Tired, oh so fucking tired...

So the weekend and beyond was spent moving and recovering.

Saturday we drove down to Jersey to help Kit and Cherie move back into their old building. Oddity #1 being that they can't move into their apartment yet, because the current tenant hasn't fucked off yet. So they were crashing in one of the upstairs apartments temporarily until he moved out and they could move their stuff in.

The joy started after we'd loaded up all three cars with stuff and Cherie called the landlady to meet us there to let us into the basement apartment, as they don't have a key and she won't give them one for downstairs until the tenant moves out. The response was "I'm cleaning right now, I don't have time. I'll call you back later". What the fuck? And this was when she knew that they were moving in that day and was fine with everything and had said she'd come let them in and such. When Kit called a little later it was all fine and we could come over to bring the stuff. Oddity #2.

We arrive there and start moving furniture and stuff into that one basement room. The building is located in a ghetto, granted the apartments themselves are nice inside... clean and relatively new paint and carpeting and kitchen and such. I swear the house across the road on the corner is a crackhouse, either that or about 30 people must live there. What is it about ghettos that have people walking around on the street all the time and standing out on their porches when it's about 3 zillion degrees below zero?

So all the stuff gets crammed into the small downstairs bedroom, as much as will fit yet we have to make sure the door closes as the tenant supposedly can't know that there are people waiting to move into his place. Oddity #3. This reeks of 'I haven't really told him yet, but I'm trying to get double rent out of this' especially when we consider that this guy was supposed to have left on the 10th and "really wants to move out soon" according to the landlady, yet apparantly knowing there are other tenants waiting to move in will unduly traumatise him or something... and his moving date keeps moving... from the 10th to the 20th to possible the 21st or 22nd or some time around there. It's not like Kit and Cherie have time for this, they're leaving to visit relatives for Christmas, and Cherie is off to China after Christmas and won't be back til January when she starts class again.

The basement apartment itself was somewhat of a joke. 2 bedrooms, one about large enough for a double bed and space to walk around on both sides and not much more. No kitchen, just a sink. Very low ceilings... low enough that all of us had to duck to some degree to stop walking into the naked lightbulbs on the ceiling. The real kicker was the bathroom. Half of it had a raised floor on which the toilet, shower/bath were. At 5'8" I could stand there and touch the ceiling with the top of my head. Cherie is at least 2 inches taller than I am, Kit even more so coming in at at least 6 feet, they had to hunch. None of us could even remotely fit under the shower head without being an Olympic gymnast doing the limbo dance. The most hilarious thing was Kit standing in front of the toilet. He already had to hunch, and then because of the excellent placement of a naked lightbulb also had to lean over to the side in order to assume the position in front of the bowl. Living there would make anyone turn into Quasimodo or you'd look like the latest baddy Zao in James Bond only with shards of lighbulb in your face rather than diamonds. Oh, and the landlady wanted $1100/mo for the place... which is a total joke conisdering the place is tiny anyway, has no kitchen and ceilings so low as to render it half as small again as a regular apartment... and it's in a ghetto of a not too upscale town anyway.

We get everything moved. We go see the new James Bond movie and we go home and crash. I was so tense and overtired from moving that I couldn't actually sleep til around 10am, and proceeded to sleep til about 4pm. While I was asleep Kit called... the landlady was still fucking them around and they decided to move into another place they'd been looking at. And if we could help. PreZ had work on Monday, so it was just me going over to help out, though Kit's mother and Cherie's uncle were also helping out. Even though still really tired I only slept 3 hours or so and headed off to Jersey once more. An hour and a half drive each way, and then moving stuff into an attic apartment up 4 flights of stairs. At least the staircases were slightly more than half of a regular sized flight, but moving loads and loads of stuff even up about 2 full flights of stairs with 3 hours of sleep behind you is just not fun... at the end of they day I just couldn't pick up a single thing anymore. They'd already moved all their stuff out of the basement apartment into the upstairs rooms on Sunday after the landlady had fucked them around once too many, so moving out was easy at least. The landlady showed up when we were moving the last pieces out of the place, and due to all the extra people around and her not being very confrontational she didn't say a thing other than a few cursory 'where are you going' questions. Problem solved.

Afterwards we went and grabbed some dinner and I drove home. I really shouldn't have driven home, I was too tired for it to be completely safe, but it's not like I had any other options open to me... made it home okay though. I'm not too sore which is good, other than the fact that my left hand is somewhat battered with the knuckles of 2 fingers being skinned when I smashed them between a cupboard and what I was carrying at the time, if it could bruise I'd probably be sporting a large one there. The other 2 fingers were skinned above the nailbed, my thumb survived unscathed. Not sore, but still extremely tired as I've just not had enough sleep this weekend. But, no more moving, at least not for the next 5 months or so. Yay!