as small as a world and as large as alone

3:49am October 30, 2014

This is Fey in the bathroom of the new place. We’ve moved her into that room because the movers won’t be coming in there, and we’ve got a sign on the door not to open the door and let her out. She’s not happy, but she’s got everything she needs, and I should be over there tomorrow night or the night after to actually live with her. I can’t wait until my bed gets set up, that’s the really big thing that I want. Bed and Internet access.

The funny thing was when we set her up in the bathroom, the very first thing she did was go for the food, she didn’t look around, she just immediately started eating. Of course for her, dry food is a treat, she gets it once a day but never in these quantities. (Although we’ve been feeding it to her more often lately because she’s been losing too much weight and it entices her to actually eat something.)

I won’t feel right until I’m over there too, like until my bed is over there. Even if I have to wait for Internet. (I know they are trying to get me hooked up tomorrow or Friday given my family situation, but still.)

The first thing I did was move my shrine over there, because to me that’s central to what the household is, and it sets the tone for the entire rest of the move. My old apartment feels really weird without the shrine, like something’s missing and not in a good way. It’s like the place is empty, and like it’s not my place anymore, like the heart of the apartment has gone to live somewhere else, be the heart of some other apartment. Which tells me my instincts were correct to move the shrine before anything else.

Then I moved all my wheelchairs over. They’re going to serve as living room furniture unless I actually need one of them for something.

Then I moved Fey over, because I want her to have time to get used to the place before the movers come banging around. She’s in the bathroom with a sign on the door telling people not to go in there because of the cat.

The apartment is smaller than this one, at least, the rooms are smaller, it may overall be slightly bigger. But unlike this one, they went out of their way to make it feel light and airy. It’s also got these amazing real wood columns that I have no idea why they’re there but they look cool. Some are painted white and some aren’t. Somehow the place reminds me of stuff I’ve heard about Scandinavian decor, and my Swedish great-grandmother’s house, using light colors to make a place look both brighter and bigger. (My great-grandmother had a tiny tiny house but you wouldn’t know it to go there. I loved her house, it was like she and the house had grown together so long they were part of each other. And she was a total Hufflepuff, always kind and generous and caring, despite also having to have been really tough to raise seven kids in poverty during the Depression, and to travel from Sweden by herself as a child. Nothing about Badgers that contradicts tough, I guess.)

It would be cool if I could somehow decorate the place in very pale yellow or something in keeping with that tradition, but I don’t have an interior decorating bone in my body. The most I can do is hang posters on the wall and crap. Vermont is far enough north though, at least for America, that the same tricks Scandinavian decorators have been using forever to make their houses look lighter even in the winter, could work here.

Choosing between the bedrooms isn’t hard, exactly, but it’s difficult. By which I mean… I only have one choice – the bigger one, or taking part of the living room as my bedroom. That’s because I have a lot of really large medical equipment, i can’t fit it all in the smaller bedroom.

But if I had a choice, I might want the smaller bedroom. It’s got two windows instead of one. And it’s just got a really nice feel to it. I’d love sitting in the windowsills and stuff. (All the windows have sills big enough to sit on, Fey will love it once she gets over the shock.)

Anyway I’m having the movers put the boxes mostly in the smaller bedroom, because I’m not going to use it until I find a roommate. And that way I can unpack from there into the rest of the house.

The one thing that’s exciting me more than most, though, is that houses and apartments have personalities. They just do. Don’t ask me how I know this, I’ve known it since I was a kid, I’ve always been good at sensing the personality of a place. (Unfortunately the house I grew up in had one of the worst personalities I’ve ever seen in a house. It was like Gruumpy McGrumpy Pants 24/7, only worse – I’d take any excuse, from an early age, to be out of there.) Anyway, this place has a very good personality. And I feel very fortunate to have been assigned it, because I only got it from my name coming up on a waiting list at the right time. My current apartment isn’t exactly good or bad, it’s just kind of meh. But my new one is definitely good. And it’s really beautiful, it doesn’t look as institutional as this one does. This one looks like the same architect designed the interior as whoever designed the local hospital. Which may be accurate for all I know.

Anyway, enough babble, sending this.

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