The Final Week - Don't even ask me where I put my gloves...

So tomorrow marks the start of our last week in Southern California. Since last Friday, time has been going on hyper speed and I have to stop my mind from jumping around just to remind myself what fucking day it is. Andy keeps on asking me if our move feels real yet and I’m always disappointed to tell him, ‘no’. People also ask me consistently if I’m getting excited yet and I have to tell them ‘no’ too as my mind is too occupied on all the things we have to do that I can’t seem to spare a moment of thought on excitement.

Today I forgot where I put my passport. MY PASSPORT. The one with the shiny new visa in it ready to be stamped. I’m an incredibly organized person in the sense that I have small piles of disorder and I know pretty much exactly what is in those piles of disorder. Because my small piles of organized disorder got all sorts of re-ordered due to the Great Pond Move of 2011 – (KEEP ON PERSON, SHIP, or WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STILL HAVE THIS? THROW THIS OUT FFS!) my passport location slipped from my memory as I wondered why I still had a library card from Boulder, Colorado (a city where I have never actually lived) and why Andy was telling me why I had to put my tax returns from the last 5 years on my carryon luggage. Thankfully Andy reminded me that my passport is top of the dishwasher where we placed a bunch of ‘Don’t Let the Shippers Take This Stuff’ which only leads me to believe that my subconscious is entirely more intelligent than my functioning conscious and I really ought to buy it a beer once I’m able to drink beer again.

Speaking of the shippers, they came yesterday and took away all our things (except my passport). That was pretty awesome. As many times as I’ve moved, I’ve never used shippers before. My normal method of moving is the great collecting of cardboard boxes from all the local supermarkets and\or liquor stores, 3 copies of the Sunday newspaper, and at least a week spent neck high in packing tape and creative thinking of nesting items to utilize the least amount of space. This time it was simply letting 4 strange men into our apartment while Andy and I sat on the couch playing on the internet and eating cold pizza. To be fair, I felt horribly guilty sitting there eating cold pizza while these four men grunted and sweated around me packing up our things probably thinking to themselves, “Three garden gnomes? Me cago en todo lo que se menea!” Between the four of them, they managed to pack away our entire apartment and load it onto the truck in 3 hours. That’s pretty impressive. Also, because it is required to wrap or pack everything in either a box or in multiple layers of brown paper, it was pretty humorous to see an ironing board and step ladder shaped package leaving the house with such helpful references to said item with “Ironing Board” and “Step Ladder” written on it in black marker (like you couldn’t tell). I’m actually pretty grateful they put a lot of things in “MISC” type boxes as I’m sure I’d be mortified to see a box with “Holey Period Panties” and “She’s Not Fooling Anyone By Thinking She’s Going to Fit in These Pants Again” written on the side.

Once the shippers were finished and all our things were gone, our apartment…well, our apartment is fucking disgusting. Andy and I always cleaned on a regular basis but we certainly didn’t do a type of clean where we took pictures off the wall to get the spider webs or moved the couch around to get to the base boards or even detached the washer\dryer to get all the lint that gathers back there. Now that there aren’t any pictures or couches or appliances to hide all the filth it’s…it’s…I feel a bit ill thinking about it really. Let’s just say that once again I’m going against my norm and hiring a couple house cleaners to help us clean up the apartment on Saturday. I can handle dust bunnies but I really have an aversion to spider and fly carcasses.

We also moved into a hotel yesterday; our last place of residency before we leave next Friday. The hotel is OK – clean and they take pets – and it’s nice to have TV again to remind myself that’s there never anything good on. Chloe was fairly amused by the whole thing. She spent a good two hours sniffing every inch of the room out of curiosity, and then kept looking at us with this expression of, “OK, I’m done here. Let’s go home.” We actually had to give in to her wishes and dropped her off at the empty apartment when we left for work this morning as we didn’t want a Hotel Maid vs. Chloe Straight-Tail law suit.

Even though we are technically out of the apartment, we still have loads of things to do – doctor’s appointments, selling Andy’s car, picking up the rental, cleaning, apartment inspection…so on and so forth. Andy and I are both running into this frustration of people getting in touch with us trying to make plans to see us. It shouldn’t be frustrating, in fact, it’s quite endearing to know that here are all these people who love you and who will miss you that they really want to spend some time with you before you go. The problem is that it’s hard to make plans, or even want to make plans when your head is so full of Things That Must Be Done that by making plans it’s just another item to have to put on your list of things to remember to do that it kind of takes the enjoyment out of it. I’d rather just say, “we’ll be at the pub on this date and time” but that never seems to work out (these people are never free when you are or just don’t like going to said pub) so you either have to do half assed “we’ll see” plans or just tell the person that you’re too busy to see them and that just plain out sucks.

Driving into work today Andy asked me if now, after everything we’ve been through, if moving to another country is as exciting as it seemed to before we started. After a moment of reflection I said, “Ask me once we get there.”