Ripples Moves to a New Apartment
Late-night adventures of chocolate chip cookie lovers.
Yesterday we started moving all our stuff into the new basement area where we’ll be living. After attending the Ozark Natural Foods Co-op annual owner’s meeting, I went home to do my thing – baking cookies! This time it was chocolate chip cookies for volunteers helping us move. They turned out really well and it was fun doing something familiar while the apartment was in total disarray (I couldn’t even find tape to put a sign on the door to let people know if we were taking a load over to the new place and would be right back!). A few fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies later, I was ready to move.
Andrea & Derek were super nice to help us move heavy boxes of books and our DVD / VHS collections, along with blankets and other odds & ends. It’s now a question of, Where’s the toilet paper? Oh it’s at the other place…darn! and other episodes of Where’s Waldo moments, including the moment Lisa actually found Ryan’s collection of Where’s Waldo books 🙂
Lisa, Havilah and Jennifer helped us move the plants and the remaining bookshelf with some random items. The plants were the biggest challenge – those that know our place know that we love some plants! Especially puzzling was a vine which had grown over a year or two to a length of about two stories long, so we wrapped the vines and gingerly carried them down to the car to be carefully loaded on top of us as we drove to the new place. Then we were able to hang it up in a window right away (thanks!) and watched as it hung down from the roof to the basement floor! I’ll put a picture up soon.
When we first entered the basement, everyone seemed excited for me to see the newly installed kitchen (which was impressive, by the way!) Apart from adjusting to the fact that the space once again looked different, I was hit by the smell of cleaning solution and paint, and blinded by many bright lights; at the same time, Ryan wished to demonstrate how wonderful the new vent over the stove was, and turned it on after also demonstrating how the gas stove worked (or didn’t, in the case of one burner) and the clicking noise, overhead vent, and smell of rotten-egg gas pretty much overloaded my senses and instead of the enthusiastic happy response everyone expected I think I just stood there like a dying fish. Sorry about that.
On the last trip of the night, I realized two things: the door was locked and I didn’t have my keys! Luckily Lisa was with me and knew how to use her keys to pop the screen out of an open window, and I scrunched my body through the frame and into the living room to unlock the door, laughing all the way. Breaking into your own home is really fun!
There was a lot of cleaning, rearranging and pondering to be done last night, and we got most of the dust and cobwebs out of the basement. Earlier in the evening I noticed how many more stars could be seen from the new place, and when I needed a breather, decided to walk outside and take a gaze upwards. The sky had become overcast.
A midnight wooded walk.
Finally we were ready for the 30 minute walk back “home” through the woods, the alleys and the downtown area. It was Ryan’s first trip through the woods in the back of the house. We heard a LOUD noise in the trees to our right, and wondered whether it was another person or an animal (I was so excited that it might be an animal, I could hardly contain myself). Suddenly, a deer gave a warning call that sounded much like a sneeze, and a whole herd of deer, unseen, leaped through the brush away from us! We crossed the little stream and noticed someone had made a new rock bridge. It was surprisingly bright in the woods at night, and warmer, too.
We collapsed back home on the bed, and for the most part slept like rocks. Except at one point in the night, when Ryan sat up in his sleep, grabbed my arm to wake me up, and said, “Manda! Look at all the boxes!! It’s AMAZING!” and I replied, “There are no boxes, because we are asleep.” “You’re welcome,” he said, and flopped back into his dream of mountains of boxes.