In two days, I’ve gone from feeling like Hitchcock’s villain to feeling like Santa Claus. Now when I go to bed, I imagine María José walking into the kitchen in the morning and coming across all the packages I’ve brought to the house during the night and picture the expression of surprise and delight on her face when she opens one to find . . . our old toaster!The moving process has been complicated by the fact that Comcast shut off our internet connection at Foster a day earlier than we asked them to and will not turn us on in the new place until Monday morning (I am now at a Burger King with free wi-fi). Consequently, it’s harder to line up our I-Go reservations. Nevertheless, since my last post, the Honda Civic I-GO reindeer helped me bring over the car seat, a bedspread, 2 lamps, pillows, tablecloths, a dish-drying rack, a VCR, 2 cable boxes, half a refrigerator of food, a shower curtain, several packed boxes and sundries out the wazoo. Ahead: more lamps, the stereo and its speakers, mirrors, trashcans, a gaggle of coffee cups, more dishes, posters and other hanging art, the computer printer, the closet shelving unit, half a refrigerator of food, several more packed boxes and more sundries out the wazoo. Then comes the clean-up: the dust bunny round-up, a refrigerator cleansing and then, finally, a showdown with the awful, sanctimonious landlord we’ve been giving our money for the past eight years. After inspecting the place and its various nicks and stains with one of us, he’ll decide how much of our security deposit he deigns to return to us.
In separate visits, neither Mari nor I have felt any lingering nostalgia for or connection to our ex. It’s amazing how different the world we live in now seems from the one we lived in just six blocks away. Living out of recently packed and unpacked boxes, in a single-family dwelling (I haven’t lived in one of those in 18 years) with no television (yet), on a quiet, one-way street with no bus traffic, it almost feels like we’re camping. The pine tree I see outside our window in the morning reaffirms that feeling.
6 comments:
If senor sanctimony gives you any crap about scuffed walls, odd smells or holes in walls, keep reminding him it's been eight years. He's lucky the walls are still standing. Or you could try the Jedi mind trick--he sounds weak-minded enough for it. Just wave your hand vaguely and say, "the place looks great. Here's your money with interest. I'm a sanctimonious prig." My point is have fun with the walk through.
In no way do I want or intend to critize you or your experience with your old landlord. Lord help and protect us from them. However, it takes a special kind of person to do that awful job and not become a real jerk. I liked and was a good friend of JLR's last landlord and he was runined by a tennant. She accused him of sexual harrasement and filed charges against him and sued him and the company. He finally had to move two thousand miles away and start over, after the many visits to civil and criminal courts that exonorated him but did not reimburse him. I guess there is something to the old saying that for every good there is an evil. According to "lost money" some apt. complex still has 350 dollars of mine, somewhere. Hope you have good luck with the deposit. the broke coyote
I say expect nothing at all. Given his track record, that is a reasonable expectation. Then if you get something, you can be happily surprised. But no reason to feel disappointed or newly exploited. It's like feeling angry and cheated when you open a box and see that it's not a shiny new dustbuster but just your same old used toaster. Divide the security deposit by 96 (8 years of months) and that will be the amount of additional monthly rent you have paid. Big deal. As we sing at Christmas time, "Let it go, let it go, let it go!"
Movers. That can be a challenge. I went to a garage sale earlier this year. I asked the person if they had any guns for sale. She said that the movers, a move six months earlier, had stolen everything of any value, including their guns. I asked her if the moving company had reimbursed them. She said they claimed they were not liable because they had sub-contracted the move to another mover. She said the move was enough of a burden, but, along with going deeper in debt at Christmas, and someone breaking into their house on Christmas eve and stealing all their christmas presents, they had to have a garage sale to pay some bills. I understand that some of you who know me may think I made this up, but I assure you I did not. Willy coyote
This, too, shall pass. Sooner rather than later, I hope. Been there, done that. I hate cleaning up after a move. It makes me feel like I was a lousy housekeeper. Love.
Paciencia Steve, las secuelas psicológicas de una mudanza duran muchos años y... hay cosas que ya nunca encontrarás. Han pasado ya 8 años de nuestra última mudanza y he perdido cosas o están en cajas invisibles o nunca las he tenido. No importa si el cambio es para mejorar. Piensa en el pino y disfruta.
Un beso
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