A moving experience

My brother, sister-in-law and I have been helping my mom move into her new condo home all weekend. We’re not done yet, but I almost am. This moving stuff is hard work!

A few observations:

1 ) A sister-in-law with a cast on her right leg and hobbling around on crutches, is not able to help a great deal. She can unpack boxes – but only if you bring them to her and you put the unpacked things away for her. This limits her usefulness. She also takes up a lot of space. But she makes up for this with her unfailing good humour and constant funny comments.

2 ) A very tall, broad, strong brother is a definite asset when moving. Bonus points for his truck, too.

3 ) Another sibling bonus is learning that he is just as particular as you are about furniture placement and what looks good where. About the only difference between the way the two of you operate is that he measures very carefully whereas you simply eyeball it. But it works. When items are placed perfectly, you are both in instant agreement. You briefly consider starting up a home staging business with him.

4 ) A daughter with a Honda Fit is another plus. Particularly if she doesn’t need her car that day because she walks to work, so she kindly allows you to use it to transport her grandma’s precious china. With the rear seats down, those Fits can swallow whales, you believe. Or at least about a hundred and twelve boxes of breakable china.

5 ) Some buildings have way too many locked doors to get anywhere easily. And your mother now lives in one. The door to the stairs from the lobby is locked. The elevator needs a key to get to the parking garage. There are several locked doors between the parking garage and the elevator. Your mother is pleased with all the security and says she won’t mind using her key so much. She should try it carrying about a hundred and twelve boxes of china up to the third floor, one at a time. She may mind then.

6 ) Many seniors just love watching people move. You are convinced that those seniors all live in your mom’s building. On moving day, they congregate on the lobby couches and watch you go in and out, chatting amongst themselves and with you as you pass. One woman, who is a member of the building’s strata council, is the designated person to keep the lobby doors open and ensure that no one gets in who should not be in. She is hilarious, and you would really rather just sit and listen to her tell funny stories all afternoon – but no, you have about a hundred and twelve boxes of china to carry upstairs.

7 ) Having no phone hooked up yet is a major headache. This means that when your daughter arrives later in the evening to join the family for dinner, she cannot call you from the front door enterphone, nor can you buzz her in. She ends up shouting your name angrily from three stories below, and you have to hustle downstairs and apologize profusely as you let her in. It never occurs to either of you to use your mobile phones.

8 ) It’s really important to have extension cords. Many extension cords. This is because some buildings do not have electrical outlets in logical places. Buildings like your mom’s. Logical places like on the long walls rather than on the short walls. Because appliances requiring these electrical outlets are more likely to be placed on the longer walls where furniture actually fits, rather than on the shorter walls where only something the size of a toaster will fit. Oh – and why would there be a telephone jack in the middle of a dining room wall? Would any sane person actually have a phone in their dining room? (Assuming their phone line was hooked up, of course.)

I’ve now decided that I will not ever be moving until I am so old and decrepit that DD must put me in a care home. That way I will likely avoid doing any of the work.

What’s up doc?

I went to my doctor for my annual physical last week. Except it wasn’t my regular doctor, who’s been on some kind of extended leave since last spring and won’t be back till mid-September. I actually had two people examining me: the nurse who used to just do the blood pressure check, and the substitute doctor. Strength in numbers, I suppose.

I’m not sure what exactly the nurse’s position is now. I asked her if she was a nurse-practitioner now, but all she said was that she was going to enter all my information into the computer, check my blood pressure, height and weight, and do the breast exam and the internal. Oh. Do we know each other well enough for that?

Anyway, it turns out that I have gained 3.5 kilos in the past year. Yes. That is almost 8 pounds. 10 pounds is a whole size. This would explain why my favourite shorts, my only pair of beige summer pants, my denim capris, my slinky electric blue dress no longer fit. I can’t even button up the damn dress any more!

Also, I am now shrinking. I always thought that I measured just over 5′4” (162 centimetres). I am now just over 5′3″ (160 centimetres). Has my bad posture finally caught up to me? Has gravity increased recently? Is this even supposed to happen?? I’m not a senior citizen yet, for heaven’s sake!

All depressed, I went home and immediately started back on Weight Watchers (the easy pinklea version: no meetings, just write down the points value of everything you eat, drink oceans of water, and pee pee pee constantly). I’m proud to say that in a week, I’ve lost 4 and a half pounds! I know at this point that it’s only water, but it’s a great start, and the rest of the weight should come off in another couple of weeks if I keep following the regime. And I will. I know how to lose weight (and gain it too, it seems).

But I have absolutely no idea what to do about my diminishing height.

School dazed

I had a bad dream last night. I dreamed I was in school, in a classroom that was an amalgamation of the new classroom I am moving into for real, the old classroom that I moved out of in June, and what we used to call the “activity room” at the elementary school that I attended about a thousand years ago.

In my dream, I was trying to put all my teaching supplies away, in a room with far too little storage space (which is actually true: my new classroom has about one quarter of the shelf space that I used to have. This is most emphatically NOT good.). Kids kept coming into my room with science and socials projects, English and French and math assignments to do (again, this is actually a real part of my teaching job). They kept coming and coming, and all my tables and chairs and desks were full of kids and their stuff, and miraculously, more tables and desks kept appearing for them all. And the kids got more and more unruly, and I was less and less able to control them, and I just really wanted to put my own things away because it was only the first day of school anyway. I kept yelling at the kids, and trying to get them to leave, or at least settle down, but nothing worked. Then the bell rang and the kids left my room anyway, still noisy and poorly behaved. They actually laughed at me and my pathetic attempts to discipline them. In my dream, I burst into tears as I shut the door behind them.

Then I woke up. With a headache.

Yes, the new school year begins in 15 days. Do ya think I’m looking forward to it???

To serve and protect?

PG lives across the street from a neighbourhood pub. It’s a pretty nice place, with good food, and we go there often.

Unfortunately, so do a number of what appears to be homeless people. While they don’t exactly patronize the pub, they do pop into the liquor store that is attached to the pub, and pick up whatever they can get cheaply. Then they go outside, sit on the cement ledge around the corner of the pub entrance, and proceed to drink their day away. Illegally. In public. One person is invariably joined by a few more, sometimes with shopping carts full of cans and bottles (or even all their personal belongings), sometimes with a portable stereo system, usually with more liquor. They get progressively louder and louder, and nastier and nastier. They are not always there, but they are there often enough that they are annoying.

There are a lot of seniors who live in this area, and I can imagine that they would be disturbed by all this going on on the street in front of their homes. I don’t like it, and I don’t even live there (nor am I a senior). It’s hard to walk past these people drinking on the sidewalk, because they end up taking up a great deal of walking space and harassing passersby for cigarettes or money. They also swear a lot, and if my own mother is anything to go by, seniors most emphatically do NOT like that.

A few days ago, I arrived at PG’s place in the middle of the afternoon. As I got out of my car, my ears were assaulted by the tune “Barbie Girl” by Aqua on some street person’s portable stereo. That’s an inane song at the best of times, but to hear it at full blast on a hot summer day is unbearable. PG was up on his balcony, gazing at the owner of the stereo and his buddies, who had obviously been drinking out there for quite a while and were also yelling and swearing at each other over the sound of the music. I yelled up at PG, “How long has this been going on?”

He yelled back, “A while!”

They eventually turned the stereo off and moved on.

The next day, PG and I were returning to his place from a walk up the street for brunch, and this time there were two men and a woman sitting there on the ledge outside the pub. The men were clearly well on their way to being tanked, and the woman seemed to be trying to reason with them. They were all really loud. We gingerly stepped past them and made our way towards his apartment. One of the other apartment residents, an older man, was leaning over his ground-floor balcony railing, watching the proceedings. He and PG talked briefly about how this drinking in public just wasn’t right, and how noisy it always got, and how disturbing it was to the neighbourhood. They agreed that it wasn’t the pub itself, it was these people who seemed to feel that it was okay to sit on the street and drink and disturb the peace.

When PG and I went inside, we watched as the two men began yelling louder and louder at each other, while the woman tried to calm them down. One of the men shoved her, so the other decided to try to strangle him. The woman tried to pull them apart. Fortunately, they did little damage to each other and soon let go and settled down somewhat. Then they began to swear and shout at each other again. Again, the woman tried to keep them apart and calm them down.

In the meantime, PG called the police.

We kept watching, waiting for a cop car to show up. There was more shouting and swearing, but the men refrained from further physical contact, and the woman persuaded them to go somewhere else. Then it was quiet. Twenty minutes later, not one, but two cop cars slowly cruised by. Good timing, officers!

I think PG should keep calling the police every time he notices people out there drinking. I understand that these may be people who are somewhat down on their luck right now, but that still doesn’t give them the right to illegally drink on the street and upset the residents with their loudness and off-colour language. And the police can’t move them along if they don’t know about it. And if the seniors are too nervous to call, well, PG certainly isn’t.

Would it do anything for those unfortunate street people, like help them find homes or find steady jobs or get them off alcohol or get them treatment for their mental issues? No. But it might help the people in this neighbourhood sleep a little more securely at night. And sometimes that’s all you can do.

One whole year

Hey, it’s my blogiversary! I’ve been blogging for exactly one year now! WOOOOOOOT!

I’ve had such fun writing down my thoughts and experiences, and slowly establishing a small regular readership. When I think about it, it’s rather an odd thing to do: writing stuff and sending it into cyberspace, wondering if and when anybody will read it and perhaps even send some small acknowledging comment back. It really is a bit of a leap of faith to blog, and although I think I’m hooked enough to keep doing it regardless of response, it truly does make my day when I open up my WordPress Dashboard and see that I’ve received a comment from somebody far way.

I don’t think I’m ever saying anything new or exciting, and it’s not that I believe my life to be so much more interesting than anybody else’s. But I know I like reading snippets of other peoples’ lives, mainly because it’s not MY life. It’s only logical that what I write will interest a few other people out there for the same reason. We just have to find each other, and that’s where other blogs come in. Making those blogging connections has been so rewarding, and I owe thanks to the writers of all the other blogs I read (you know who you are!) – for sharing your thoughts on the Intarnets, for the cyber-relationships we’ve developed, for continuing inspiration, and also for the opportunity to check out your blogrolls.

Everybody, thank you for reading, and thank you especially for commenting!

Now, let’s have some cake!