Cadence Proper: Finally online again! (Recap of my move)

Oh my gosh, this move has been hell! First, though, let me tell you about TODAY!

I woke up this morning, to be greeted by this:

Snow up to my knees! If I were a child, it'd be a dream come true, but to me I see a lot of digging I don't want to do so early in the AM. So, I call work to see what's to be done. After all, the snowplows hadn't even hit my street.

After a bit of waiting, and shoveling, I eventually decided to call in. I was only working until 9 anyway, and by the time I could get out and the plows to make the streets safe (ha, ha) It'd be 9 anyway.

Turns out, after hours of digging, I still couldn't get my car out. We have a long driveway.

That's our NEW driveway, BTW. One of the very few downfalls of the new place.

Anyway, I took off of work, went back to bed, cooked my family a nice pancake breakfast, and then my lovely family went to work trying to dig us out. I even called work, to tell them I may need a ride in the morning. What did they say? "You have fourteen hours to dig yourself out." Yeah, if I don't sleep.

It's 5:38, and we're still not dug out

I may need to take a cab

So, I think I'll need to break the recap of my move into pieces. It's quite an epic and dramatic story. And I was hoping that once signing the lease was over, my troubles would be over. Lets talk about the lease, though!

So, we found this nice apartment. It's a three bedroom, two story duplex, for a price that we can (miraculously) afford. Caleb's room is a little smaller than the old place, but with the extra space in the third room, and living room, and well, everywhere else, we can manage. The eat-in kitchen is pretty big, we finally have a living room separate from our bedroom, and we have a spare room for a library/office! It was a little dirty, but I'm pretty good at fixing stuff like that up. Pretty sweet!

The landlord is a very nice Asian gentleman whom, unfortunately, doesn't speak a whole lot of English. That's ok, his partner (wife, I think) speaks plenty, so we had a translator. You'd think that would be the problem. No. The landlord wanted the lease notarized. No problem, I can see why he'd want that. So, after we signed the lease, we drove off to the bank in the grocery store where he swore he's used a notary before.

The notary wasn't there. It was already late in the day, so we went back to his office where he wanted us to call the energy company to put it all in our name. He had his partner call NYSEG where they sat on hold for a good 45 minutes before giving up. I convinced them I could do it tomorrow and we called it a night. I did just that the next day and went to my bank to see if a notary was available there. There was, so I went to the landlord's office to tell them. Kana was going to be on the lease, so I had to wait for her to get home from work so we could get it notarized, but at least things were going to be ok.

Kana came home, and we returned to the landlord's office. I tried to explain the situation about the notary, but the landlord insisted he could get it done for free at the bank we had tried the other day. We returned to Price Chopper to find the notary busy with a conference call that should last the next 45 minutes. I tried to coax them into going to Visions to use the 2 dollar notary. So, we went to a different bank a few blocks down- not my bank. We get there, and, of course, they had closed only minutes before. Awesome. How about my bank? No- there's an M&T across the street. Now, I HATE M&T and have had a HORRIFIC experience with their services, but that's for another story. At least, this trip went well. They were nice and we got the lease notarized- FINALLY! We may have wasted an hour looking for a notary that wasn't at my bank, but at least we saved the $2.

All in all, our landlord is a very nice man and very attentive. We had mentioned that we wanted to put a banister on the stairs so my son can have something to hold on. He said he'd put one in for us. I was expecting a cheap banister kit that screws flimsily into the wall. Instead, I came in the next day to an incredibly sturdy hand-built hand rail. And, with that, the apartment was ours and we could start moving in. The move took literally the entire month of February. I'll tell you more in my next post.