Listen to the Rain

There are many ways to be observant:

Me: "The office facing the dawn makes it a great place to say the Shema."
desh: So much frummer than I am. 😛
Me: "I will think fondly of this comment the next time I'm doing melacha on Shabbat 😅"
desh:"Wait....maybe Jewish observance practices DON'T fit on a 1-dimensional continuum from less to more?!?!"
Me: "That's ridiculous! Everyone more observant than me is a hidebound luddite fanatic and everyone less observant than me is contributing to the extinction of the Jewish people. That's just common sense."
desh: "I am definitely both."
Me: "Intersectionality!"

But the real big news is that...I moved! I bought a condo!

I went down to the signing on Tuesday, at nine o'clock sharp in the Loop, and then it took three hours because of the lender's incompetence. The packet wasn't ready when I got there. They kept screwing up the paperwork because they didn't understand how to deal with an individual and a trust joint-owning anything (they ended up just deleting the entry field and hand-entering the info). They called me the previous night and told me that most of the documents would come through DocuSign and I could just read them at leisure and sign them online, and no email came. They ignored my explicit instructions as to how I sign my name on official documents, so I had to alter my signature. On, and on, and on. I made sure I ate almost a dozen cookies to take full advantage of the title fee, and then when everything was finally done and I was a member of the landed gentry, I went back to my old apartment to start moving.

It's a good thing my parents stayed to help, because it turned into slightly more of an ordeal than I expected. While my father replaced the locks and the electrical sockets--installing sockets with integral night-lights and USB connections, welcome to the future --and my mother did some cleaning, I unloaded my kitchen, and then my bedroom. I brought all my kitchen supplies and clothes over, my bathroom supplies and my futon (carried up the stairs on his back by my father), and set that up. We made a few trips and then it was almost dinner time, so my parents had to leave to go take care of the dogs and I had to prepare for my birthday dinner with meowtima and lisekatevans!

We went to Anteprima, the site of the last birthday dinner I had two years ago. meowtima ordered a bottle of wine, lisekatevans showed up after we had sat down, meowtima addressed me as "m'lord" a few times, we drank, we ate, the restaurant brought me birthday tiramisu, it was amazing. After a very long day, it was exactly what I needed, and when we went out to George's for ice cream and then said goodbye to meowtima, I felt a lot better. lisekatevans helped me move one more box of stuff to my new place as I brought over all the food that was in the fridge, we opened a bottle of wine and talked for a while, and then she left and I went to sleep in my home.

The next day the movers were coming, so I woke up at 5:30 a.m. unable to fall back asleep. With nothing else for it, I got up, went back to my apartment, and did the last bits of packing I needed to do. I even ran a couple boxes over to my home, emptied them, and then ran them back and repacked them. When the movers showed up at 9 a.m., I was ready.

I hired the same movers that I hired for the last move, and they said the same thing--that I did all the work for them. They were just as efficient, helpful, and price-competitive as they were last time, and even though the person living below me left his gas grill and some construction debris (lumber, a ladder, etc) in the stairway even though I called the management company and told them when I was moving in, the movers still finished within their original estimate. And the foreman gave me props for my Mario coin text tone, and another mover said he wanted my old Gandalf LotR framed poster, so I gave it to him. They left at noon, I ate lunch, went back for the last couple things I hadn't told the movers to take like my katana, handed the keys over to my neighbors--the first time I had met them, and I learned that one of them was a massive Legend of Zelda fan--and then walked back to my home to wait for the RCN people to come hook up the internet.

My modem didn't work, but it is about four years old so it failing isn't entirely unexpected. I have a rented modem now but I'll probably buy a new one. And then I had to read more Ember in the Ashes before book group and unpack.

I have a huge pile of boxes in my dining room (open plan, but), there's a lot of grit on the floor, and I don't know where a bunch of stuff is, but I have a home.

Thursday I went back to work--originally I had taken it off, but later changed my mind--and I met ed.mcnamara13 and takei.tsubasa for lunch at Gyūkaku! I had last seen them back in May, when they were here to look around before takei.tsubasa started her Chicago job. Well, now it's starting, and ed.mcnamara13 was here helping her move. Again, ed.mcnamara13 and I did most of the talking, and he offered to give me a bunch of light novels that someone gave him and that he'd owned for years without having read, so I'll get more Japanese practice! We also all commiserated over how banal and saccharine 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ, the book I'm reading with my Japanese tutor, is. takei.tsubasa didn't talk a lot, but I noticed she kept glancing at the menu. And Gyūkaku is delicious, so I get that. I could only stay an hour before I had to run back to work, but ed.mcnamara13 said he'd be by more often since takei.tsubasa lives here now, so I'm looking forward to it!

After work I got a haircut and then joined aaron.hosek at First Slice Pie for dinner! He was in Europe for the past couple weeks on a last pre-school-year vacation, and he's been absorbed by Final Fantasy XIV for much of the summer, so it was great to see him. I asked him about his trip and returned the Guy Gavriel Kay parallel history books I borrowed from him (The Lions of Al-Rassan, etc.) as well as The Lies of Locke Lamora, I told him about moving, he told me about his new apartment and the battle of wills with his landlord over getting it painted, and I got to say longer because I didn't have therapy. Though not too long, with all the unpacking I had to do. We realized that we're now literally for blocks from each other, so we have no reason not to hang out more often.

When I went home, the RAM testing I had run on my computer came back clean. It blue-screened after the RCN guy left and threw a ton of errors on the first test, but slots 2 and 4 came back clean and when I put 1 and 3 back in, the whole thing came back clean. Hopefully it was just a fluke! We treated it extremely gently during moving to make sure that this didn't happen, and yet...

As my father says, the more you know about computers, the more amazed you are that they ever work.

Now I'm at work for a half-day, and then I'm meeting lisekatevans and luke.beasley.262 so we can take a trip up to lisekatevans's parents' lake house at Sand Lake in Michigan! She said the forecast predicts night temperatures in the low 10°s C, so I cracked open a box last night and found my long cardigan there on the first try! That meant I could hang up some coats as well as put some boxes on the shelves, so I'm slowly settling into my new home. I even hung some pictures on the walls where the previous owner/renter hadn't removed the hooks!

I'm really looking forward to a nice vacation weekend. I'm not exhausted anymore, but I'm definitely still tired. A weekend at a lake house with chilly nights and warm bonfires is just what the doctor ordered.