The Final Countdown

That was absolutely necessary.

Today is my last full day in New Jersey.  My plans for it are as such:

• Finish packing up my clothes (SO. MANY. CLOTHES.)
• Sprucing up my bedroom a bit so my parents can stop complaining
• Getting my last haircut for a while from my mom.  My mom has been the only person to ever cut my hair (except the first time I donated it because she was too scared) and I just don't think I can enter the world of paying for my own haircuts.  You can tell me I'm growing up, but I'd still rather say, "Hey Mom? Can you cut my hair after dinner?" Luckily, since I'm a girl, I'm allowed to grow my hair out without looking like too much of an asshole, unlike my brother, who works for the government.
• Packing the rest of my crap in my car.  My dad and stepmom gave Keith and I a toaster oven, which prompted me to squeal with glee.  My grandma also gave us a proper pasta pot.  These two boxes take up more room than you think they should.  

This is what I'd like to fit in my car:

• My clothes
• My bag of toiletries 
• My duffel of stuff I'll actually wear across the road
• My bag of important and possibly breakables
• My teacher bag with various items in it
• My toaster over, pasta pot, and bitchin' fish fishbowl (I have a thing for fishes)
• I'd really like to also fit in my cd tower and my two potted plants and bamboo, but they might have to stay home with my mom. 

I think that's it. 

After I do all of that, I'll say goodbye to my mom, stepdad, and sister, cry for a bit, and then stop by my dad's and say goodbye to my dad and stepmom, cry some more, and then drive to Keith's.  I'll spend the night at Keith's, and then on Monday morning, away we go. 

I will try to update from the road, but we'll see how that all pans out.  If not, I'll see you in California.

New Jersey, I love you so. 

road trip music

With Monday rapidly approaching, I'm trying to make sure I have some clutch music on my iPod to hold Keith and I over on the drive.  He'll also have his iPod, but sometimes, he likes to get a little more country than I do.  I get about as country as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, which I feel like is the hipster, indie-alternative version of country.

Regardless, I realized that my iPod was missing Supertramp, so I'm currently rectifying that now. I'm generally of the indie-alternative persuassion.  To give you an idea of what I'm into, I really enjoy Local Natives, Le Loup (who are now in the Blackberry commercials! Check them out!), fun. (currently in the Sprint commercials, I think?), Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend, Good Old War, Rilo Kiley and other fun stuff.  I listen to all types really (Lord knows my two favorites are 311 and The Beatles and that I've been known to throw it down to Jay-Z and some other glorious rap songs), so give me some recommendations so Keith and I don't get bored of our iPods.  Bonus points if it's a song about driving/road trips, even if it's not of the kind of music I listed.

In the meantime, I'm going to finally bask in "Give a Little Bit" since I've somehow lived this long without it on my iPod.

Packing is Really Obnoxious

I know this blog is here to let you all know how my move is going and all, and we all knew this would happen. I've obviously become a victim of time, meaning that there's very little of it and I have a lot to do.

The good news is that I am packed.  My Door2Door shipping container holding pretty much everything I've ever thought was picked up yesterday and is getting shipped today. It's going to beat me to LA by a day or so.  This makes the actual drive much easier than I originally thought it'd be, because I no longer have to worry about driving a huge ass truck with a car on a flatbed behind it. I only have to worry about maneuvering my little Corolla, which I am having spacial issues with since it's new and I'm still used to driving around my Honda CR-V.

Keith and I went to Delaware early on Tuesday morning to pack up everything that was there.  I packed my car with other various stuff that you saw in my room from a previous post, including all of my board games, a TV my brother left behind, books, CDs, and some clothes.  We had all intentions of packing for the day and getting out early on Wednesday.  We had breakfast with two of his friends who he hasn't seen in a while.  After breakfast, we headed back to my apartment and started on laundry and packing, but then I got a message from Kaylee through facebook.  She really liked how my tattoo turned out this past May and has been saying how she's been itching to get her next tattoo and wanted to see my artist, Javier at Tough Luck Tattoo in Lewes, DE.  Kaylee is a great friend and decided that she'd finally make it to DE after all my years of being there, help me pack, and get a tattoo done.  I told this to Keith, who said that if we're going to be in Lewes, we might as well go to Rehobeth and go to the Dogfish Head Brewery and call his friends back up and see if they wanted to go.  Lewes and Rehobeth are about an hour and half/two hour drive from my apartment in DE, and so Kaylee arrived around 2 and made an appointment for 5:30.

I'm sure you can guess what did not happen that day as planned.  Keith kept saying how when we got back to the apartment, we were going to move the couch, but that obviously did not pan out as planned. Instead, once we got back, we went straight to bed.  But the day was great and filled with good food, great drinks, great friends, and Kaylee's new, bitchin' ink.

So Wednesday came.  Now, if you're not from the East Coast, specifically NJ/DE, I can tell you that we've been having a drought. For at least a month, maybe even two. Wanna guess what the weather was like every time we wanted to move big heavy objects?  TORRENTIAL DOWN POUR EVERY TIME WE WANTED TO MOVE MY MASSIVE, HEAVY-ASS COUCH.  It's heavy because it is a sofa-sleeper and it's fairly old, but wonderfully comfortable.  I spent a large portion of the day soaked and completely overwhelmed, but at the end of the day, my entire place was condensed into boxes packed into a giant container.  Awesome!

I've been trying to see friends and family now that I'm, for all intensive purposes, packed up and ready to go.  I realized the other day that this is my last week here, and although I will be back to visit, it will be different and who knows how long I'll be back for.  Today is possibly the last day I'll be seeing my dad, stepmom, and grandma, and I cried the other day when I realized it.  I'm sure I'll cry today when I say goodbye because I am a big crybaby and can't deal with anything.

For now, I'm going to get ready to enjoy the day with my family.  I'll do more catch-up with you all later.

Success

I haven't updated in four days, but within good reason.

Who has two thumbs and packed up their entire life and was able to fit it all in an 8x5x7 box (with the loving help of her wonderful boyfriend)?!

THIS GAL!

(Please forgive the hair.)

More to come later. 

Guess Who Hasn't Been Packing?

Remember how I yammered about positivity? Also remember how I pissed and moaned about my stuff and nothing fitting it? Welp, I got some positivity back because I found the cheapest (of my options) way of moving my stuff without having to lose my stuff, and the answer was Door to Door.  If you need to move, I'd recommend it because they are friendly and helpful.  I reserved two containers (one is a back-up which I can even get refunded back if I don't use it--score!) to load up and have shipped out to wait for me in Cali when Keith and I make our way out of the Garden State.

Keith has finally made his way back to the East Coast.  Tomorrow I am supposed to go down and see him and his family. Tuesday I'm going back to Delaware to pack up all of my stuff that's down there, which I'm sure is more than I realize, and stuff it into the Door to Door containers.  Meanwhile, I've been avoiding packing like it's the plague, and so it has obviously come back to bite me in the ass.  I clearly have tons of stuff in New Jersey to pack and I am suddenly overwhelmed and completely stressed. I've been trying to organize and put my life together since my parents told me I'm not allowed to leave anything behind.  I'm one of those people who when they see a mountain gets overwhelmed and has no clue where to start and then starts on the smallest, most banal task there is.

Forgive the awful Photobooth quality of it, but this is to give you an idea of what I'm up against.  Also forgive the pink carpet against the fabulously teal walls--we didn't have the time or funds to recarpet my room, so I hid it with my stuff. Excellent plan, yes? PS I bet you can't take a guess on what my favorite color is based on the color of my room as well as my blog. HA.

Nevertheless, none of this furniture is coming with me to Cali, except the CD tower hiding in the back. I've been trying to organize and throw things out, but I feel like I'm not doing such a hot job. But for now, it's 2:35 AM, so I really need to get to bed so I can wake up early and then try to do some more organizing. Pray to sweet baby Jesus in the golden manger to give me the strength, courage, and cajones to knock this out preferably around the end of the World Cup final.  Lord beer me strength. 

Every Mode of Transporting For My Life is Too Big or Too Small.

So here's the part where I piss and moan about the physical act of moving all of my stuff.

Let's start with the obvious. I'm a girl. With a very large wardrobe. Not only that, but I also have a sizable book collection, and arguably, a larger DVD collection (my library is constantly being built, developed, and worked on).  I also have furniture pieces that I'm in love with. For example, I have a beautiful dresser that I worked on myself.  It was once an ugly hunk of wood with massive wood handles that was white and covered in stickers, courtesy of my little sister.  I took it and sanded it down, primed it, and then painted it with a milk chocolate base and made the drawers a wonderful but not pastel light blue and green. And then bought new hardware that look like shells for it.  I worked hard on it.  It has some of my sweat, tears, and blood in it.  It also has very deep drawers that store a good amount of my wardrobe.  I also acquired a great side table from my dad.  It's built out of hatch door from a ship.  Not only is it aesthetically pleasing, but it has a story to it. I have wrought iron bedside tables with glass tops that are pretty but not really girly that would be great for my boyfriend and I to put into our new bedroom.  I have a desk that has 4 drawers and is still not massive.  It may not be the prettiest, but I'm sure with some love, it could be glorious.  It's large enough to house a lot of my supplies without being large and clunky.  I have yet to find a desk to replace it that has as many drawers, not massive, and not cost at least a thousand dollars.

I also have an extensive mug collection. I love mugs. There is just something so wonderful and pleasing about mugs. They're versatile.  I can, of course, have my hot chocolate or tea in there. I can give a guest a cup of coffee. I have mugs that are specifically for soup (my tall Conan O'Brien mug).  You can have a big mug of ice cream, or a small one that you won't feel too guilty about.  A mug is a great place to put your cereal, especially if you don't like to have a lot of milk in your cereal like me.  Pour yourself a mug of Cheez-Its, and it's the perfect serving of a snack. Fantastic.

I'm also a teacher.  Although I've been riffed this year, and I'm still a new teacher, I still have teaching supplies. Paper trays, a laminated calendar to write due dates on, bulletin board materials, laminated posters for the way, binders, and other necessary teaching supplies.

I also have a 6'8 longboard.  Although not the biggest longboard, it is certainly much taller than I am at 5'2 and certainly rides beautifully.

Needless to say, I have a lot of stuff.

I was originally supposed to inherit the couch I've been using in my apartment in Delaware.  It was originally my uncle's, and then it was in my childhood house since his death.  It may not be the prettiest couch, but I will gladly fight with anyone that says it's not the comfiest couch.  The couch and I have shared MANY naps together.  It's a great place to curl up with a book.  When I moved to Delaware to teach, I took that couch with me.  I had been telling my mom that the couch was going to be mine, and she agreed to it. This couch was also going to go with me to California....

...until yesterday when my mom informed me that, no, the couch is going to come back to New Jersey because, "What if your sister wants to have a sleepover? What if your stepfather's mother wants to visit? What if we have guests? Where will we put them? We need that couch back, and Lord knows I don't have the fucking money to get a new couch."

Hey Mom, remember that time I don't have a job because I was riffed and the decided to move across country and had to buy a new car because my lease expired so I'm totally strapped for cash? Oh, yeah, that time is now.  My little sister is getting my double bed, as well as my beautiful room, so we're going to have a spare bedroom for guests to sleep in instead of in the living room on my beloved couch, but that is not what my mom wants to hear or remember.  My mom has a perpetual state of assheimers, as my brother says.

I had planned on renting a large truck with a flatbed to put my new car on, stuffing the truck with all of the stuff, including the couch, and then heading across country. But without the couch, this excessively large truck seems....excessive.  So now, with with 18 days left on our countdown, I have yet to decide if I should leave my wonderful furniture pieces behind and throw them on Craigslist, or give them to my sister with her anti-King Midas touch, stuff my new Corolla to the brim with clothes, books, and DVDs, and head west, or suck it up and rent a too-large truck but happily have all of my crap.  To say a had a little hissy fit would be an understatement. Because I definitely cried and called my boyfriend and pissed and moaned about how my brother got the entire family room set when he moved to California, the fact that I got nothing but a "Happy birthday, Sunshine girl!" on my birthday just less than a month ago, and how helpful I've been and how hellish of a year I've had, as well as how piss-poor broke I'm going to be. The fact that he still wants to come home to the East Coast tomorrow and scoop me up and kiss me and then drive across country to live with me is beyond me. God love him, because Lord knows that even I'm over my bad attitude.

So, lovely readers, please expect to hear more about how I love my stupid material shit and can't bear to part with it even if it means spending more money than I should spend, or about how absolutely tiny my new car is and how nothing fits and how I will barely be clothed in LA with nothing else to my name.

Getting Positivity Back

The new eye doctor was incredibly friendly and very nice.  It's a shame I found an eye doctor I like just before I leave! But, luckily, I'm getting a year's worth of contacts, so I don't have to worry about not seeing for a while.

I'm not particularly religious.  I love the idea of a god, not any particular god, but a god, that is there and helps people out.  I don't believe in fate because I hate the idea of not being able to make things happen for myself.  But I do believe in a few things, and one of them is putting positivity out there.  If you put out positive, you'll get it back.  There are obviously times when I do not always work according to that philosophy and let negativity get the best of me.  For the most part, though, I try to do my best and be positive and pay it forward, even if it's small things like letting a car in front of me that has been trying to get into traffic for a while.  I know I hate it when I'm that person.

But I must have been doing some positive stuff recently because at the end of my eye appointment, I had to shell out $155.  I wasn't angry about it at all; I'd obviously like to keep that money, but hey, I need to see and all.  I went home, and about five minutes later, my eye doctor called me.  He told me that normally he wouldn't be calling right after an exam, but that my insurance wasn't as awesome as we'd hoped.  About 95% of employers get the insurance that covers eye exams, costs of supplies, and then part of your contacts/glasses.  I, sadly, did not fit in that 95% category.  My employer choose the cheaper route, obviously, and so the insurance did not cover supplies or the exam.  He told me that I technically owed them about $150, but because I am a new customer and that my insurance was running out and my upcoming move, he was willing to cut it in half and I only had to pay them $75.  Although I had to pay more money, it was incredibly nice of this man, who I'd only known for about half an hour, to offer that to me.

So, moral of the story, is that I need to continue my positivity.  I'm having a really hard time with this move coming up (faster than I think!), but that doesn't mean I should let it affect how interact with the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have 19 days left on the East Coast.  Let's make it count.

My Eye Doctor Troubles

I've been avoiding posting. Not because of anything in particular, but general anxiousness about my upcoming move.

Since my teaching contract expires on August 31, I am currently trying to squeeze my insurance for every last drop. This means that I'm going to a new eye doctor today and I'm going to see how many contacts I can get out of them.  In another two weeks, I'll be going to the doctor's and seeing how long of a prescription I can milk out of them as well.

The eye doctor will be an experience.  I haven't been to one in well over a year, mainly due to laziness, but also because I always have weird experiences with eye doctors.  It goes a little like this.

When I was younger, I generally sat in the back of the class because of alphabetical order. In 7th grade, I noticed that I was having a hard time seeing, so my mom brought me to the doctor's to get my sight checked out. Turns out, I can't see far very well.  So, I got glasses.  The doctor was this old man who had some sort of problem with his legs because they kind of bent the wrong way. He smelled awful and had a terrible disposition.  He got very angry at me because during the test, he gave me an index card to read to see how my vision was. The card had a very banal paragraph about a boy, his puppy, and a French baguette, and I thought it was such a random paragraph that I began to laugh. He was displeased in my reaction. He also got annoyed because when my face was in that giant contraption where they flip the different focal lenses, my eyelashes kept getting stuck, so I giggled then too.  We were off to a bad start.

Later that year, I asked for contacts because it would be easier to play sports with.  So, Mom hauled me back to the smelly doctor and we met about contacts.  The doctor was examining my eyes and told me to look to the left, so I did. Next thing I knew, his short, stubby index finger was jabbing me in the eye with some foreign object! He stabbed a contact into my eye without ANY warning! Obviously, this did not fly with me. I winced and teared up, and he got angry that I was "making such a fuss."

Um....you just poked my eye without any fair warning, I think it's fair for a 13 year old to be displeased.

We later moved on to a different eye doctor.  The doctor herself was nice; the rest of the staff was not nearly as pleasant.  My doctor didn't mind that I giggled at a lot of things.  She mentioned that she also does that. She didn't even lecture me when she learned that I wore my contacts for way beyond their welcome point.

However, the staff was rough.  The woman who worked the main desk was in her mid-forties and from New Yawk.  Every time I went in, she was wearing leopard print, and a lot of it.  She had claws for nails, and a pinched face like Janice Dickinson. Yikes. The first time I went in, we were having trouble with my insurance cards.  She yelled at me for not knowing more about my insurance (what 17 year old knows much about it?) and told me we would do the paperwork later.  So I went in for my eye exam and all went well, but I had to get my pupils dilated.  After that, my insurance problem was solved, and she told me I had to fill out all the paperwork. Here's the problem: I couldn't see a single thing, let alone read teenytiny print.  I had to call my friend Theresa to come to the eye doctor to not only give me a ride home later, but to help me fill out the paperwork.  Once Theresa came, I started dictating my information to her  so it would get filled out.  The front desk woman SCREECHED at me about how that was not allowed and how I had to fill out my paperwork.  I reminded her that my pupils were dilated, and I therefore could not see anything, but she still yelled on. Eventually, my doctor came out, and I looked at her with my massive, sad pupils and said, "I can't read anything, this is one of my best friends, it's cool if she fills this out for me as long as it's correct, right?" Of course, my doctor agreed.

Not only did that lady work there, but there was another man there that made me feel terrible. Not in the same kind of terrible though.  This man worked with the glasses.  I got my face fitted for my glasses and all.  When I got them, they were slightly crooked, so I asked him if he could level it out.  At that point, I noticed it: he had a lazy eye.  He gave me my glasses back and asked them how they were. They were still slightly crooked, no better or worse than before. I thought I'd ask one more time, blood rushing to my cheeks out of embarrassment, and he gave it another whirl. Still, my glasses were returned crooked.  That's when I said they looked great and hightailed it out of there.  On my visits back, I'd ask them to straighten them out, and every time, they were as crooked as before.

So, as you can see, I don't have much luck when it comes to eye doctors.  I'm going to a new one today. The woman I was on the phone with was incredibly delightful, so we're off to a good start. I picked that office solely based on the fact that the doctor has the same last name as one of my favorite comedians, Rob Huebel. Hopefully, he's sympathetic to a recently riffed teacher whose insurance runs out soon and gives me an incredible prescription for contacts.

Wish me luck!