The Nest

Brother 4, or "The Boy," as we have always called him, has noted in the last several months as I've been obsessing about our new apartment that my nesting instinct is rather strong. He's right. I've been thinking about and obsessing about this "nest" for the last several months. When I got the email from the landlord telling me that the keys were in the mailbox and we were able to move into the house, despite my exhaustion, I leapt for joy and ran down the stairs yelling to Ambrosia to come and check out the new place with me.

I'll be honest. When we first opened the doors, I was scared. It was dank. I'm not sure that I've ever really used the word dank before, but I think that it's the best word to describe the house. Really. It smells old and the previous tenants didn't do a good job of cleaning it out. It was also a good twenty degrees warmer than outside, which was disturbing to say the least. My first instinct was to open the living room windows, but then I saw that the living room windows do not even open.

This was in stark contrast to the kitchen window, which was practically non-existent. There was a plastic window pane that was supposed to be above the swamp cooler. Instead, it was lying on top of the swamp cooler and the entire window area was open. Of course, I contacted my landlord and got this fixed before moving any of my precious stuff into the apartment.

Moving farther into the apartment, we got to the bedrooms. One bedroom is accessed through the other, and we didn't really see a problem with this until I noticed that there is actually no door between the bedrooms. Now, I love my brother. But I'd still kindof like a door separating our rooms.

So on Tuesday we started the big move. A wonderful friend of mine from Maryland---let's call her Life Saver---volunteered to help with the move. She came to the new apartment at about 9:00 a.m. The Boy and I left her to clean our apartment while we rented a truck and moved furniture.

First we went to Home Depot to rent their truck---they rent it for $19/hr. We waited in the rental department for twenty minutes while the man helped someone in line before us. When he was finally done serving that customer, we told him that we wanted to rent the truck. He said that someone had called fifteen minutes earlier to reserve it, and Home Depot policy was that the truck went to those who called first. Well, never mind the fact that The Boy and I had been waiting for twenty minutes in the renting room. Sorry. The truck goes to caller number one. Let's also forget the fact that half-way through telling us that the truck was unavailable for us, the worker took another phone call and spent over five minutes on the phone while we were waiting for him to finish telling us that he couldn't help us.

So we went to U-Haul. It sounded like a good deal---they'd rent us a moving van for $19. Plus $14 for insurance. Plus 69 cents a mile. It sounded good until I started to figure that maybe the trip to Spanish Fork and back would kill us...

So we asked if they rented pickup trucks. They didn't, but the guy suggested we try Enterprise. So we went to Enterprise. We went in and asked how much it would be to rent the truck. The guy did all the calculations, and it came to over a hundred dollars plus gas. Ugh.

So we walked out of there, too. Just as we were getting into The Boy's car, a different Enterprise employee came rushing out after us.

"Wait!" He said. "How much would you expect to rent a truck for?"

This was my moment of truth. I had to go low enough to get a good deal, yet high enough to make it acceptable to him.

"Fifty dollars," I said. He told us to come on back into the office, and he'd swing it for us.

It took him a lot of swinging, actually, since The Boy and I are both under twenty-five, and he's supposed to charge an extra ten dollars for those under twenty-five and he's not even allowed to rent trucks to those under twenty-five. So we got a deal. And a freaking huge and cool pickup truck. And we got it for twenty-four hours.

We finally got back home with our furniture four hours after we'd first left. Poor Life Saver! All alone and cleaning that whole time!

So the rest of the day was spent cleaning, moving, etc. Puckish Mitya (Mishkin) showed up to help, too.

I finally went to bed at 1:00 on Tuesday night. Yuck. The apartment is nowhere near being put together yet. I was so tired yesterday that I didn't end up doing anything, either. I'm waiting for Brother 2 to come and bring the hardware that we're missing to assemble our futon for the living room. I have bags of clothes that I need to put away at some point, and I have stuff at the old apartment still, too. I have to do laundry. I have to paint the table and chairs. I have to do tons of other stuff, too.

But I'm nesting, so I'm happy.