The Big Move-In

Following the long (and exciting) haul across the country, one week ago Monday, we made our way into Oakland. We moved in with all the worldly belongings we had brought with us in the car (because the delivery truck with all three of our “small” storage units wasn’t scheduled to arrive until Friday).

We picked up the cats at the airport...

Excited to have started to settle in, we spent the next four days camping-out squatter style in our empty apartment.

While over the years we certainly have grown to appreciate the value of living with less (examples being not subscribing to cable tv, and riding my bike to work occasionally as a compromise to sharing one car), we discovered there is a threshold below which life becomes more of a challenge than any person should have to endure.

This is a long one, but there's a TOP TEN at the end...

Exhibit A: Lack of Refrigeration.
Take food for example, which some might consider to be an important part of life. In our modernized country, food isn’t so hard to come by (heck, our whole culture revolves around finding food easily– it doesn’t take much effort to hop into the car and drive to the nearest grocery store, all-night fast-food joint, or “all-you-can-eat” corral – No need to have a garden or slaughter your pet cow, just fill a few bags with neatly packaged, processed “food products,” and bring them home to fill the cupboards and fridge, then indulge. Simple and convenient, right? Not when you’re squatting.

I was about to put water into the ice trays before heading out to the grocery store for some juice, when I noticed a problem… the freezer wasn’t freezing. In fact, the air that came out was actually warmer than the rest of the kitchen. Being that we’d just signed our lease the night before, I immediately called Pat the Land Lady. I left her a voice message, then decided that perhaps she would have it fixed quickly enough that we could go on our merry way shopping… after all, 11 out of 100 people in this state are looking for JOBS. Not enough of those folks must know anything about refrigerators because it took two more days for her to get it done.

Exhibit B: Lack of furniture.
While we did have our Aerobed, aside from the floor it was the only “furniture” we had. We did eventually find a couple of chairs to “borrow” from a neighbor’s storage unit, but by the time that happened it was too late. My back decided it had had enough by Thursday night. It was apparently revolting after having endured a week and a half of a constant thud-thud of the car traveling over regularly spaced highway cracks. Couple that with three recent nights of being contorted for the sake of finding “comfort” on either a solid wood floor or the space-walk super-bounce carnival bed, and you get a gut-wrenching spasm that makes a grown man want to OD on ibuprofen and pain killers. (Aerobeds, you may have heard, were recently exposed by a Fox news reporter to have been used in Guantanamo).

So, it was a bit of a bittersweet moment when our stuff arrived just in time to be unpacked on the very next day. I had to leave work at 10am for a doctor appointment that became a visit to an X-ray technician followed by another appointment with a Physical Therapist. My third day on the job amounted to a whopping 1.5 hours of standing at my desk to avoid flexing my back, followed by trips to the doctor, an x-ray technician, and a physical therapist. As I type this it's Tuesday and I'm still getting occasional twinges of pain.

There is a happy ending to this story though… after unpacking and carrying most of the three containers worth of boxes and furniture up two flights of stairs, Jess’ legs are looking hotter than ever. We went out to dinner last night to celebrate.