Moving Briar and Alisa's Skank Asses: Part Duex

(Forgive the title - it's two inside jokes).

Teresa was a trooper yesterday. Even though she's on vacation here in Boston (well, Somerville), she helped Alisa and me schlepp our things to the new place (via UHaul).

We were able to rent a van for this trip (a van is much bigger and therefore somewhat more appropriate for moving than a Ford Taurus. But there was no CD Player, and we still made five pretty big trips -- as opposed to the nine we made last year in the bitty Taurus). There was a trip to Target where we actually got almost nothing that we were supposed to get (a fire extinguisher and dining room chairs, for instance), but I managed to acquire this gorgeous little mirror/shelf for my room, a waffle iron (!!! "Alisa! Now we can have waffles every....Six months!!!), and some new plastic tumblers (we kept breaking the glasses. So plastic it is!).

People on our new street are so nice, which is funny because it's a block away from our old house. No one offered to help us on our old street (save one story for the next paragraph), and everyone was offering to help on our new street.

The biggest problem we faced during this move was getting Alisa's box spring downstairs. Our stair entry has a low ceiling, and we've all bumped our heads (well, maybe not Jessica), or gotten stuck coming down the stairs (the doorway is also stupidly at the foot of the last stair, which is the only way it all fits inside, but is still inane), so we knew the only way to get the box spring out was to lower it from the front balcony, but we all had the same mental image of the box spring exploding into a million little wood splinters -- and some springs -- on the sidewalk below. Teresa decided it would be best to ask experts before we attempted this, so she asked the movers who were two doors down how we would go about getting the mattress and box spring into the van. Well, as it turns out, being three cute girls has its advantages. They didn't just tell us what to do -- they did it for us! It was too sweet, and they also offered to move one of our bigger boxes, too (which we didn't allow, but still -- so. sweet!). We were going to buy them beer, but they left before we had a chance. I hope they have enough good karma to last them a lifetime, though; and I guess that's better than beer...But still -- I wish we'd been able to get them something other than a "thank you!"

After one of our trips, we met our new Irish neighbor. He told us that he wanted to show us something...So we followed him to his place and went through his basement, and saw his pub. I'm talking...Bar, barstools, lots of alcohol, a HUGE widescreen TV (and a smaller TV behind that, ha!), and football? Rugby? memorabilia all over the walls. He was the sweetest man, and he gave us water and chatted with us for a bit. Apparently, once when he got pretty drunk, he offered to take his Korean tenants to Ireland. He paid their airfare, and hosted them with some friends of his. Then he called the local paper and they wrote a story (parts of it fabricated, but most of it true) about the hospitality in Korea and how this local Irishman wanted to extend the same hospitality to some girls he met there (those girls would be his tenants...So that's the part that's fabricated). He's introduced many couples, apparently -- so Teresa says we need to hang out with this guy, if not for the full bar, then for the trip to Ireland and future husband.

Seriously, guys. We moved one block down. Just beyond the "we keep to ourselves" border.

So, that's our new place, in a nutshell. My room is being decorationally-difficult, my knee really really really hurts :( and I'm a little sad we'll only be here for a year, but otherwise, I can't really complain.

And we were done moving by 9:00 PM this time. After taking breaks. And we only made 5 trips. And we weren't even packed before we left. And we still got to go to Target and IHOP. By far, it was a much better moving experience, except, sadly, there was no Jessica, and no "Moving Briar and Alisa's Skank Asses" mixed CD.