home

I have moved.

It took nearly 20 days to get everything out of the Pittsburgh apartment and into the State College, PA, apartment 3 hours away, but it has now officially been accomplished and I no longer live in Pittsburgh and I don't have keys for anything in Pittsburgh and I am a real, live State College resident (although now I have to change my voting registration thing again, I guess...grr...).

Whew!

I am far from being "settled in" to the new place - there are boxes that will provide me with a pseudo-Christmas for the next month or so as I explore what is inside of them all. Incidentally, I do know where my fake Christmas tree is AND even the location of all the decorations...maybe I'll put it up just for kicks.

And then there's Joelle.

Poor gal. Over the past few weeks her favorite hiding/resting spots have been taken away one after another. First it was the bookshelves...then the pink chair...then the bed...then the silver chair... One day I found her stolidly laying in the past home of the silver chair. You can still see the imprints of its legs in the carpet.

maybe if i wait here long enough, it will come back...?

I drove her to the new place on Wednesday after having set up the living room and half of the bedroom.

i can sit!

i can sleep!
...what i'm not showing you is what these places look like now a week later...with boxes filled with clothes stuffed under the bed and 6 of the 7 available seating locations piled high with miscellaneous stuff i don't know what to do with yet

After she moved in and her house was rebuilt and put into is new location...I promptly locked Joelle in the cage and left for 36 hours...! I returned Friday with all the rest of the stuff from the old apartment crammed in my car (I really ought to have taken a picture of that - it was pretty funny...but not something to be proud of), including all of the cleaning supplies I had used the night before to leave the old place spic and span. For someone who doesn't clean much, I sure have a heck of a lot of cleaning solutions - why??? - I filled three 1'x1'x2' boxes with it all!

And so now...the Jo and I are home here in Happy Valley, the cute little name given to the region containing and surrounding State College...centered around the Pennsylvania State University, which will be my new workplace starting tomorrow!, and extending via beautiful, rolling farm fields to the bases of the Appalachian Mountains.I like.