Moved!

My move is done, just the aftermath to deal with. Everyone thinks the hard part is the packing and the actual moving. It's not. That's the easy... well, easier part. Taping together boxes and filling them is rote and mindless work, physically tiring and endless but it's just repetitive grunt work.  For the

Unpacking

move, we use a major moving company and they are great. They send two trucks, five guys and everyone is polite, respectful of our home and our stuff and know what they are doing. The moves usually go seamlessly as far as getting all our stuff from one place and into another.  It's all the rest of the moving details that make me crazy. Even the transfer of utilities is pretty painless now. I do as much online as a I can and we had our phone, internet, cable and utilities all set up the day after the move. Its the things you can't foresee that knock you sideways, as with life in general. And there are always things you can't foresee, even after as many moves as I have handled.

This move started with a mix up over keys. Due to issues with the rental agency we could only have one garage/elevator key fob. A bit of a problem when the fob is needed for everything and my husband and I had to be in two different places. I am still waiting for the extra fobs four days later. Then there was the leak. This is the second move we have had where a water leak was found on move in day, and leaks are problems, BIG problems, my friend. The previous leak required a refinishing of all the wood floors in the main floor of the home we had just moved into. All our furniture, carpets, artwork etc had to be moved out again for the floors to be redone. This time the leak is in the ceiling of our laundry room and will require the removal of drywall, etc, etc. It is starting to smell already. Welcome to your new home, Faye!

Ted having his non-Zen moment.

This is what a room full of paper looks
like when tamed.

Having boxes and packing paper delivered to your house is a breeze, one phone call and there they are. I also get used boxes off of Craigslist so they come into the house in small amounts. After a move there is a huge mound of flattened boxes to get rid of and enough crumpled packing paper to fill a room. Ted took on the most-dreaded job of flattening the paper and the boxes. The boxes were no challenge, a good knife, a few slits through the tape and a big space-gobbling box is flat against the wall. Very satisfying.  But the paper proved to be another thing altogether. I have friends who won't come near my house now until after the paper has been flattened. Everyone has been called in to help with it at one time or another and if you can get into the Zen moment of it the act can be relatively painless but if you don't it becomes the most disliked job in a move.  Ted rose to the challenge and smoothed out paper for hours but by the end he was ranting and raving, swearing to NEVER, EVER flatten a piece of moving paper again! Not too Zen. It's not rocket science but believe me, its a challenge. If you don't flatten it out you will be hauling garbage bags of crumpled paper out of your home for days.

Ted has left on a trip and I will be joining him in a couple of days. Till then I am, arranging for repairs, waiting for key fobs, slowly emptying boxes and stowing things away, all the while knowing I will most likely have to rearrange it all again. And maybe once more after that. No two houses have the same storage or closets and where you keep things is always going to be different. Moving is easy compared to settling in and making a home. And therein lies the most difficult part of the move, making someone else's home feel like yours. I'm pretty good at that part but it takes time. Check back with me in a couple of months and I'll let you know how its going but for now I'm still trying to find that damn wine opener!

Ted's office awaits him.

On The Move Again

I am moving at the end of this month.  This will be the fifth move in less than eight years for my husband and me.  It seems even worse when I see it written down. We are not young adults in our twenties with some clothes, a computer and a bed.  We are grown-ups with lots of stuff.  Lots and lots of stuff. About 13,000 pounds actually despite my many donations to the thrift store. I know what that amount of stuff feels like because I have packed and unpacked every item, each move, with my own hands.  When my husband brought up the idea of moving last month, the thought was unbearable to me, the memory of the last move was still fresh in my mind. The muscle memory was still there, all that bending, lifting, and the screeching of the tape gun, the stacks and stacks of packing paper. Ugh. But life wasn't always like this.

We lived in the first house we purchased for three years, then came a baby and the move to a larger house where we stayed five years and had another child.  The universe aligned and we had a chance to buy a view home and turn it into our dream home and spend fifteen happy years there. This was the longest period that either my husband or myself had spent anywhere. When our youngest son entered his final year of high school we were ready to move on from the suburbs and head back to the city.  The only problem with that was the difference in house values. For what we sold our large view home for in the 'burbs we could purchase a two bed, two bath apartment in Vancouver. So we decided to rent. That's where the trouble began. Selling a large home can be difficult, it took us six months, but giving your notice on a rental is easy. Thirty days and you are gone.

ah, the smell of new
boxes!

We stayed almost two and a half years in the first rental before Ted found a view home for rent he had to have. We moved. The kids were both gone so we had gotten rid of what felt like pounds and pounds of belongings when they went but it still felt like I was packing up a three ring circus.
The new home was lovely, the view stupendous, so nice in fact that after ten months we were given an eviction notice by the owner who wanted to move back in.  She couldn't find any where else to live that she liked as well. Our first eviction notice. We had to be out by the end of January, a terrible time to be looking for a place and an even more terrible time to actually be moving. Happy New Year everyone, pass the packing boxes.

Therein lies one of the downsides to renting, you are at the mercy of the owner. Our next move proved that out as well. We found a home with a more modest view and many, many stairs. Living there was like living on a Stairmaster. I developed buns of steel and after two and a half years grew weary of hauling my groceries up two long flights of stairs to the kitchen, steel buns or not.  I told our rental manager that we would not be renewing our lease and she said, "that's great, because the owners are moving back in!" They were supposed to have moved permanently to China but "surprise!" So we couldn't have stayed even if we had wanted to. Out came the boxes I had stored in the crawlspace. I never give away boxes, you can appreciate why.
This takes us to our current home which we have lived in for 18 months. I could happily stay here another year, not because I love the house so much but because I am so tired of moving. Really, really tired of moving.  My husband is unhappy in our current place and will not stop looking for another rental so he has agreed to help more with the move and I have very reluctantly agreed to go.

On top of my own moves I have helped my mother with her seven moves in the last seven and a half years. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, apparently. In the last decade there has been around 25 moves between my siblings, my two children and my mother, add our five and we are at 30 or more as a family not counting nieces and nephews. That's insanity. And a lot of boxes and tape.

My siblings seem to be staying put for now, I'm hoping my mother does, too but I'm not counting on it. My children don't require my physical help with their moves so that just leaves us. My husband thinks he will love our new place for years to come but I am too jaded now to believe that. Plus we are still at the mercy of the owner who can chose to evict us.  I am thrilled by the recent drop in home prices in Vancouver, (sorry, to those that own one) and am dreaming one day of a place of my own that doesn't have a stack of folded boxes in the basement waiting to be refilled. Someone once commented to me that I must really enjoy moving since I do it so often. I don't but I AM getting good at it. Gotta go, the tape gun is calling me.

Modern Art -Groundbreaking or Garbage?

Modern art is really a crazy trip. People scoff at it, laugh at it and always say "I could do that!"when they view it. I recently spent some time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA as it's known and all those things went through my head or passed my lips while I was there. But there is something energizing and fresh about modern art that makes you crack a smile as opposed to viewing the great masters of old with their solemn portraits, still lifes or gory battles. I'm not taking anything away from the beauty of the classics and their ability to provoke emotion, I love art of all kinds but modern art was what I was there to see.

The Coffee Pot by
Picasso

 Modern art is considered roughly the time frame from the 1860's to the 1970's so it takes in Picasso, Chagall and Klimt as well as the 60's bad boys Warhol, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Pollock and the like.  Anything newer than that is considered contemporary or post modern. The "old" modernists were just as irreverent and ground breaking in their smashing of tradition as the group from the sixties were for their time. We are so used to Picasso and his Cubism, and Dali with his melting clocks that we don't stop to realize sometimes how shocking their work was to their audience. Chagall's dreamy visions were no more appreciated by the masses when they were first seen than Warhol's can of tomato soup was.

In walking though SFMOMA's wonderful collection I was really struck by the irreverent attitude and "in your face", raised middle finger aspect of the work from the fifties to the seventies. It felt like the artists weren't even trying to be "painterly", they were just doing what they wanted and daring you to like it or buy it. It was my first time seeing one of Richard Rauschenberg's White Paintings series. It consists of three large panels, a triptych, each one painted all white. There have been many jokes made at its expense over the years.  While my brain was thinking 'now THAT I could do', I was laughing at the sheer audacity of it. It seemed to say, "I'm a painter, I painted it, its art so f*** you." And there is no point in trying to do it now, it's been done.

Andy Warhol, Self Portrait 1967

Andy Warhol was well known for his portraits, using Polaroids he took of famous people and reproducing them with screen printed colours on top. Elvis, Dolly Parton and his self- portraits are among the SFMOMA collection. He had many people help him with the work or do it under his direction further breaking down the image of what an artist was or was not. He is the biggest selling artist after Picasso so obviously he did something right, love him or hate him. The sixties were a turbulent time of great change in America and the art work of the time truly reflects that. Boundaries and barriers were coming down everywhere. It was an "anything goes" era, and the artists were the conduit for it. The massive canvases with their bold colours almost leap off the walls, demanding attention, energy made visible. They cannot be ignored.
From the powerful work of Diego Rivera to the striking and delicate colour block abstractions of Mondrian to the elegant moving mobiles of Alexander Calder, through to the polka dot cartoon images of Lichtenstein the SFMOMA has much to offer. The building itself is a thing of beauty, open spacious and  modern,  filled with light coloured, wood floors and high-ceilinged rooms. The pugnacious energy of the modern art bounces around the rooms and invites you to dare to say it's not art. I loved it but there was one piece that stood out in my mind, Untitled (1971) by Cy Twombly. A large piece that looked exactly like a blackboard that had been erased many times and then scribbled over. Standing in front of it all I could think was, "okay, Cy, now you really are having us on."

Untitled, 1971 by Cy Twombly