Settling in…
Sorry I haven’t posted since the 23rd; it’s been pretty busy. We finally did make it to Ashland - here’s the route we ended up taking in the end, more or less. We left Sandwich on Thursday morning, stopped in Sturgis, MI to have a late lunch with my family there, drove all the way to Rochester, NY that evening, and somehow managed to make it to Ashland, MA by noon on Friday. It was pretty exhausting, and that wasn’t anywhere near the end of the turmoil. The movers had arrived at the new apartment before us, as had our realtor, and they were all anxious to get things … well, “moving”. So, despite running on something like 3 or 4 hours of sleep, (this is the point my mother calls me on the phone to scold me upon reading this post) we took posession of our new apartment for the first time and directed the moving-in operation.
Of course, there was one little problem. The carpets in the new place were utterly filthy. So filthy that we couldn’t even walk around in our socks on them, because our socks would end up black on the bottom. It took a few days of fighting with our landlord before we got them to agree to pay for a thorough carpet cleaning. It was truly one of the most stressful and annoying things I’ve ever had to deal with, and I wasn’t even the one doing most of the work!
The good news is that our carpets are now clean (ChemDry did an amazing job on them, but they were quite expensive…), so we finally managed to settle in a bit and unpack some of the boxes. There’s been plenty of other turmoil, of course:
- $600 spent at IKEA
- One of the cats stressed to the point where it peed on the floor. Twice.
- My car arrived from the shippers with a giant oil stain on the roof
- Comcast being difficult (big surprise, eh?) … “What? You can’t use that cable modem, it’s still in use on this other account! Oh that’s _your_ old account? Oh you closed it two years ago? But that doesn’t make any sense! You should have been getting billed! Oh look, you owe us $742 for service that didn’t exist!” Quality customer service, right there.
I posted some various bad photos of the new apartment from the day we moved in, some less-bad photos from the drive from San Francisco to Boston, and some completely unrelated photos from the week we were on Maui.