Lessee now — it’s been 3 1/2 weeks since we arrived here, and about 10 days since our furniture and boxes of crap joined us. (We received one box that did not belong to us. I called the moving company to let them know, but they haven’t gotten back to me as to how they plan to get this box to its rightful owner. That’s a bit unsettling.) I had this beautiful dream in which I unpacked for 10 hours a day, every day, and got the whole place arranged and bright and shiny within a week!

Dreams are nice, aren’t they?

Click on Mr. Readmore! It’s tremendously exciting!

I did do a fair amount yesterday, but I was discouraged at how things didn’t look all that different. I moved the big bookcase into the corner that McDoc and I had designated for it. When he got home, he was surprised that I had managed to do that by myself. I keep trying to tell him that I’m not a 90-pound weakling. I am at least a 100-pound weakling. Actually I’m a lot more weakling than that, but I digress. What I lack in upperbody strength, I make up for in resourcefulness and ingenuity. if you want to more something heavy and unwieldy across a wood floor without scratching it, you just need an old towel or blanket. You tip one side of the object so you can pull the blanket under it, then the other, and voilà! You can glide across the floor like buttah! Just make sure, if your object is tall, that you avoid the running ceiling fan while doing this.

I also worked on unpacking dishes. This was where I came to grief. What words shall I use to describe the amount of counter and cabinet space we have in our kitchen? Scanty, scarce, meager, paltry? Something along those lines. The kitchen as a whole is actually pretty spacious — it is what a New York real-estate agent would call an eat-in kitchen — but that’s the problem: it has a lot of… space. Where things like cupboards ought to be. We need to buy some sort of supplemental unit; sadly, IKEA is a 40-min. drive from here, and then one time we went there, the thing we wanted was out of stock, grrr!. We have 2 good-size cabinets over the sink/stove area, and currently, one is for dishes and the other is for food items. Then there are 2 more dinky cabinets over the fridge and stove, the kind that even a taller-than-average female such as myself needs a step-stool to access. So you put things you don’t use very often up there, like your crock pot, blender, wine glasses — dear God, did I say that? I can’t get to my wine glasses! Now I have to drink straight from the bottleaaaaagghhh…

Ahem. So I am now realizing that I was actually spoiled in my previous apartment. The kitchen there was long and narrow and nigh on unworkable for serious cooking, what with the stove and fridge shoe-horned back in the corner facing each other with about 6 inches of space between them. But I did have enough cabinets to store the dishes, pots, pans and glasses sufficient to throw the dinner parties for 8 that I used to have. So yesterday I kept pulling dishes our of boxes, kind of like scarves out of a magic hat, fretting to myself that I had nowhere to store them. Should I even bother putting them through the dishwasher, I wondered? Oh yes, we have one! It’s a small one, but still. Thing is, I am so stuck in my depression era/grad student mentality that I’ve mostly been doing dishes by hand anyway. But that’s gonna change, buddy.

I must jump back into the fray again today — next target: books. Oh dear Lord, please shoot me now.