It's official...

...I think. The landlord called and said we can have the apartment we applied for. But she said nothing about sending us a lease agreement. We mailed out a deposit, but I'm not clear on what rights that gives us. When we were in OR, they told us we would handle the lease by mail. That's what I want to do. I don't want to show up on moving day and have them say our place is not ready and that there's nothing we can do about it. Not that this isn't a nice place. It's almost too nice, like Mike and I aren't quite good enough to live there. It's in a really posh "exclusive" neighborhood. They actually describe themselves that way. It seems that the 150 rental units likely meet some sort of mandatory low-income housing requirement for this neighborhood. Of course, "low-income" for this neighborhood is laughable for us normal peasants, but you get the concept of where we're going. And all the online reviews of this community are good, with the biggest complaint being that there don't seem to be enough parking spaces for the rich folks' fleet of vehicles. We get one assigned to us and that's all we care about. We won't even complain if it's not right outside our building.



Which does bring us to another concern. We're not quite sure yet as to how we're going to get our stuff from here to there. Naturally we are purging a huge amount of stuff so we have less to move and unpack. Which brings me to another sidebar...Heidi sent me the story of stuff , which is a 20-minute video explaining the consumer cycle. Starts off with 10 minutes of propaganda about Bad Americans, Bad, Bad! But then explains some consumer concepts and practices that I hadn't thought about before, ultimately stating that we're all brainwashed to shop and trash things and then shop some more. So this was fresh on my mind as we're pointing at things around the house and considering how much it would cost to move them vs replacing them upon arrival. Oh the guilt and shame, or wait, as an American, isn't that my duty? whatever. We're getting rid of LOTS of stuff only to buy it again upon arrival.



So back to the original question. How to move the stuff that's actually going? We think we've settled on PODS or Relo-cubes, but the trouble with that is that the landlord doesn't seem to like those...and remember the parking complaints? So we have to consider dimensions and length of time they will be on the property before they can be taken away, and what if we need 2 pods, will we have to have them delivered one at a time? I'd almost rather do the old-fashioned truck thing, where it's done and gone within a few hours.



We can not reserve the truck or cubes until we know the exact date we're leaving, and that is contingent on an upcoming DAR meeting whose date is still unknown...