and now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming

1. Moving, that joyous occasion. I'm writing to you at work, because though we now have power (thanks be) we don't have a connection to Frednet yet. We've been slowly muddling through setting up the apartment, but it's just not going to be home until I take a couple days next week to organize it.
Last week was a blur of finishing up Rothesay things at work and trying to pack at night. When Friday came, we still had some left to do; when Scott and Dad showed up at 9ish, we spent four hours moving about half the stuff over to the new place, which was big and dark, having no power yet. I won't really bore you with a blow by blow of the move, but the low point was definitely the arrival of the Queen of the Night. Ever since she came to view the apartment, she'd been pushing us and Gabriel around, trying to figure out how to get us to move out early and just generally getting far too worked up about her son moving out. Her poor son is a fairly quiet guy - a metalhead, going to the Centre for Arts and Technology downtown to learn the music recording business - and I'm pretty sure if it had just been him there would have been no problem. In any case, she showed up at two on Saturday, hands on hips, dismayed that we were still moving out and claiming that Sean had said we'd be out. I know, and he later confirmed, that he said in no uncertain terms that she could move in Sunday as we had to have Saturday for moving and cleaning, and technically it was still ours until midnight Saturday anyway. There was nothing for it but to tell her too bad and keep moving; I'm not sure what she expected of us.
After a long 24 hours of moving, we finished in eight loads of the magical trailer (everything fits in it perfectly, even the futon frame. Futon frames don't fit anywhere). I can't tell you how utterly up the creek we would have been without Scott and Dad - thanks guys! :)

2. In the new apartment, without light or the ability to cook or refrigerator, we did some unpacking and rearranging over Sunday and Monday, but were limited to daylight hours for the most part - flashlight and candlelight aren't really all that great for unpacking. We passed the evenings playing cards and watching movies on Sean's laptop, charged at Reads.
Canada Day was pretty quiet for us. We stayed in and played Crazy Eights by candlelight. We could have gone out on the fire escape to see the fireworks, I suppose, but someone else had thought of it first: we were playing our first round when we heard a clatter on the roof and two voices laughing. It was already dark, and we couldn't see anything outside, but we yelled hello and heard the clatter stop. Then one voice, drunk and terrified, said "Dude, there is totally a girl looking right at us!" and they scrambled away.
Maybe curtains are in order after all?

3. The cats have dealt relatively well with the move. Parallax is unflappable, and is just as happy to roll around and purr in the new place as the old; Tonks was my real worry, because last time we moved she spent weeks holed up in the closet with her face pushed into the radiator, terrified. This time she had the cat tent instead of the radiator, which was much more comfortable and less pathetic, and to my great relief she woke me up Saturday night by jumping on me to get to the windowsill and then danced around the windowsill, looking out the window excitedly.
It is a bit confusing, though. She hides all day, behind boxes or under the bed, and is quite angry if disturbed (Sean has some really impressive slashes from trying to dislodge her from the bathroom when the repairmen came to fix a couple of things), but comes out after sunset every night to purr and roll and just generally act completely normal. She's a pretty weird cat.

4. Why am I not unpacking this weekend? Why, it's Rothesay! And it's going to rain. Rain. I can't speak of it. All I know is that we are as ready for this thing as we're ever going to be, and the weather just cannot be my fault, no matter what people may say.
Shasta has some rubber boots to lend me, at least.

5. So, next week we'll be getting a booster for the internet and unpacking completely and I'll even take some pictures. There will be pictures of Rothesay, as well. Pray for not rain!