Well, Hurricane Dawn has officially made landfall in South Florida. My girl Vitamin D had forwarded me a news story that a milder hurricane season is predicted this year. Heh. Apparently no one alerted AccuWeather to my arrival.
Land, ho!
I have about 17 million stories to tell. Which my beloveds on Twitter have had to endure. So I’ll spare the details and say it was a relatively smooth move. There, that’s simple and truthful, yes?
The CliffsNotes version, however, is that the movers came Friday morning and told me the furniture would be in South Florida on Monday morning. MONDAY MORNING. Christ. The original estimate was WAY later. And while the extra time to get acclimated to my new environment has been beautiful, I might have lost out on the opportunity of a lifetime.
OK, so everyone knows the Extended Houseguest drives me batty. And that for a portion of the time between my interview and offer and subsequent resignation from the ranch (think late January through mid-March), the EH said she was going to stay put in D.C. OMG, I had so much hope. I was thrilled. I knew better than to believe it, but hey, I don’t turn down hope when it happens.
So as she was spending the last week before the truck came, cooking and baking for her new colleagues instead of, oh, PACKING, she came to ask me if I could delay the truck’s arrival. The truck I had reserved on Feb. 11 to come on March 20. *kick*
It was partially that she didn’t have time to finish packing, for one, and two, she felt like she was going to find a place to live locally — that the right person was going to answer her ad.
Well, OK, the moving truck came at 8 a.m. Friday, yes? She put an ad in the paper on fucking TUESDAY NIGHT. And son of a MOTHERFUCKING bitch, she got a call on SATURDAY from a grandmother raising a granddaughter who was willing to take her offer to cook and clean and pay a small amount — way below the D.C. market rate for renting a room.
She wasn’t going to call back, but I begged her to. And it sounded just lovely. The woman wanted to meet her for lunch on Sunday.
Trouble was, I was leaving Sunday morning. And even though the palace is paid for through the 4th — whereupon I’d begged her to at least stay at her job and mosey down after I’d gotten settled — she insisted on coming with. I begged her to at least do lunch with the lady, but she wouldn’t because her shit was already on my moving truck.
Gah. Do you know how much I would have GLADLY paid to send the truck straight back to D.C. with her stuff? Money ain’t nothing but a number, in that case. Sure, I’ve blown my life savings in this epic adventure, but instead of buying the iMac that I’ve been saving up for, for two years now, that could have been my one-way (three-way?) ticket to sanity.
She wanted to follow me to Florida, all 1,000-plus miles. Because she was afraid to do the drive alone. Now, I’m someone who LOVES to drive long-distance, but not when I have someone either tailing me or failing to match my speed.
PLUS, because she kept falling asleep at the wheel (because I didn’t give her any extra days to pack. Because I HAD to drive Sunday. Because of the other 35 reasons of something that I supposedly did), she insisted on driving in front of me for much of the trip. So when the rest of the highway was going 85, she was doing 60. So I’d pass her and then she’d floor it and cut me off. Grrr.
So anyway, here we are, and the same patterns are emerging. I couldn’t go anywhere in D.C. without her because she was too scared to get out and learn the area. So she’d sit home all day if I wasn’t driving. She’d go without eating if I wasn’t paying. And I don’t type all of this to put her down — I know what it’s like to have nothing. But she CHOSE to leave her job and leave a great living opportunity. She CHOSE to drive exhausted.
Oh, one more story. To break up the drive, I rented a hotel room in Savannah on Sunday night. We got there late and I wanted to leave early. I could hear her kvetching on the cell phone/plan that I paid for to her friends about me, not that I cared, but still. She was whining about why I needed to be up so early. To make it to the fucking rental office before it fucking closed, if that’s OK with you. Gah. Who’s the one organizing/footing this trip? No questioning the master here. NONE.
So she fell asleep pretty quickly. She had put on the TV and gone into a coma, so I figured she wanted to sleep with it on. So I grabbed the remote, turned on “The Soup,” and went into my own la-la land for an hour.
Until …
OK, so she’s a Pittsburgh girl. And has these metal hair rollers that were made before I was born in ’74.
AND SHE STARTED CURLING HER FUCKING HAIR AT GODDAMNED 1 A.M. IN THE LITTLE FUCKING HOTEL ROOM WE SHARED. IN FRONT OF MY BED. AND WAS PUMPING OUT CLOUDS OF HAIRSPRAY.
I woke up, pissed to death. She said she couldn’t sleep with the TV and couldn’t turn it off because I had the remote in my bed somewhere. I said, No. 1, you could have awakened me. Or, No. 2, DID YOU NOT SEE THE BIG FAT FUCKING “POWER” BUTTON ON THE TV?!?!?!
Well, guess who didn’t sleep the rest of the night. This guy!
Yaaarrrrrrr.
Well, she also said that I’d TOLD her to be ready early. So she was just trying to be up and at ’em for when I wanted to leave.
Always my fault. I refuse to accept it and SAY that repeatedly. But yeah, she honestly has no idea why I’m so freaking through with this shit. She will, however, GLADLY tell you how mean I am.
Speaking of shit, er, piss, Maddie had pissed up her cage during the Arlington, Va., to Savannah drive. (And Maddie got to roam around the car for seven hours on Monday from Savannah to Miami; she was a fixture in my rearview mirror as she watched the traffic go by.)
In Arlington, Tom and Tiff had given us a lovely send-off brunch at the Boulevard Woodgrill. Which was so fitting. I’d moved to D.C. with Tiff seven years ago and that was one of our first favorite restaurants. Now for her and her awesome husband to take me there one last time to send me on my way was nothing short of appropriate. Life has come full circle — at least, my life in D.C.
I lost mom on the way there. (Yes!) She couldn’t keep up with me from the get-go; I lost my shit and told her again why I thought it was a bad idea for her to travel with me. But she doesn’t listen. Which is why I keep reminding her that she’s in the guest room and that she can decorate her own place when she gets one. But I digress.
But yeah, I took her out twice here (tonight was a third; I finally got cable and had to miss out because she was up my ASS about taking her. I can’t do the fight more than 15 times in a day) and now she refuses to go out on her own.
This is the only vacation time I’ve had in years, you know? Dragging her everywhere I want to go just sucks.
And I am happy to sit on my ass and tell her to go out her damn self, but she resurfaces every 45 minutes to ask again if I will take her out. And every time, I say your car works; use it. I will even write directions for you. Just LEAVE.
And as I sat in the house last night because I was not going to entertain her (and I’m running super-low on cash for feeding two). Seriously. I miss the days when my roommates paid bills and rent and also had cars or bus passes and would do their own fucking thing. I can’t take another minute of this shit, especially not knowing that she could have stayed in D.C. and had a place to live and did NOT have to haunt me here when I’m trying to start my new life.
Well, fuck everybody; I’m going to the damn beach tomorrow. I know she’s been begging me to take her to the beach; I showed her how easy it is to get there. Make a right, follow the street till it hits the ocean, and turn left. How much fucking EASIER can it get?
I know a lot of people are praying/rooting for me, and I wouldn’t have made it this far without all of you. And when my guest room is freed up, anyone who wants to come and hang out had better do so. And if any of you want to hang out longer and are willing to split some bills, I’m totally up for negotiating!