Smooth Move

Jen and I have now finally completed the shortest move ever from the second to the fourth floor of our building. This was an interesting move, to be sure, since we weren't required to actually pack everything. For example, instead of packing kitchen utensils into boxes, I just carried the kitchen drawers up and unloaded them into the conveniently corresponding spaces within our new kitchen. As smooth as our move was, we still encountered some amusing obstacles along the way:

Billie, our bullying tuxedo cat, has a history of going scaredy on us when in transit. During our last move, she cowered in the closet for three days. This time around, she peed all over Jen who was in the process of comforting her.

We learned how heavy our recently purchased mattress is. For Jen and I to carry it upstairs (with the help of a push cart and an elevator!), we had to stop three times to keep Jen from hyperventilating. This was the price she paid for insisting that only we could move our mattress, it being so precious and all.

An extremely fit and Herculean lesbian friend (let's just call her Britomart), who had offered a hand, decided that carrying a bookshelf into the elevator wasn't challenging enough. So she talked me into carrying it up two flights of winding stairs. It did the trick. Even I felt mighty afterwards. Why not make moving a sport?

The management company of our building kept delaying. First they pushed back the move-in date at the last minute and then they told us carpet was dry, when it was obviously soaking wet. The lady who opened the apartment for us actually bent down with me to test the carpet and lied to my face. Later, disregarding our warnings, the Trout got her socks all wet.

Tenants are expected to clean their bathrooms before they move out. Our tenants did a fair job except for failing to notice the nastiness built up within the grouts between the tiles. This calls to mind a pun. But in order to set it up, it will require a little background information. Those of you who live in Madison may have had the opportunity of entering the first floor men's bathroom of college library (half of you of course will not have been afforded this privilege, and I advise sneaking a peak). On the urinal walls within this facility, there are phrases written onto the grouts between the tiles. To my great satisfaction, these phrases are all plays on the word grout: "no grout about it," "down and grout," "the groutful dead," and, my personal favorite, "grout expectations." As for my own tiles, suffice it to say, the previous tenants have failed to live up to my "grout expectations."