excited
myrrhianna and hcolleen and I had an appointment with that Apartment Finders fellow today. We got there early, despite some nattering around before leaving, laundry (included in the nattering around), a quick detour to Party City, a stop off at QT, some gnarly traffic where something involving two large service-type vehicles and a police car had blocked the intersection with the 17 and some dweeb in a Porsche wound up making things worse by expecting the other vehicles to move out of the way simply because he was trying to cross the intersection with his green light, and then ... Pig. myrrhianna has been eying Pig for some time. It is a large pink pig, shaped approximately like a large pink balloon with five half paper cups stuck on the bottom side as legs and snout, and its snout has a squeaker in it. It was in the Sanrio store. It is cute. It is also smaller than Ryoga*, but not by much. Pig has been a topic of much discussion in the little social circle here. At a point not too horribly far in the past, the two of us made a little side trip to a certain place. We decided that today was the day, since myrrhianna had asked if we could go by the Sanrio store to check on Pig. We were going to do this in the AZ Mills parking lot, but there wasn't enough time to go there first. When we hit the Apartment Finders parking lot, I opened up the trunk, ostensibly in search of a pad of paper, and balloons emerged. (Not as neatly as I'd hoped, but eh.) myrrhianna made the sorts of noises that one makes in this sort of situation, and wound up going in to our appointment clutching Pig tightly, with four pink balloons tied to her wrist. The guy recognized us. It's hard not to. We're not exactly a hard group of women to forget. We talked about the options;
myrrhianna filled him in on the particular quirks to the situation. He came up with two likely places, one more likely than the other. He got in touch with the first one (more expensive, but one-level & a ground floor unit available) & printed us up information on the 2nd (cheaper!! larger!! but 2-level). We headed off to check out the first one, which was in a very reasonable distance from the call center where hcolleen and I are likely to wind up at, given the direction we seem to be heading at work. The woman who showed us the apartment at the last place we were looking is working at that location now. We hailed her. Another woman in the office showed us the display unit. It was grand! It wasn't perfect, but it was definitely workable. The kitchen passed the butt-test**. The closet doors are all mirrored, but that can be fixed with curtains if necessary. (They don't have non-mirrored doors available; I asked.) The master bedroom was assigned by a vote of two to one. The closet space is not fabulous, but will do nicely. The bedrooms are acceptable to me and my picky requirements about placing a bed. There is patio or balcony. There is a storage closet outside. There is an alarm system; not necessarily monitored, but it can be done. (I was amused to see that there were lettered keys: F, A, P, in that order.) There is a rather oddly-placed but convenient computer nook; it will eventually house the Entertainment Machine. It's not a good place to sit, though. There will be bookshelves.
We stopped attempting to furnish the apartment with our eyes very quickly, and went back down to the office. There was an unspoken consensus that very quickly became spoken. This was it.
We filled out paperwork.
hcolleen and I are the initial applicants, because we're the ones who are not about to be flat out with surgery going on. I get to let the current apartment complex management know that we're to be moving out, and then we'll have October to move (overlapping). The lady mentioned storage units, and I jumped on that. I've been -- I guess you could say praying -- but hoping for a solution that would do what I wanted to do. I was thinking very seriously about renting a storage unit to stash boxes in so we could pack up as fast as we wanted to now and then move at our leisure. A storage unit at the new apartment complex that we could rent before the apartment would let us start moving things over there a bit at a time, so we wouldn't have to have as horrible a crazy weekend as moving usually is. We'd be having two crazy weekends, most likely -- one for us (no current cats), and one for Myrrh (cats). Even the concept that the lady had misread some move-out dates & the three-bedroom unit that was available was a 2nd-floor one didn't spoil it. It's going to be cheaper than we anticipated. We might technically be able to afford to move now, but that would not make for a happy and smooth move. Their system was down (no email notification of the downtime to them, yay) so they couldn't process the application right then and there. But.
I think this is it. OMG.
Moving is to be happening in October, either the 2nd and 3rd or 3rd and 4th weekends of same, assuming all goes as it should. Anyone (local) who feels like helping out, please do let us know so we can coordinate. (Please also enter your information into the Pizza Arbiter to lower the number of weird guessing games.
samurai_ko had a good idea with the bagel brunch for her Epic Move, and I think that's a good tradition to follow as well.) (easalle and family are off the hook for this one, as they were there last time.) After this dizzying progression, I navigated us to Target for a bloody new steering wheel cover (Vash's was refusing to stay on) and a new chair (my yoga ball sprung a slow, invisible leak, and I needed a replacement). This became swiftly Epic. Pig was belted in to the toddler seat in the shopping cart. There was hilarity. We washed up at Long John Silver's for supper;
hcolleen and I got a little extra with our meals because they were running short-staffed and wound up spacing our meals somehow. (Not arguing with the end results!) It was quite the weekend. My announcement scheme is amusing, at least to me. I called Darkside first. He wasn't home. (His mom wasn't in a chatty mood, or I would have told her first and let her pass it on to him.) So I told IRC, because what with everything that went down in June, Darkside doesn't have first-informed rights anymore. Then I started drafting this LJ post. Then I realized that really, my best friend has higher priority than the entirety of LJ, so I dashed off a quick email to him. Now, it's time to let the whole world know!
* Ryoga, aka Sumo-cat, is
myrrhianna's boy-cat. He rivals Garfield in size. He is also a complete fraidy-cat. ** Can all members of the household be in the kitchen at the same time without having their butts collide? Failing this test is what gives rise to the saying "Too many butts in the kitchen!"
