April Fools!

I'm not much of a prankster, but re-restarting this blog seems like as funny an April Fool's joke as I can think of, at the moment.

For a while, I was purposefully delaying posting to the blog, thinking that an anouncement of us being in our new apartment might be a nice opportunity for Milly to make her first post on the blog. Well, Milly has forgotten her password for her original blogging account, so we'll have to make her another.

But in the interim, Life was busy interfering. Several computer malfunctions contributed to the blog's stall, not to mention the frantic pace of moving in, and making several trips to IKEA when our work schedule permitted, etc. Additionally, the early part of this year has kept me busy getting ready to go back to school -- namely, I've been busy trying to come up with the money needed for tuition. Trying to figure out which loan I needed from SallieMae -- and for how much -- proved a thorny proposition.

As I pick up this blog this evening, life is in transition for Bernie & Milly. Tomorrow morning I'll have orientation at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, and on Wednesday my graphic design classes begin. As a result of having three days of class a week, my schedule at work (still pretending to be sick for a living) has had to be scaled back significantly. While I had become acustomed to working up to six days a week, I'll now be working a maximum of three days a week. I expect that by August, I may even have to drop my "fake patient" job altogether, to make room for a graphic design internship. And Milly is on the prowl for a new line of work, deciding (wisely, altruistically) that she is beginning -- after three years -- to lose patience with the job, and that she is no longer as effective at her job as she might be. I have to respect that. If I was applying the same pattern of thought to my own effectiveness at work, I should probably have quit a few months ago! Most of us at work are beginning to find little short cuts to get us through the day, and we get so impatient with the examinees sometimes that we may even sometimes sort of snap at them or seem flustered. And that's no good, for sure.

It seems apropriate that all this change is happening now, as Spring begins. Things are budding, leafing, coming to be. Worms will soon be shucking their cocoons and emerging as butterflies. And so, in the spirit of rebirth, I'm attempting to resucitate this blog. It's odd to reflect that both times I've "initiated" this blog, it has been with a note of change -- "winds of change," in January, and now the change that comes with the seasons.

So -- happy April, everyone, and happy Spring. Have faith and keep tuning in, and I'll endeavor to reward your loyalty with bigger and better blog entries. And I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the blog itself begins to look better, as I learn desktop publishing and computer illustration. Something to look forward to...!

Days 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 & 24

Yeah, yeah, I know. But this time you can't blame me for the giant lapse in blogging. My laptop pulled a Humpty-Dumpty on me, and I had to take it to the King's horses and the King's men and have them put it back together again. (No, it didn't physically break into a million pieces, it only broke internally; and yes, this time the King's horses and the King's men were able to put Humpty back together again.)

And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed account of ten days in this blog entry. I'm a boring writer, sure, but I'm not insane.

So, here it is in a nutshell:

The computer went kaput; I took the computer into the shop; Milly bought a new desk from Target, one which would take up less room and is very nice-looking; Bernie built said desk while Milly cleaned the new apartment; Bernie and Milly had roughly a week off from work, which would ordinarily make them groan in dismay, but actually happened to nicely coincide this time with their need to do some serious packing up in their respective apartments (their respective bank accounts still groaned); Bernie was forced to labor in his apartment for three or four days without the benefit of his iTunes or the ability to play episodes of his beloved "Office" or "Arrested Development," as his computer had gone by-by; Bernie discovers he would not take to solitary confinement very well, nor would he gracefully handle being on a desert island -- a volleyball with a handprint for a face would not be enough to keep him from going insane; Thursday (DAY 22?) Bernie makes a couple of runs between K-town and the Miracle Mile, his little blue Saturn weighed down with lamps, pillows, posters, pieces of furniture, drawers full of clothes, etc., etc. It's a big push, to be sure, but not big enough, and there's still quite a lot to be gotten out.

But Bernie's friend, R, is coming to the rescue tomorrow, sacrificing his Super Bowl Sunday to lend his arm-power and horse-power (he has a pickup truck!) to the cause. Thankfully, it's not supposed to rain, and is supposed to actually be a lovely, 80-degree day (which might be worse, in the long run), so we're hopeful we can get all of the heavy and bulky furniture-like and microwave-like things out of the apartment!

Stay tuned... I'll try to keep this thing updated in more discreet chunks.

Days 10, 11, 12, 13 & 14 (of 30)

Yeah, okay, so I've not exactly been keeping up!

Let's see, some highlights:

DAY 10: Saturday. Work; not much got done in the way of apartment stuff.

DAY 11: Sunday. We went to Target and bought ourselves a kitchen table with two chairs. They're a light wood color that matches the hardwood flooring of the apartment (except the kitchen is bluish-gray tiles), and the table is round but with two sections which drop down, so it takes up less room and fits against the kitchen window, but could also be transformed to accommodate guests, board-games, or very large plates. Then we built the table. Our first piece of furniture in the apartment!

Also went to the Grove to have a copy of the apartment keys made for me. Mine are green. Whoopee! I got keys!

Yes, Day 11 was a productive one.

DAY 12, 13: Monday, Tuesday. Had both of these days off from work, but there is less progress to report than you might think. I mostly feel as though I spent those two days making a big mess, which I then had to scramble around and clean up in order to prepare for my brief work-week ahead, and so that I'd have a bed I could actually sleep on, rather than a bed that was hosting a lot of half-filled boxes.

DAY 14: Wednesday. One of the two days of work I have this week. I spent the evening trying hard to purge a significant amount of clothing from my closet and drawers. These efforts have met with marginal success, at best. I am such a pack-rat and a clothes-horse all at once. I'm addicted to T-shirts, it turns out. I don't know why. I got rid of four hats far easier than I could decided to part with a single T-shirt. I'm finding that I buy T-shirts in order to commemorate something (my Ashland T-shirt, my Whistler T-shirt) or to express some facet of my personality (my Underdog T-shirt, my John Coltrane T-shirt). Getting rid of any is like trying to determine what photographs you could shred. Plus, they're comfy. However, I do have two pillars of clothes that I have marked for Good Will, so the evening has not been entirely in vain.

I'm keenly aware that I'm talking at great lengths about the color of my keys and my T-shirt psychosis. God bless those of you who are actually reading this drivel. I can't promise it will ever get more interesting, but I can assure you I'm hoping as ardently as you are that it will...

Day 9 (of 30)

DAY 9: Friday. A hugely significant day for me, the male half of the Dynamic Duo, as I put out to pasture the postage-stamp-sized television/VCR combo I've had since I began college and which D and I dubbed "Merlin" (the remote control was named "Archimedes") one sleepless Freshman night; a beanbag chair also dating back to my USC days; and a lava lamp donated to me by Milly, who rescued it from the curb in her neighborhood, only so that it might eventually wind up on the curb in mine.

The giving up of these three items has been like my transition out from bachelorhood and into... well, something else. (I'm not quite married, am I? But definitely living with someone, now.) Milly has always been super-sensitive about letting me enjoy my bachelorhood (even donating bachelor paraphenalia, like lava lamps, to the cause!), and encouraged me to decorate and organize my "bachelor pad" in K-town so that I could enjoy it. And as excited as I am to be moving in with her, I won't deny that part of me is mourning the end of my bachelor pad days. For the past couple of years, I never actually really sat on the beanbag chair, and it was starting to rip at the seams and become deflated anyway, serving as little other than a place to sit other junk I didn't know what to do with. Still, I'm sorry to give it away. The television is easier for me to part with: the VCR part doesn't work, it's screen has been oft-mocked (though not by me) for its diminutive size, and I didn't really watch television anyway. Milly has a much better TV that she's bringing to the deal, but... Hers isn't a major player in Arthurian legend, is it? Sure, you may argue that I could simply name her TV "Merlin," but that's too easy: the original "Merlin" earned its monicker from a delirious night of no sleep in Trojan Hall dormitory -- neither my roommate, D, nor I had any reason to be up all night long (and in fact, I'm quite impressed D managed it!), but by the time dawn spread her rosy fingertips out across the southern Californian sky, we had named beds, desk lamps, televisions, even over head lights after the more notable characters in Arthurian legend. What I mean to say is, there's history there. I imagine the Route 66 signs in my kitchen will have to go as well; ditto the hula girl postcards in my bathroom. What will become of the EXIT sign currently above my door, nabbed from the now-extinct Madstone Theatres in Albuquerque?

There is brightness within this darkness: not only do I now have more room to navigate around my apartment with the beanbag chair gone, but it's also starting to look a helluva lot more like I'm actually moving! I took down frames from my walls, and while there are still some things hanging up, the walls are starting to look a lot more nekkid, and I feel as though I'm gathering momentum...

Day 8 (of 30)

I got up early for this?

DAY 8: Thursday. Of course, I'm parked on the wrong side of the street -- meaning, the side of the street scheduled to be "cleaned" (you know what? Those streets never actually look very clean...) between 8 and 10 in the morning. So, I set my alarm and get up at 7:30, throw on some warm clothes, and walk to my car (just because it's on the wrong side of the street doesn't mean I got a conveniently-located spot in the trade off!) to try and reposition it and avoid a ticket.

So I drive. And I drive. And I drive some more. There is literally nowhere to park. Not only that, but I'm not the only person looking for a place: each and every time I come to a 4-way stop, there is a car sitting at each way, and usually a build-up of cars behind those, all waiting their turn to roll through the stop sign, all eager to nab that miraculous last parking place -- which of course, is always three inches too short. Assuming it exists. And for me, this morning, it didn't.

By this time I'm thoroughly hating my neighborhood and remembering why I'm moving. The remembrance that I'm moving brings me some comfort, but in the mean time I can't just keep circling blocks for two hours. Not with gas as high as it is. Something's gotta give.

Finally, I see a dingy little garage advertising $5 daily parking. So what if it's two blocks west of my apartment, and three additional blocks south? I chance it. Thankfully, I actually had some cash in my wallet. (I used to be the proud owner of six dollars...) And thankfully, I actually found a place in the garage -- on the last floor.

So then I walk back to my apartment, shower, throw some odds and ends into a box, and it is time to hoof it back to the garage, get my car out of hock, drive it back to my block and park on the shiny, newly cleaned curb, so that I can pack it with five boxes full of books, and one crate full of carefully-wrapped breakables.

Milly calls me: she got the keys!

So I jump in my automobile and drive over, find a parking space (oh, new neighborhood, how sweet you are!), and we begin to move in to our new place! We both had books to move in, which we unloaded in order to free up the much-needed (and way too expensive) moving boxes: there is a stack of our combined tomes lining one wall of the bedroom, waist-high!

After all that car-moving, block-walking, stair-climbing, dolly-rolling, and box-schlepping, we are exhausted! Is 7:54 really too early to go to bed? In L.A.?

Day 7 (of 30)

The first week of our transition draws to a close, and I feel as though I've only just scratched the surface of all that needs to be done. I feel pretty overwhelmed at times. It's hard enough being at work, unable to pack; but being home is little better, as I look around my rat's nest of an apartment, trying to decide where to start.

Tonight, I concentrated on wrapping breakable items. Frah-gee-lay... Must be Italian!

Days 5 & 6 (of 30)

DAY 5: Monday. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. What, you expect us to do work on this day?

Day 6: Tuesday. A very frustrating day for me. All weekend long I did nothing to further my progress on the home front, and so I had a hefty "to do" list going for Tuesday. Unfortunately, I was scheduled to work that day, and so I felt like I was being forced to spin my wheels even more. I used a skip to try and call the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a chore which I thought was no biggie, but ended up a disaster. First of all, the internet connection I was counting on to tell me LADWP's phone number wasn't working. So I called information, which connected me to the DWP for Huntington City. The person at the other end of the line there connected me back to the secretary, who said I'd have to call Los Angeles City Hall in order to reach the DWP (which I don't think is true). So I had her connect me to City Hall, where -- after enduring a chipper recorded message from Mayor Villaigarosa -- I got another operator, who said she'd connect me. For a minute or so I listened to music on hold, and then suddenly the line went silent. I waited for a human voice. None came. Had my call been dropped? After a minute or two of this dead silence, I ventured: "Hel-loooo..." Which was answered by the peevish operator: "Just a second, sir..." Finally I was connected but immediately put on hold (more music). By now, my skip had ended and lunch was beginning. Finally I got a pleasant woman on the line, and told her all about how I wanted to change the electric at the new apartment to my name starting Jan. 19th, and cancel my existing service at the old address on Feb. 9th. She put me on hold while she verified something, and it was while on hold that my cell phone's battery decided to die. I was awfully frustrated, but it turned out that when I got home and charged my phone and called LADWP back, and waited on the line for a little while, my request had been processed. Good!

And then I packed five boxes full of books.

Days 1, 2, 3, & 4 (of 30)

DAY 1: Thursday. Basically we just went to work, pretending to be sick. Took my laptop in to the shop to get a new superdrive installed. (Nothing to do with moving.)

DAY 2: Friday. I worked. In the evening, Milly and I watched disc one of "Extras."

DAY 3: Saturday. Worked again. Milly and I drafted up checklists of things to do. Once we start doing them.

DAY 4: Sunday. Blew $70 on cleaning supplies at Target: caulk to fill nail holes with, trash bags, ziplock bags, Swiffers, a vacuum cleaner for the new apartment, and... Velveeta cheese. Had lunch. Picked up laptop from the shop while Milly shredded papers. Then, we both went over to Staples and blew $40 on cleaning supplies: a dozen boxes, Sharpie markers, bubble wrap, packing paper, etc. Spent virtually the rest of the evening laughing at episodes of "Arrested Development."

Oh yeah. It's on!