Blog (Not Bloog)
Dear Internerd,
hello hello hello! I have missed you achingly, but I hope you will forgive me for not dropping in earlier; I haven’t really had a way to connect for the past five days, and we still don’t have our DSL line turned on in our new apartment, so I’m having to peek in on you from a lounge in the student union 0f the University of Chicago, ostentatiously named “The Reynold’s Club.” “The Reynold’s Club” is a little warm and undergoing a little too much construction for my liking, but right now it feels like I’m sitting in Valhalla drinking the nectar of the gods, only instead of nectar I am drinking wireless packets. Mmm, packets.
Anyway, to answer the question burning on all of your lips, the move went spectacularly well—hooray! We set off in Pete, our little yellow Penske truck, on Thursday morning, and by 8:45am on Saturday we were pulling up in front of our building in Hyde Park! Highlights of the 974 mile journey included a great many corn fields, Indiana’s picturesque barns, gigantic highway service centers, a traffic warning in Ohio, and two clean, quiet, comfortable motel rooms along the way. Since our arrival we have painted a wall, had a wonderful vegan lunch with Rachel and Matt, driven to Ikea to pick up enough flat-packed Scandinavian-designed (and China-made) furniture to keep us busy building for the next month, and surrounded the fridge with broken-down moving boxes destined for the nearest recycling center (Chicago doesn’t have a city-wide residential recycling pick-up program yet. Don’t even get me started).
But the details aren’t really that important. What I want you to know is that our new home is adorable and I love it, our new neighborhood is friendly and tree-lined and I think I’m going to love it too, and our new city is gigantic and a little scary but way cool. I am working up to loving it but for the time being I’m just practicing saying “I live in Chicago!” in a slightly incredulous tone. Usually this coincides with the realization of just how much bigger Chicago is than Boston, which tends to happen while I’m staring up at all the tremendous buildings in the Loop, or crawling through an 11-lane highway toll area along with approximately 40 billion other cars. Basically, dude. This city is the real deal.
Come visit me soon and you’ll see.
September 4th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
‘rah! glad it all went well. i am with you in ikea-furniture-constructing spirit.
x
September 4th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Yay! I’ve been seeing all sorts of Chicago references lately and thinking about your two. Best of luck getting settled.
FYI (and I know this might be a challenge without regular web access) but I got rid of most of the boxes from our last move with Freecycle. Or Craigslist . . . I dunno. You are probably sick of both sites by now, anyway.
September 5th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Welcome back!!! We’ve missed you so. And of course can’t WAIT to visit you..that is, when I can drug myself enough to agree to the 20+hour flight over with the 2 kids. Lots of love & hugs and we are going to be building lots of ikea furniture for Asher’s room soon!
September 6th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Estee, after we acquired a cheap power drill/screwdriver yesterday the whole assembly process started to go much faster. Now we only have the bed and a couple of shelves left to deal with. Phew!
Sarah, most of our boxes were recycled to begin with, so I don’t feel bad about not giving them a third home. I just can’t deal with trying to do that right now — it’s off to the recycling center with them as soon as we figure out where the closest one is.
Rani, we all have to keep our fingers crossed for a non-stop SIA flight to Chicago. :-) And good luck with the furniture! Don’t forget the power screwdriver! :-)