I wonder if anyone else does what I do when I'm in the midst of a move: I take stock of where everything is in my current abode and try to emblazon it in my memory. I want to be one of these 85 year old grandmothers who can draw a to-scale floor plan of every house she's lived in. The fact that I do this for every apartment I move into will certainly help when trying to remember these things later on. It's true; I've been obsessed with finding out the exact dimensions of the rooms on the main floor of the new place (a scale floor plan of the second floor was provided by the management, but they didn't have one of the first floor). I might, just might, have a chance to go into the apartment today, which will hopefully create fewer instances of face-pressing against the only window that's reachable from the ground, leading to very suspicious neighbors. Thankfully, the new apartment is in the same vicinity as the old apartment, so I've been able to stalk out the new digs, measuring the outside walls with my arms (being 6' tall comes in handy some times), figuring out how we're going to move certain things in, and where the cat can be tethered in our wee front yard. Not only will we be gaining nearly 800 sqft, but everything that was in Ichi's storage for far too long will be coming out into the sunlight again, if only to be moved into the basement/computer lab. I'm incredibly excited to see what the views will be from especially the 2nd floor guest/TV room, which faces west, and I'm pretty sure will provide a fantastic view nearly all the way downtown.
Moving is one of those events where I get really stressed and maybe a bit OCD-ish. As mentioned, I draw out floor plans (to scale, natch) to figure out where furniture will go and how the flow of the house will be. This, I'm sure, stems from the only "video game" I had when I was incredibly young, which was some kind of DOS-based drawing program that included such great shapes as |, -, ¬, and other characters that allowed one to create outlines, all via keyboard. Being a kid who was obsessed with dollhouses (but never had one), I would draw my own intricate houses, complete with a living room, kitchen, dining room, and at least 2 bedrooms with bunk beds (I wanted, and had, one of those as well). Since these were all in extremely 2-dimensional form on an only-green monitor, I had to work the ol' imagination pretty hard to transform my ASCII art into a home for my @-symbol people. Sometimes I wonder how I didn't grow up to be an architect. I really didn't have the grades to get into the school I would have loved to go to for architecture (Berkeley, of course), but it seems the kind of thing someone would do who would grow into an engineer or similar. I guess for now, I'll have to live out my architectural dreams vicariously through my friend Matt, who is now living in NYC and has been doing some amazing stuff no matter where he goes. I'll take photos of the new place once we're in. Wish me luck (and pray I don't bug the hell out of Ichi with my constant realigning of walls and windows on paper).
