It was moving week.

So, the last week was dedicated to my moving. I took a week off work and made an effort to be as organized as possible. The guy who rented the new apartment to me made some joke about never hearing this much from a new tenant. I did call like 5 different times during the month leading up to my move, but all my questions were things he should have told me anyway once I committed to signing the lease (like my new address and making an appt. to sign the lease, etc.), but whatever.

Anyway....
Monday - I had a 9:30 meeting in South County to sign my new lease and then I needed to be back downtown at my work at 10:30 to get something done real quick. I was ten minutes late to meet my rental guy and he was surprised to see me. He hadn't even gotten my apartment keys copied for me yet. By the time, he got everything together and we had walked through my apartment and checked my new mailbox and everything was signed, it was 10:30. I rushed to my work and, luckily, they were running late, so I got there in time to observe something that takes them about 10 minutes to do, but they only do it once every two weeks. Then I headed back to my old apartment to continue packing and wait for Jeff and my sister to show up. Around 3pm, they showed up and we moved my turtle aquarium, freezer and refrigerator food stuff and anything else we could pack into the 3 cars. Then we caravaned to the new apartment and unloaded. We set up the turtle tank and got everything working, stocked up on a few household items and set up the kitty litter box, then Jeff and Tara headed to their homes and I headed to my soon to be old apartment. I continued packing boxes for the rest of the night and was down to my last two boxes around 3:45 in the morning when I ran out of packing tape. (The best part of this story is that when they moved the couches out, underneath the couch in the spot where I had been sitting was a brand new roll of packing tape that had gotten lost underneath there during the initial move into the apartment.) So, without the tape, I gave up and went to sleep. The movers were going to be there in about 5 hours.

Tuesday - I got up, showered and I had lost 2 pounds thanks to our late afternoon moving endeavor. Whoo-hoo! I texted my sister to bring me packing tape, so I could finish packing and she arrived with duct tape about an hour into the move. The moving company had estimated it would take about two hours to move me with an additional hour driving time. In the end, it took them 5 hours to move me with an additional hour driving time. The moving guys were great and they worked their butts off, so I'm not sure why the estimate was so far off, other than I have a lot of crap and my old apartment has a difficult layout and awkward stairs. I also got the pleasure of climbing onto the roof of my apartment to detach the DirecTV satellite dish because my rental company said it needed to be gone or I'd have to pay a fee and DirecTV said they don't ever send people out to pick the satellite dish back up. I own it now. I wish I had known/realized that when I signed up. So now I have a satellite dish in the backseat of my car. My sister had to remain at the old apartment waiting for the cleaning crew to come because they said Tuesday was the best day for them to work my apartment into their schedule. I needed to be at my new apartment to wait for the DirecTV guy. The cleaning crew never showed up and when I called, they had me scheduled for Wednesday. I still don't know how that happened. So, my sister went home. My new apartment has specific rules about DirectTV and the apartment they assigned me wouldn't work with that service. But I had only completed one year of a two year contract. So I needed a technician to come out and confirm they couldn't hook me up before getting a different cable company. The DirecTV guy showed and said exactly what I expected. Then I headed to my sister's house to do my laundry and pick up my cat.

Wednesday - I slept in and I had lost 6 pounds so far that week due to the moving process. Whoo-hoo! Then I headed to my old apartment to wait for the cleaning crew. They showed up that day and were really nice. I asked them how bad my apartment was and they said "pretty bad, but they've seen worse." Thanks! (Seriously, the worst part was just a lot of hair/dustballs and a dirty stove. I just never vacuumed or mopped the floor in the year I lived there. No stains on the carpet or leftover cat puke or anything like that.) So, after an hour and a half, they were done and my apartment looked fab-tabulous. I was really impressed. It definitely looked like I had made a great effort at leaving my apartment as close to how I received it as possible, but if you looked closely you could find flaws. I spackled the holes for the few pictures I hung up. But you just never know how picky they are going to be or what exactly constitutes "reasonable wear and tear". After the cleaning I went back to work for a few hours to watch some tapes. I was thisclose to finishing two audits and I had hoped if I put a few hours in, I could tie them up before I came back to work. It just didn't happen. So I headed back to my apartment where I didn't have a TV or internet. That was weird for me, but I unpacked boxes and read books (True Blood series). I should also throw in that I watched "New Moon" and "Star Trek" over and over from the time my TV was disconnected Tuesday morning until it was re-connected to cable Thursday afternoon. (BTW, I enjoyed watching Star Trek with the commentary on, but was extremely disappointed that I couldn't find a "deleted scenes" option on the disk. They talked about it in the commentary like it would be part of the DVD, but I never found it, if it is there. And the scenes of Bella screaming in her sleep due to her pain of Edward dumping her, really got on my nerves. Thank God, I have a blind spot when it comes to any criticism of the "Twilight" series or I could really end up hating Kristin Stewart as an actress just for those few scenes.)

Thursday - The cable guy showed up in the early afternoon. He was really friendly and looked like he was about 12 (okay, he looked 21. I'm exaggerating). He had played tennis on his lunch break so he was a little smelly but I didn't care because I was getting my TV and internet back. YAYYY! Once my TV and internet were back I stopped unpacking boxes and just laid on the couch, set my computer up so that it was within arm reach, turned on the TV and facebooked for the rest of the night, while watching cable. It was great.

Friday - I had to meet my old rental apartment representative for the walk-through. She did a quick 5 minute look and then said I'd be getting my full deposit back. Yay for me. Then I went to work for a couple hours, then home again. I was supposed to go to the baseball game that night with my sister, but a huge storm blew through and we skipped the game. The Cards played anyway. They were stopped in the 6th inning because of rain and then restarted around 10pm and played the rest of the game. I was at home watching TV and Facebooking while not unpacking any boxes.

So, I still have about 15 boxes to finish unpacking and I haven't found my camera, nail polish, or dishwashing tablets. My goal is to do 5 boxes tonight and then keep working from there.