525,600 boxes

we moved!

we live here now!

moving day (and the days following, to be perfectly honest) was pretty trying. there were a lot of stairs. but everybody put in an amazing effort, which este and i truly appreciated, and we managed to get all of our stuff out of our respective apartments and into our joint new one in just 10 short hours, which were followed almost immediately by pizza and beer in the back of our uhaul truck (see picture, above).

este and are this close to being finished unpacking and arranging and whatnot. the original plan was to put everything we could into the living room, and then leave the bed and dressers for the bedroom, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. the blog command center had to be relocated to the bedroom after we realized that walking around the entire couch to get to the kitchen every day would be super annoying. but it’s cool because i can move around the room willy nilly and este sleeps through the whole thing.

most of our stuff (aside from clothes, etc) fits in este’s bookshelves, which is nothing short of a miracle, but we have had to work some shelf magic, too, especially in the kitchen. i have a lot of tupperware!

hopefully we’ll be done in the next day or two… mainly because unpacking sucks, but also partly because i think este might go into cardiac arrest if the clutter is here much longer. but in the end it will be completely worth it, because we live in the east village now! i walked home from union square today (after a not completely miserable experience at my new post office, i might add), and it was lovely. LOVELY.

private overheard in new york moment
girl screaming into cell phone, corner of 76th street and columbus: it’s about your inability to emotionally commit! even to an animal!

bzzz bzzz

that’s me being “busy as a bee”. sorry… they can’t all be winners.

anyway! a lot going on lately. for realz. first of all, miss mariel “short stak mak” (ghost)reiter had a birthday! she and i and este and steve and dan went to a lovely brunch in noho, and then mariel and went over to a free street concert because a friend of hers was “in a band that’s opening for morningwood or something.” oh wait, she was IN morningwood! it was wicked cool. and since mariel’s got the hookup, she got a fun little birthday shout out! followed immediately by the lead singer calling her up on stage to dance for the last couple of songs! it was crazy. then this woman decides she’s going to get everyone to do aerobics in the middle of the show, but she started by having everyone sit down. seriously:

it was pretty awesome. and so was the show!

the next day, i started babysitting my new little friend maddie. we decided to go on one of those awesome waterfalls tours that start at the south st seaport and go all around the east river. and the waterfalls are pretty magical, i must say. check out the info here. give it a sec to load. anyway, we wanted to take the water taxi tour because they have real live tour guides and they go by the statue of liberty, too, but they were sold out so we ended up on the normal cityride (or something) one. it was fine, i mean it got the job done… but it was just some funny pre-recording thing from the artist. and one of the waterfalls wasn’t waterfalling! it was pretty hilarious. it was the last one we saw, so by that point we kind of go the message, but it amused me all the hype surrounding these and then one (the biggest one, for that matter), was broken. anyway, here:

doesn’t it look like one of those inspirational pictures? like it should have a big black border around it with “SELF-INDULGENT: sometimes things need to be bigger and better than everyone else’s” written in big type below it? for the record, i just took about 10 minutes to look for one i could post up here, but they’re all super sarcastic now! there’s even one about mac users with the apple symbol carved into some punk chick’s arm. so do it yourself.

other fun things from this week: i got bumped up to full-time at my job, starting august 18, and este and i are moving tomorrow! fiiiiiinally! ask me if i’m packed. -pause- NOPE. i’m blogging instead! completely necessary.

HOW DARE YOU.

fyi, i do have pictures and stories from this past weekend with the visitors and birthday bash and whatnot, but i’ve been busy packing so i haven’t really had time to go through the whole shebang yet. UNTIL NOW.

so as you’ve heard, este and i found an apartment in the east village last week. hooray! they told us that the apartment was listed for july 15, much to our chagrin. we asked, “no way for august 1, huh?”, and we were DE-NIED. fine, so we pay for a couple of extra weeks… at least we found a great apartment and now people can help us move (since the rest of our friends are moving 8/1).

shortly after we get approved for the apartment, the landlord tells este that we actually can’t move in until probably the 18th or the 19th, but anywhere between then and aug 31 is fine by them. apparently the current tenants have been there for five years, and between that and the two cats living there, the management needs some extra time to clean and paint and de-gross-smellify the place. so he tells este to call him the following wednesday (today) just to confirm all that.

i’m sure you’ve figure out by now that this story does not have a happy ending (otherwise i probably wouldn’t be going into this great of detail.)… well, pat yourself on your back, friend, because you’re absolutely right. guy goes ahead and tells este that the current tenants aren’t moving out until THURSday, and they’ll need into the middle of next week to clean. read: we can’t move in until next weekend, as the middle of the week doesn’t really work well for people who have JOBS.

okay, so here are my questions:

1. what landlord in the entirety of new york city allows tenants to move out three days after their lease is up? i mean, i understand that they’ve been there for a while, and i’m sure they’ve built up some sort of relationship with the landlord, but honestly, what the f? they’ve known for at least a month that they’re moving. when the landlord told me we’d probably have the apartment on saturday, i started packing the next day to make sure i had all my ducks in a row on time, and i don’t know this guy from adam.

2. who sets a move-in day for the third week of the month? i’ve been moving in and out of apartments for the last six years of my life, and i have NEVER seen a listing for anything other than the first or the 15th of the month. is this guy really so greedy that he needs to prorate the six days we’ll be there before august 1? especially since he already knew that he’d need extra time to clean the apartment? i can’t imagine that two weeks unpaid for will really break the bank for this guy.

moral of the story? i’m annoyed. i’m 75% packed already to appease the g-d landlord, which means i now have to UN- and then RE-pack a bunch of my shit (clothes, namely) over the course of the next week and a half. LAME.

can i get a ‘hallelujah!’?

okay so your prayers did NAWT work. we appreciate the effort, though! and for those of you who didn’t cross your fingers and whatnot… you should be ashamed of yourselves. you know who you are.

but we got ANOTHER apartment! and we’re officially approved and everything! it’s amazing. this place is also in the east village, just a slightly different area (aka, the AWESOME area). we move in next weekend, which is ridiculously soon, right after they mop and scrub and get rid of the cat pee smell. the current tenants have two cats, it’s not just the apartment. look!

it’s waaaay bigger than it looks here. and it has a real bedroom that’s actually not too small (which is what we were expecting to get, and would have in the other apartment, for that matter); a nice living room; a REAL kitchen, with room for a table; and a bathroom. with no sink. it’s fine.

anyway, we’re super excited. about the apartment, not the paying of the fees and the rent and whatnot, which we have to start on tomorrow.

on an unrelated note:

there’s a new york times article about this guy, too, but i don’t feel like looking for it. deal with it. i can give you a highlight reel if you want… this guy is now officially sponsored by stride gum. the end.

yay for me and este!!!

pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease

everybody cross their fingers and think happy thoughts for me and este and the awesome apartment we found today in the east village! our approval status is currently pending.

pictures to come, but only if we get the place. otherwise, it’s dead to us.

mom: “what about the lemon hand washing ordeal”

so my sister works for a landscaping company right now (as in, for the summer). since she’s 19 and clearly has way more stamina than i do (or anyone i know, for that matter), she spends the remaining hours of her days (and nights) hanging out with friends and doing fun summer-in-the-country things like swimming and driving around in pick-up trucks. so since this leaves about 3.5 hours left in the day, and a girl’s gotta get some shuteye, she’s quite dirty.

jaime, calm down. i’m not done.

by “she”, i mean “her hands”. seriously, they’re gross. so for those of you who read this and know my mother (so… jaime and maura? oh, and my mom.), you can probably figure out the rest of the story. for those of you don’t/can’t, here’s a hint:

that’s right; barb busted out the big guns. LEMONS.

she held jaime hostage at our kitchen sink this weekend for a solid 15 minutes scrubbing her hands for her. FOR HER. not only was this a little scary for jaime, it was wildly amusing for the rest of us. here are a couple more pictures of the experience. and i’m sorry that i couldn’t get closer so you could see what was really happening, but i think you can judge by the terrified and terrifying (respectively) facial expressions that i probably shouldn’t have even been as close as i was.

in case you were curious, it worked. my sister’s hands were sparkly clean for the next 36 hours… until she went back to work.

also, i saw this in the south station bathroom before i headed back to new york.