Notes from the small-seaside town:
Today I was walking on the beach with my husband (don’t be TOO jealous, it was grey, about 30 degrees and super windy) and there was this sign that said “DONT BOTHER THE SEAL PUPS.” And then four feet away, looking exactly like a piece of moldy driftwood (or, conversely, a very gray human baby) was a tiny new baby seal with its eyes closed, breathing really fast and twitching in its sleep. I tried to convince Glenn it was cold and needed me to hug it keep it warm, but he pointed out the sign again. I think it would play really well with the cats.
In other news, I found my roasting pan, and put my bookshelves together. Also had to go to the eye doc after something during the move flew into my eye and my eye swelled up and got all red and they had to get it out with a suction cup thingy they put on your eyeball (ow!) and run an IV (eye-V?) bag of saline through to rinse out your eye. Like a big plastic contact lens. Not something I’d recommend for fun, especially if you’re a little eye-squeamish (I am!) In future, my father tells me, I should wear protective “Lab Goggles” when I move. Especially in the 60-mile-an-hour winds and a truck full of tiny particles of dust, mold, fiberglass, feathers, and God knows what else was in there from previous moves…Hey, when I was in organic chem, we had the eye safety center, which was basically a big water fountain, and that was good enough for us. No frou-frou-plastic-suction-eye-wash crap for us! No sir. Such overkill these modern doctors!
Also, I bought Thanksgiving food, including a branch of brussel sprouts. I don’t know exactly how to cook them on a branch. Should we just throw it in the over and gnaw at it? I did not buy a pie, though they looked good, because, what are two people going to do with a whole pie? If we want pie, you can go to the coffee shop the day after Thanksgiving. I’m sure we’ll be hungry again by then.
One more carload of stuff in the old place to get tomorrow…
40 things that can go wrong when you move, or why moving is always, always more expensive and challaneging than you think…Or, trust that Murphy fellow and his law
First of all, a big shout-out and thank you to Poet Kelli and her husband who helped us move into our new place. That’s a real poetry superheroine, one who will actually move your boxes with you! In the driving cold wind and rain! Anyway, we are eternally grateful, K!
So, yesterday, the pickup of the 26-foot truck was scheduled was 8:30 AM, and the movers were supposed to appear at 9 AM. But, low and behold, when husband G shows up yesterday morning, they did not have the reservation or know anything about it. Later, the manager showed up and says, Oh, I wrote you down for blank day. Of course, the wrong day. So we end up calling a bunch of rental companies in a panic. The movers start charging us at 9 AM whether we have a truck or not. Finally we find a truck, a 23-foot. Glenn buys extra insurance on the truck because he is nervous about driving such a big truck himself. (Turns out that will be a smart move on his part.) So that was yesterday’s drama (ended up paying an extra $110 for the mover’s time.) Also, we had to buy lots of little things that were missing from the house: a curtain rod, new sets of curtains for the hundred thousand giganto-windows we have that look directly into our neighbor’s houses (great view!) a shower curtain, a new cat litter box, and one of those rugs for the inside of the doorway – since we haven’t had non-carpeted floors in about 8 years. A Target run that cost about as much as I made last month.
This morning, at 7 AM we start loading up all the little stuff, including all of our clothes. It is about 40 degrees, howling wind, and driving sideways soaking rain. At about 11 AM, we took off in the big rig for Port Townsend. Husband G was driving like a champ, even maneuvering the giant truck on and off the ferry, which can be tricky. But after two hours of driving, about five miles away from our new place, he tries to pull a turn in a parking lot and knocks the fender off a parked car. Holy Crap! The truck isn’t even dinged. He calls the police to let them know what happened since he can’t find the owner of the car, and leaves his insurance information, but he is devastated. The woman evenutally calls and they exchange information, (she wasn’t mad, just bemused by how such a thing had happened) police later give him a citation, and our insurance rates will go up now. Perfect way to start life in a new town!
Did I mention my computer crashed (for no apparent reason) three times during the last two days, wiping out not all of my labor, but at least a chunk of it?
Lessons Learned: Always buy the extra insurance. Sometimes it’s worth it to pay for a moving truck AND driver. Don’t buy Vista yet. Save your documents frequently. When making reservations for movers and a truck, give yourself a few hours of leeway, and always call every day for at least ten days and talk to every employee at the rental truck agency to make sure they all know you and when you’re renting their truck. Or get a written contract. Or save yourself a lot of pain and stay put in one place as long as possible. Sell all your possessions and live out of your backpack, so you don’t have to rent a truck in the first place. Or make a lot of money so none of those little-expenses-that-add-up hurt so badly. Maybe I should look into that…
Mood: Exasperated, Exhausted, and Broke
Not Poetry-Related, Technical Effluvia
In the midst of the move, and all the associated panic (where is my blank? Where will we put blank? And where the blank have the blanks gone?) here is my pressing question:
Does anyone else who upgraded to Vista feel nostalgic for Win NT?
Moving Some More…and poetry and stuff…
Okay, now that I’ve gotten the keys and stocked the fridge and made sure the cable and phone worked (they didn’t, but we had the guy come out to fix them) I’m thinking, yay, small town Americana by the sea! Sure I’ll miss those big glitzy (and also, teensy cool) bookstores and big glossy grocery stores, but the ocean will make up for it. Unfortunately, no view of the water from the little slightly dingey side street we live on, but it’s less than a five-minute drive in any direction.
Snuck out of packing for an hour yesterday to see Matthea Harvey at Open Books, who was great, but sadly, had not heard of Astro Boy (a 60’s anime cult figure who has made a comeback on Adult Swim.) I had this theory abour her Robo-Boy poems and their connection to Astro Boy…well, maybe the connection still works, but more in a collective unconscious kind of way. Anyway, she was great and the room was packed, and Oliver was there (hi Oliver!) I did manage to get away without buying any new poetry.
On the way down to small-town-by-the-sea to the new house today, husband G and I listened to Margaret Atwood’s CD of her reading her new book, The Door. She’s a fun, if slightly flat-toned, reader. It helped to hear them as well as see them.
I’ll be delivering a paper at AWP on Pedagogy, it seems. Yay! Now to get those airline tickets and hotel reservations (all the conference hotels are sold out, of ourse, even the new Doubletree one…) At this AWP, I swear I will be neither disabled by back injury (like last year) or sick (like the two years before that.) It’s health all the way for me! And dancing and fun til all hours! I hope 🙂
- At November 12, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Moving Time
9
Moving Time…You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here
Moving again? Well, by now it’s become old hat. Since 1998 I’ve moved…let’s see, Cincinnati to Virginia, Virginia to Seattle…9 times. I’d like to point out that’s nine times in less than ten years. I don’t recommend that kind of behavior. It’s expensive and really puts your writing life into disarray. For instance, right now I’m desperately grabbing copies of Margaret Atwood, Dorianne Laux, and Matthea Harvey’s books for my reviews, in case I need to quote something from one of their earlier books, as my husband deconstructs the poetry bookcase and packs my books (there go the anthologies!) into bins. All around me are boxes, boxes with shoes and dishes and life’s every day chutney-of-stuff. Hard to write when the dust hasn’t settled, the dust of the mind, I mean.
I moved around a lot as a kid, too. My Dad, looking to land that ever-elusive tenure-track professor of Engineering position, moved us (four kids and wife, plus, sometimes, animals) from – let’s see – from Missouri to Yale U to UCLA to U of Tennessee to U of Cincinnati, where he still teaches. As a kid I used to think everyone moved as much, and as dramatically (my parents often finding a place to live at the last minute, giving us a week or two notice, packing ourselves into moving trailers, driving 21 hours a day on route to the new place) as my family did. When I found out there were people who stayed in the same place their whole life, I felt sorry for them. I thought they were really missing out – the new friends you’re forced to make, new scenery to admire or grumble about, the new horizon – plus the whole self-reinvention thing you get to try out.
Now, I’m not so sure. I think moving so much may have done something to my mental processes, the way I process memories of places and people. I often don’t put as much mental or emotional energy into getting attached to new places or people as I probably should – investing the kind of emotion neccessary – after all, in the back of my mind, I’m pretty sure I’ll be leaving as soon as I’ve started to get used to them. Everything physical is temporary – that is a lesson I have definitely learned by heart.
So will the new place be Home? In the words of OK Go, “So here I go, here I go, here I go again…”
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
