Cascading downwards

Sunday we were rudely awakened by a car alarm. That's not even the bad part.

Then, someone rang our doorbell (not 5 minutes after the car alarm) and told us someone had reported smoke in the boiler room. Our apartment shares a wall with the boiler room. There were already at least two fire trucks on site at this point (before they thought to knock on our door!).

So, we got dressed (unusual for a Sunday) and I got out the cat carriers and tried to mentally inventory which items I might try to carry out with me if our place was on fire. Fun.

However, we never did have to evacuate. There were of course issues with the boiler and we spent a good part of the day without heat or hot water. Not really an issue, since our place runs pretty warm as it is (it is right next to the boiler room, after all).

I don't think I mentioned before, but Mom visited this weekend to see the new place. She very pleased to see us in an actual decent apartment (not to mention being able to sleep in an actual guest room, inflatable mattress on the floor notwithstanding).

So her flight today was at 10:30. She wanted to be dropped off around 9, just to make sure there was plenty of time for security lines and so forth. And because we were unsure about traffic, we left the house at 8.

With the end result that I arrived at work 45 minutes early. Forty-five minutes! What a waste. But it's not quite enough time to be worth going home, so ....

Mom was also tickled by my (relatively) new curly hair. I myself am still trying to figure out how my hair can just turn curly in my late twenties. Weird. I'm sure it's hormone levels, but I didn't know they could do that. I guess I really did get some of dad's hair genes.

We had a lovely visit. We took her and Rich's mom out for a joint birthday dinner (their birthdays are two weeks from now and two weeks ago, respectively), and just kind of hung out all of Saturday, shopping and talking. We came home and she and Linda chatted while I put all my books away.

Books - I seperated them by genre this time (after shelving the paperbacks in the bookcase with the shorter shelves). I have an entire bookcase of just speculative fiction (let's summarize that as spaceships, wizards, and vampires) (I have so many cross-genre books I didn't want to break it down into SF, Fantasy, and horror), and three shelves of mysteries. And once I seperated the genre fiction out, I only had a single shelf of non-genre fiction, which I am just finding funny - I really do like the escapism, huh?

And there are still a couple of stacks of "themed" books that will become part of the decor, with these shelves. I'll post pictures - I think everyone who knows me will be amused. And we got this table for the oversize coffee table books. Nice, huh?

OK, enough about my books. Dear to my heart as the subject is. Next (and last) thing for the apartment is hanging the pictures - that'll be fun with concrete walls, huh?

So, if anyone in the NYC area has nothing to do Saturday, would you like to come help me move? Yes, move. Saturday. And I've known since all of last Thursday.

My landlord is selling my building. Evidently, the new owners applied for some kind of federal loan that is specifically for small rental properties. For small, read "4 apartmetns or less." There are 5 apartments in my building, and ours is the one that is supposed to be combined with another one. So basically the sale won't go through until we move out of this apartment.

Luckily, there is an empty apartment in the building. Unluckily, the living room is half the size and there are half as many closets as our place. But, we only have to move stuff up one flight of stairs, and
not really pack. We just have to throw out a ton of stuff.

Evidently graduating and getting married was not enough life stress for one year, I need to also have the joy of moving. I can't wait for 2006.