Time To Move In

Soup is warming on the stove and the aroma is weaving to our noses past cooling rice, slices of cream cheese and avocado, smoked salmon, roasted seaweed, and other fixings for home-made sushi.  

Mmmm...pretty much straight vodka...

A cocktail in my hand and Christmas lights in hers, it's a Sunday evening and my girlfriend is decorating the tiny Charlie Brown-esque holiday shrub that has Pinocchio-dreams of being a real tree while I get the Packers/Vikings game to stream correctly from my laptop to the living room television.  Somewhere in this moment I realize a dream is becoming reality.

From living with the folks, to dorm rooms, to the man-cave dubbed "Tripod House," and back to the folks, I finally have my own living quarters.  It's my kitchen, my bedroom, my spare room for music and crafts, my garage and my driveway and it's wonderful.  I share it with my girlfriend and while I sometimes miss the days of manly yore with brotherly brethren - let's face it, she just smells better.

Previous tenants used the inside of this fan as an ash tray

It wasn't always all philly rolls and vodka gimlets, though.  Beside the basic moving woes of traveling with my life in five boxes and her life in fifty-six (okay, it was only forty-eight), we had to deal with the excuses from a landlord, the trash from previous tenants who just refused to leave, the non-existent care for customer service from the cable company, a "thoroughly cleaned apartment" that was filthy throughout, and cigarette butts falling from the ceiling fan into my mouth on the bathroom-christening first shower.

Maybe they thought we could use these things?...

Our excitement plummeted and our stress levels sky rocketed.  The backyard strewn about with the previous tenants garbage looked like a junk sale and worse the garage was packed to the roof with their belongings and the door padlocked shut.  But we took it all in stride and fixed one problem at a time.  A couple of wonderful women from a company my girlfriend works for called Daily Details Concierge arrived that very weekend to help us search for our new home beyond the filth.

The toilet stripped apart, window sills wiped, cupboards, shelves, counter tops, the mysterious oven cave where I'm certain a grease dragon once lived - these things and more were rendered nearly spotless.  While the cable guy that didn't "have a ladder tall enough to reach the service box" proved to be no help in allowing us to do our jobs requiring speedy internet service, the fine folks at Time Warner Cable's

The GF and I celebrate Halloween the night before the move

customer care center had no problem waiving our installation fees and ensuring internet would be installed within 24 hours after having a little talk with "angry" Luke.

A little more than a month later, I have a place to come home to every night from work that is clean, warm, and very friendly to both of our creative drives.  We have paintings in the works, music in various stages of recording, stories to write and books to read.  And most importantly, a cabinet filled with vodka and a fridge filled with olives.

Okay that's probably not the most important thing but it certainly helps.  After quite a struggle, I'd like to thank the friends who helped us get here.  And be sure to visit the lovely ladies' website for Daily Details; you'd be surprised to find exactly what they are capable of doing for you!  (The answer is almost anything, within the legal spectrum.)

We're finally in the holiday season, the year 2013 is coming to a close, and I can finally growl in a proud Batman voice these words...

"I WILL FIND HIM!"

*cough* No no no, not those words.  These words:

"Time to move in."