Reel Expression

If you’ve been paying attention to my plurk or twitter accounts, there is a good chance you already know what is going on.

I have moved back across the pond. I am no longer an expat. \o/ I think in my complete lack of sanity near the end, I forgot to mention the Chicago series was in part because I was moving here.

Let me tell you… transatlantic moves suck. Not in the ways that all moves suck. Take the regular annoyance of a move and times it by 100 and you may just understand. It’s what I’ve been dealing with for months now and pretty much slammed with it since the last release.

Take packing for instance.
To move all your crap overseas, you have to decide what is important enough to take for the huge price of it. Are you going to fly it over? (super expensive) Or have it sailed over? (takes 4-12 weeks and still pretty fucking expensive). Which of your items are worth the shipping costs and possible length of time it takes? To give an example, the cheapest option - sea freight and 1 of the smallest size of boxes - starts at £195.00.

I also had to write out a full inventory of every item I packed, including length of time owned and amount it is worth. These are for the customs forms and as a returning resident, anything I’d owned for a year or more was exempt from paying duty. Type it all out into a clean excel spreadsheet, print, and hand over to the shipping company.

Don’t forget the rest of the forms - about 10 pages.

Importing the kittens was surprisingly easy. So easy in fact that it seemed too easy which led me to do far more research then necessary. In the end I went with a pet travel agent who picked them up the day before, filled out the paper work, supplied the carriers, and got them to the airport and on my plane. It was about 3x the amount of my ticket. \o/

Furniture:
Of course I didn’t have any when I got here, due to the entire shipping annoyances. But the thing about renting a flat in London is that you generally get them furnished. Which is awesome when you get there and not having to deal with it during moving but you rarely get a choice of quality and what it looks like. Plus if you move to a place with no furniture at all, you have to buy it all in 1 go.

My first week here, I had an air mattress. That’s it. Last weekend, Keiki drove up for a visit and we went on a massive ikea shopping spree. I very much have a love hate relationship with ikea. I hate shopping so much that I like to go get what I need and leave. You can’t do that in ikea. The place is a maze. Plus everyone has to go down just about the same paths and you have to walk at their speed, which is bloody slow. But its great because you can find random stuff you never thought you’d want but can still afford.

Ikea is awesome when you have to furnish an entire apartment on a budget but by the time you get through the endless sea of crap they expect you to be able to find the correct furniture. I don’t know if it was the jet lag or annoyance of 3 hours of shopping, but I well.. didn’t do so great. The pieces are the correct type, but the chest of drawers is the wrong colour. \o/ And I’m thinking there might be colour miss matched bookshelves too. Those are still in the boxes as I don’t have my books yet.

With no car I don’t have much options in getting it changed. So, I’m just going to live with it. Who needs matching furniture? It’s ikea stuff so it’s not like it’ll last for the rest of my life. And knowing me I’ll pick up and move somewhere random in 5 years again.

Given all that, I built all the stuff all by myself. Even the bed. \o/ Fear my power screwdriver.

On Monday my desk arrived then the stuff from ikea on tue. It’s getting there, but I still don’t have a tv or couch. Soon hopefully.

Landlord from hell
Here’s what I don’t get. I’m in a pretty decent 1 bedroom apartment. Brand new rehabbed place. It’s got all sorts of new appliances for the kitchen - even a dishwasher… how I missed having one. Granite counter tops, new cupboards, nice wood floors, marble bathroom with whirlpool tub. And yet my landlord is about as responsible as the rumours you hear about slum lords.

When I got here, there was no heat turned on at all. The gas wasn’t hooked up. No heat. No hot water. I learned about this when I called to change the utilities to my name before I left and the earliest they could get here to turn the gas on was a week after I got here. FFS. After finally getting that entire thing sorted on tue, comes to find out that the hot water heater just isn’t working. Maintenance came out last week, said they would be back in a couple of mins, 5 days later and I still can’t have a hot bath in less than the 3 hours it takes to fill it with water from the stove.

I live in a 3 story walk up courtyard building, which is rather typical here in Chicago. Before you actually get through the courtyard to the door of my part of the building, there is a fence and a gate. The first couple of days, the gate was unlocked. Then one day I left to walk up to walgreens to find it locked and me without a correct key. They had given me 2 front door keys instead of a gate key. Awesome.

When Keiki and I went shopping, I’d left tape over the latch so we could get back in. It was off when we got back. I stood in the rain for perhaps 30min when I finally scaled the fence. Monday the cable guys came, needed to get into the basement - same key as the gate - and after 10 calls to the landlord I still couldn’t get a key. Luckily a neighbour happened to be walking down the alley, stopped over for a chat and opened the door for us just as I was rescheduling.

Daily calls and their daily promises and it was a week until I got it.

According to what I’ve read, there is a city ordinance that says landlords have to supply a recycling program. We don’t. So my living room is filled with recycling - mostly boxes - while I decide what I’m going to do with them.

I don’t have a door buzzer. Ok. I’m in the back end of the courtyard. Meaning I’m across the entire courtyard from the gate. UPS gets to the gate, how are they supposed to get to me? And how am I supposed to know they are there? Luckily I’ve had a chat with the regular driver, he comes this way at a specific time and yells really loud.

My upstairs neighbours stomp around with shoes on (wood floors), scream at each other constantly and then have loud make-up sex. They also break up and slam doors every day.

Crazy Kittens:

When I got them here, they were so happy to see me that they just wanted out of their carriers and follow me around. You are supposed to (according to my vet) lock them in 1 room until they calm down. That was… impossible. They cried and scratched at the door. So Chuck (pictured here) walked around with his big fluffy tail in the air shaking it he was that scared.

Pretty much straight away they figured out how to get on top of the cupboards. 8′ in the air. A few days after getting here, I woke up to Chuck pacing and crying. Hunter was missing. I searched for a while and then remembered the tile in the bathroom that isn’t attached because of the whirlpool motor is behind it. Of course, the tile is flat on the ground and the cat sized hole is exposed. I tried for a while to coax her out, but she wasn’t having anything to do with it.

Chuck on the other hand really wanted to be in the hole, so I closed him in the bedroom. Big mistake. He peed on my air mattress and blankets. I have no idea why I didn’t remember he does that when I lock him away from what is going on. As soon as I let him out, he went into the hole. He’s a bit on the tubby side and couldn’t get very far… just sat there staring at me. So I took a picture.

Since I didn’t have a key and worried about being locked out to leave, I had Keiki bring me some aluminum foil and duck tape to close the hole once they got out. Which they did… eventually.

They were a bit worrying for a while as they weren’t eating very well. They get 4 small meals a day, mostly so Hunter will eat it all so Chuck doesn’t finish it for her. Until a couple of days ago, Hunter would only come out of whatever hiding place she was in to eat once, and never eat it all.

They are getting better and now asserting their dominance over the apartment. Demanding cuddles when/where/how they please, jumping on me as a “feed me” wake up call, and standing on the desk for giving me headbutts.

It really isn’t all that bad…
Lots of annoying crap has been thrown at me to deal with, but it’s starting to look up. Which is good because Chicago is a great city. Like Bill Maher said when I went to see him debate Ann Coulter on Tue, Chicago is like NY without the attitude. London I’d say is somewhere in the middle, with really shit customer service.

People in general are friendly and helpful. I’ve had neighbours stop by just to introduce themselves and welcome me to the building. Shop cashiers are a level of friendly that you don’t get in London. The cable installers stuck around for 2 hours while I tried to get someone to open the basement door and didn’t complain. They were chilled and just chatted with me. At the theater for the debate, the people sitting next to me (perfect strangers) asked what I thought of it when it ended. As did a group of people I ended up walking next to towards the El.

3 blocks away I have a coffee shop with free wifi with a nice and chatty barista who’s been perfectly OK with me still sitting there with my eee pc after they have closed. The red line El stop is 4 blocks away. 2 blocks is a decent sized grocery store. 7 blocks away is the only kickboxing school I could find that teaches the style I know and like. 6 Blocks is the lake/park/beach. An Organic grocery store is 8 blocks away. It took less than an hour to get to the loop (downtown) which I was rather worried about because I’m pretty far north. In London, my place looked close and only took 20mins to get to Oxford St by tube, but door to door it was about an hour. 30min walk + you can never get on the first central line train.

I have this thing I do when I move to a new city. I hide out for a week or 2. Alle says I’m a cat like that. When I moved to SF 10 years ago, it was the first time I’d ever moved to another city. I was staying in hotel and had 2 suitcases. I’m pretty sure I didn’t leave that room once in a week. 5 years later I moved to London. It was a bit different as I was staying with a friend and he made me leave a few times. I remember very clearly that first night on no sleep, experiencing massive jet lag for the first time and the mass amounts of drinking we did. I was hurting for days after that. Now in Chicago, I’ve ventured out a few times to get things that I needed… but meh. I really just need my bearings first and then venture out when and where I need to.

I spent a lot of the first couple of weeks sorting things out when I had to and watching TV in the bedroom whenever I could. I’ve still got a bit of jet lag, exhaustion or weird sleeping schedule so I’m a bit out of it. Today I woke up itching to work and have been since. Still sorting through the 2 weeks of IMs and notecards, so please continue to be patient. Hopefully I’ll have some new poses out soonish.

This week maybe I’ll ring up about starting kickboxing again and we’ll see what happens.

Cheers
Luth