some experience in the field, (database administration) along with some education and qualifications for future opportunities
I moved here and stayed with friends after starting my new job. Their oldest son was displaced in order for me to have use of his bedroom. He said that he didn’t mind and coming from anybody else, I might have been skeptical but this young man’s heart was generous and his mind mellow, I have no doubt that he really didn’t mind. That didn’t keep me from feeling guilty about it though, so I moved out as quickly as I could, into a place that quite honestly wasn’t ideal. It was on the third floor but back then it had only been a decade and a half since my last outstanding physical readiness award from the Navy and climbing the stairs didn’t much put me out. I was okay with it, knowing that I was only going to stay for three years at the most.
Just after I had moved in, the same friend that I had been staying with called me and told me to come take my cat home. Cat? What cat? I had known that a semi feral cat had given birth to 3 kittens on her property while I was there and had actually expressed interest in one of them but hadn’t given it much more thought. So I brought my wonderful Kuroneko home that same day. I think that she was 12 weeks old at the time.
Well life intervened as it is wont to do and my job went away and I spent some time unemployed, from January 23, 2009 until May 17, 2011 in fact. I survived obviously but my plans were necessarily altered. Eventually I got my current gig, which is essentially what I did when I was fresh out of high school in the dark ages before the internet. Because I was making roughly 40 percent less, finding a new and better place also went to the back burner, (I had actually been looking at single family homes prior to the wanking Chimp lighting the economy on fire), so I stayed put for the time being.
Eventually the “time being” stretched into a bit over a decade and a half. Owners of the property came and went and for the most part I got along with all of them, despite some bumps in the road. For example, the time they told everyone that they were “painting” but I came home from work and every square inch of the cladding on my building had been pulled off. Off. It was laying in scraps and heaps all over the ground around the building. Poor ‘Neko was shell shocked! Through all of it, I was never late with rent, (except for one day when an emergency closed the office several hours early) and I got along with my neighbors. My cat and I walked down the years living there, even though climbing those stairs became more and more difficult for me.
A couple of years ago, we had yet another change in ownership but this time things couldn’t have been more different. It almost immediately became clear that the new owner was only interested in extracting as much cash as they could from the property. I had a couple of disputes with the new property manager, who would have looked very comfortable in jackboots and red, white and black armbands. When she attempted to extract coin from us regardless of the fact that many of these bills and fees were not included in the lease, I bided my time. After all I had survived 6 ownership changes, I could do another standing on my head.
Again, life intervened. The air conditioner on my car conked out and if you’ve ever been in Texas in the summer, you know that A/C is not optional. It was late Autumn though and so I scheduled an appointment to take it in after the holidays. I had my second bout with COVID-19 in January and ended up having to cancel my appointment. As soon as I emerged from suffering from that godawful COVID-19 Paxlovid, I immediately got an infected tooth and a nice abscess to go with it so I had to have it extracted. (they ended up taking 3 teeth but that’s another story). At the same time, my wonderful apartment management somehow unilaterally tore up my contract with my local ISP that I had had for years and started charging all residents a bulk rate for internet access/cable television, whether we wanted it or not. (FWIW, I had internet only before they imposed cable TV and its accompanying expense upon me) That ordinarily wouldn't be a bad thing but the ISP charged a month after one’s service, the apartments began charging before the month of internet service use, due on the first. Consequently, though I paid my bill to the ISP for December at the end of January, the apartment management charged me for January, February and March all due on 3/1.
I had lost 3 days of pay, as I was out of personal days, (we don’t have sick days. Come on, this is Texas), I had spent several hundred with the Dentist Veterinarian that worked on my teeth and suddenly I owed $150 bucks in unbudgeted money. Well I know for a fact that isn’t in my lease and I pointed that out to the Wohnungführer but apparently requiring them to honor their lease, just like we had to honor ours is subversive or something. I didn’t ingratiate myself at all when I wrote the owners and outlined how much this (illegal) additional fee was going to hurt me and said that it was literally taking food out of my mouth, while they went on contemplating that new yacht.
I came home from work to find an envelope marked “important documents” on my door. Knowing that my lease was ending in May, I assumed it was their annual offer to renew my lease and I groaned, wondering how much the rent increase was going to be so Imagine my surprise when I learned that they were not only not renewing my lease, they were refusing to go month to month and were requiring me to be out on May 30, 2023. Until yesterday, (Friday), that was literally the last thing that I heard from them. Even when my apartment developed a roof leak and I put in a maintenance request, they marked it as “complete” even while the roof continued to leak, the office never approached me, never discussed anything with me. They just told me to GTFO and went silent. I couldn’t get any information beyond that they could choose not to renew a lease for any reason they wished. I have a neighbor who claims that another neighbor has been complaining in a whiny and transphobic voice about my polluting his air but who knows?
Fair or not, I had to move. I began looking for a place and soon realized that the cost of rent has skyrocketed! It’s just ridiculous how much rent has outstripped income. So I located a unit that’s also not ideal but it has four things going for it: Close to work, on the ground floor, built in washer and dryer and affordable. The drawback is that I had to give up about 200 square feet. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s YUGE when you have 16 years of crap that you have gradually been filling every nook and cranny with. I immediately began boxing things that I was keeping but don’t often use and throwing out those things that I wasn’t keeping.
I spent several weeks of doing this gradual sorting, packing, donating, gifting and discarding and I felt really good about where my efforts left me and I really thought that I was as ready for the move as I thought that I could be. I scheduled the move for the week of May 22-27, mainly because I didn’t get any more personal time at work until after the 16th. It was a wrench to let fully 70% of my books go but some of the older ones had pages browned so badly that they were unreadable. One was a hardcover Bantam Book by Isaac Asimov based on the Screenplay of Fantastic Voyage that I got for Christmas in 1968. Like I said, I had to be brutal with myself. It wasn’t readable and it was so fragile that you couldn’t open it entirely without cracking the spine. Another was a copy of Dune that I stole from my brother in the early 1970s.
So books, cook wear, clothing, collectibles, nothing was spared from the paring knife but you wanna know what? It wasn’t enough. Not remotely enough. The effort that I was so proud of was similar to placing one sandbag in the mighty Mississippi River ahead of a flood and calling yourself prepared. THAT became clear last Sunday when I began moving in earnest. Immediately it became apparent that things were not going to go anything like I had planned or intended. The original plan had me getting the small stuff moved over the week and some friends and co-workers were all ready to help lift and tote furniture for me this very day, (Saturday) and I would spend Sunday cleaning. Easy-peasey, right? It’s just 667 square feet, how much shit could be in that “tidy” space?
I knew at once that there was no way possible for plan A to have any more chance of succeeding than for Trump becoming a human being. After that epiphany reached out and slapped me in the head I immediately let my friends off the hook and scheduled professional movers for Wednesday, so as to have some days to set up the new place and clean the old before I have to return to work Tuesday. With the movers scheduled, I spent Monday and Tuesday hauling boxes over here, emptying them and returning to refill them. Rinse, repeat.
Wednesday, I packed up my little Kuroneko and her things and we came over here to the new place. She has an old comforter, (the same one in the picture above of a much younger ‘Neko) that was in the far corner of the closet at the first apartment that she sleeps on in stressful times and I made sure to bring it with me so she would have familiar scents and familiar surroundings. I brought all of the clothes from that end of the closet, (the one category that I didn’t cull) and hung them over the comforter so she had a tiny piece of her lifelong home here. Wednesday afternoon I met the movers at around 2:45 at the old place and we started loading their truck, or more accurately they loaded their truck while I directed and loaded my car. That actually could have gone worse, it only took two and a half hours. Sadly my almost new, custom built computer was broken when it arrived. It turned out okay, it just needed some things reseated but at the time I was just devastated. I sure couldn’t afford to replace a $1,400 computer. I never blamed the movers, I even tipped them a C-note. I know that shit happens as well as anyone else.
Thursday then, I began to bring order from the chaos in the new place. I had to make an unscheduled trip to drop the computer off with the builder but it was reasonably close so I was able to get back before the ISP Tech came to my new home. THAT was a fucking nightmare, though the Tech was knowledgeable and very efficient but shit does happen and the shit that happened then was that the ISP had set me up with two accounts. I had ordered the equipment several days ahead if the move and had meant to install and configure it myself but when I saw that someone had painted over the coaxial outlet, I realized that I needed a Technician. Unfortunately when I tried to cancel the original order and set up a Tech visit, the ISP didn’t cancel the one and schedule the other but just gave me a new account along with the first. {{Le sigh}}….. What a mess! That’s still not entirely sorted out but the affect on my wifi network was that I couldn’t make some of my equipment “forget” the old wifi network. I could sign into the new one on my phone, for example, but would be almost immediately disconnected. UGH!
So Friday… Friday, Friday…. I need to be completely out of my old apartment by Tuesday and there was still a crap ton of shizz at the old place. Smaller stuff, trash and moving detritus mainly, cleaning supplies, the old ISP equipment that I have to return to them, and some miscellaneous consumables like ‘Neko’s medications. There was also a small storage room. Small but packed floor to ceiling with stuff like old boxes, camping gear, potting soils, etc. I took my brand new box of 40 trash bags and began sorting, packing and filling. I got there at 7:00 am and started working. Filling bags, getting them downstairs, stacking them on my car and making a dumpster run. And not just bags of trash. three dead printers, one dead CRT television, pots, pans, etc.
I started with the bed and bath rooms. Made several trips, vacuumed and I had been there less than two hours. I cleared a space in the living room to save out the one or two items I was planning to keep from the storage room. Then I opened that door and started in. I bagged boxes, old foam packaging blocks, soil, pots, etc. I would fill six bags and toss them over the rail to the ground. There is a large open area underneath and it wasn’t high enough to burst the bags if I kept them from becoming too heavy.
Things were moving along but I couldn’t maintain that level of activity forever. I’m 63, I’m overweight and I have some arrhythmia thing going on, which I found out about around two weeks before my move. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I made at least somewhere north of three dozen trips up and down those three flights of stairs. At one point, some office lackey scolded me for throwing the bags off the balcony and made me promise to stop. Thanks, lady. I told her that I hadn’t planned on moving and they were forcing me to and now she just made my work orders of magnitude harder. I get liability issues and so forth but there was nothing unsafe about what I was doing.
About noon, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it. I was out of gas. I filled the final bags, left my cleaning supplies there, (I took my vacuum though) and prepared to leave. In a funny encounter, I threw the final bags over the rail, along with a box stuffed with other cardboard boxes that I had cut up. Up comes the same officious Wohnungunterfuhrer from previously to gripe at me again. Her hands firmly on her hips, she asked if she had or had not told me to stop throwing things off the balcony, like she hadn’t ceded their power over me by booting me TF out. I just told her that I forgot, oh and that I’m out of fucks to give.
I was EXHAUSTED! Hot, sweaty and just unable to face more trips up those stairs. I made the final four trips to pack my car, took another dash to the dumpster and went to the office to deliver my keys. The problem is that the office was locked and empty. On the door was one of those clock sign thingies, indicating that they wouldn’t be back for an hour and a half. As I was meeting my computer guy at 2:00pm, I couldn’t wait for them for that long. I placed the keys marked with my apartment number on a clip that was on the steering wheel of the maintenance golf cart, took a picture of it and went to meet the computer guy.
Having long since given up on my deposit, I left the cleaning of the final room to them. I’ve been there for 16 years and the unit had been rode hard and put away wet before I moved in way back then so yeah, it was pointless to shampoo carpet that was going to be replaced anyway. I kinda feel bad about leaving it in that state but again, not my choice to move. I got most of my stuff out and the storage room is entirely empty.
So I headed back to meet the builder of my computer and he tells me that he reseated some things and tested it and that there wasn’t anything wrong with it that he could find. I thanked him and headed back to my new home. I had in mind to eat something because I had had nothing but an on the go container of Raison Bran Crunch that day but my damned life intervened yet again.
It was when I was taking pictures of the new place with my phone, (less than 30 years ago, saying something like that might have been alarming to people🤭), to send to a friend when I noticed that I was on Cricket’s 5G dime instead of my wifi. I signed in and was connected but as I was looking at it, the icon disappeared. After a couple of failed attempts, I went into the app and saw that it still had my previous equipment listed instead of the new. I contacted tech service and spoke with a very knowledgeable lady named “Pauline” and we eventually tweaked the router so that my phone would hold on to the network. The app still has my old equipment listed and I can’t interact with the new network to change the name or the password but that’s something that she said I had to take up with the sales department. It being after 5 on Friday, I was happy just to not use up my limited data texting and talking with people. That hurdle behind me, it was supper time. Or was it? Life once again intervened, this time in the form of an Amazon driver.
My old place had built in shelves, in which I kept many books and all of my DVDs. This new place lacked them so I sprang for a DVD shelf, (I have a separate bookshelf) and ordered it from Jeff Bezos’ flying monkeys and lo and behold, it arrived almost contemporaneously with my unloading the final load from the car and partially solving my wifi problem. After I had reconnected it, I found to my delight that my computer worked just like it should. Since all I had left to unpack was my DVDs and some collectables, I decided to further postpone my meal in favor of assembling the shelf. It wasn’t difficult but my recently de-chaosed place began to resemble a land fill of clutter again before I finished. In the end it was finally done and I was very gratified to find that all of my DVDs fit with a half shelf to spare.
*************************************** I had hoped to stay in the old place until I retire in a couple of years, primarily because I didn’t want to stress out my old kitty cat. I had moved her on Tuesday and though her appetite hasn’t suffered, which admittedly was my biggest fear, she was behaving very fearful, disoriented and confused. Who can blame her? Other than 8-12 weeks, her entire life had been spent in that 667 square foot apartment. Even so, at this point she was demanding food so I fed her, fixed some mac n cheese for myself and went to bed.
On Saturday then I had to run an errand and pick up a prescription that was auto filled at the old pharmacy but otherwise I kept it local, cleaning and arranging the new place and I made a lot of progress, though my little bitten kitten was/is still discombobulated and it suddenly occurred to me that some of her fear stems from movement sounds coming from the neighbors above. All I can do is hope that she’ll adapt.
When I finally got my scale out and placed it on the floor and stood on it. I had lost 21lbs(!) in the move and suffered several minor injuries on my arms. I hadn’t slept well since the prior Friday or so and Friday night was no different. The pain was crippling, especially in my right leg. I’m 63 after all, I moved everything but the furniture by myself and was all of the way done in physically so my sleep had been fitful to nonexistent. Saturday evening I began this post but set it aside in order to do some more straightening and arranging.
Here I am on Sunday and I slept much better last night and find myself better rested. After breakfast I decided to work on finishing this post and leave you with this thought: I called this post “Murphy’s Move” because I felt like everything that could go wrong, DID go wrong and it could still end very badly. The air conditioner in my car still doesn’t work and now I have a bad fuel injector and in the last few trips between apartment I am starting to hear what might be a bad CV joint. I am not a wealthy woman and though friends and especially co-workers have been more than generous, it could all go south with the car, At present though, things might have stabilized a bit. After a very iffy morning, like a switch that got flipped, my kitty exhibited “normal” behavior when she leapt up and tried to finish my breakfast for me.
I don’t know how things will turn out with her but I am encouraged by her display of more expected behaviors. I have two days, (as of this writing) to spend with her before I have to return to work. As I’m posting this on Monday, I’ll include an update about her progress then.
That’s the tale and if you’ve made it this far, thank you. My experiences are but a mote of dust in the ocean of trouble in these troubled times but it has dominated and will continue to dominate my life for the foreseeable future. We all have trials and difficulties but I may have landed more softly than I could have. Like my cat, I’m a fan of routine and when it gets so avoidably upset by forces beyond my control, I have to remind myself that others have been through such times and worse times with less complaint and have thrived. I’m not a perfect human being and some of my detractors may even say that I deserved it. Whether I do or not, I’ll just say that may we all survive the rough times so we can better appreciate the good and fun times.
