Moving!

Friends, my moving day is fast approaching. On Saturday, I pull up stakes and head to sunny Los Angeles, California to take over the apartment of a colleague who will be spending her next while doing research in Japan. As many of you know firsthand and some of you secondhand, moving across a continent can be a huge pain in the everywhere, but this move will actually not be such a pain. Why? There are several answers.

1. The Mysterious X and her paramour, the Inscrutable A (new nicknames are fun!), who have offered to retrieve me from the airport.
2. The She God of Shark Reef, who has retrieved the key to my new apartment from the landlady who won't be there when I arrive.
3. A New Car!, who has offered to loan me his cello when I need one in LA, thereby cutting my plane fare in half.
4. Fenchurch, whose apartment I am taking over, and who is selling me some essential furniture to fill it.
5. Nota Biene (another new nickname!), who wrote to me to tell me that she was unable to sell some of her furniture on Craig's List, and would I like it?
6. Musicolojill, who volunteered without my asking to help transport the furniture!
7. El Brucero (a new nickname based on the fact that he owns a car named Bruce, not on any inherently brush-maker-like characteristics), who in consideration of my journey both offered me a bicoastal Kitchen-Aid swap and gave me a booze gift certificate so I wouldn't have to transport whisky.
8. My father, who despite longing to empty his basement has agreed to take on the innumerable boxes of books and winter clothes that I want to keep but don't want to bring to the flaming desert of LA in August, and who has also agreed to be a long-term hedgehogsitter.


These people are the reasons I am able to make this move in a fairly relaxed and cost-controlled fashion. I owe each and every one of them a drink or a baked good or a combination of the two.