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Independence Day 2008
After about two weeks of relying on others to provide us shelter, Lauren and I moved into our new place on July 4, 2008. Sort of.
The stuff that the movers took, i.e. most of our stuff? That hasn't arrived yet, and won't until Wednesday. However, I loaded up my mother's truck with our luggage, a few things my mother had given us--a desk, a recliner, a dresser--and a bunch of the wedding gifts that had already arrived. Meanwhile, Lauren took the car up to her parents' house and collected all the non-refrigerated food we had packed (it seemed easier than worrying about how we could or couldn't pack food for the movers) as well as the gifts from her bridal shower (which is to say, a bunch of kitchen gadgets for me) and other assorted things that we'd left at her parents' place.
So we have a random assortment of things here, and we have each other, and we have some time on our hands. We're planning to paint at least one room and we want to get and put down some carpet remnants, because our bedroom floor is neither carpeted nor wood--it's institutional tile flooring. It's kind of nice, really, before we fill our apartment up with stuff, to have some time to contemplate the place and do that kind of work on it. I was planning on fencing in a big segment of our backyard so that Beaker has a nice play area and we have an easy way to let her go outside and do her business when we're feeling lazy. It just occurred to me, however, that we may want the movers to have access to areas that would be fenced off, so we'll either need to fence carefully, fence in a way that can be temporarily moved, or hold off on fencing.
Our apartment, of course, is on the campus of the boarding school we'll be teaching at, the school where I began my teaching career. As I pulled onto campus, I got a stupid grin on my face, because it was nice to be back. When I finally got into the apartment, the grin just got bigger, because I realized that not only was the apartment nicer and more spacious than any of the apartments I lived in during my first five-year stint here, but it's quite a bit more spacious than the apartment we paid so much a month for last year in Providence. It does not, of course, have all the advantages of living in a city, but loads of space it does have. Not, of course, that the particular space won't have challenges. I can already see that it may be difficult to find a really good place for our dining room table--it will almost certainly have to be in the living room space, but which part of the living room do we compromise in order to have room for dining? Our office is quite large, but how will we set it up best to accommodate two teachers and the students who will come in for extra help (and our many bookcases?!)? Our kitchen feels quite spacious, and yet there doesn't seem to be any good place for the baker's rack or the cookbook cabinet. As I said, there will be challenges, but I'm sure we'll manage them. At this point, we're looking forward to trying.