My sister had her baby. Dave was in Toronto dealing with Glarkware while she did baby things. And my parents were coming back from Karachi for the first time since they’d moved there for Olivia’s 30-day party, and I was already planning to stay in Toronto (and work from here) the whole time they were in town. Ever since we’d found out we wouldn’t be moving out of New York, we’d been talking about redoing the floors and the kitchen, so with the apartment about to be empty for a while, it seemed like a good time to get all that done. Our real estate agent recommended a project manager who would hire the contractors, he came to look at the place and measure it, and by last week we were all systems go. At that time, he mentioned that I would have to stage the apartment — by which he meant clear off the surfaces of all our furniture so that the floor guys could maneuver in there. He recommended getting some banker’s boxes that would be easy to stack and move around. I thought that sounded reasonable — and fortunately, the weekend before I left, Joe would be staying with me for a few days, and I told him he’d have to sing for his supper by helping me pack up the few bookshelves, to which he readily agreed. We finished in half an hour and twelve boxes. What could be easier?
And then, at 5 on Monday (the day before I was to leave), the project manager called back to arrange a time to come pick up the keys. In the course of the conversation, he reminded me about staging the surfaces of the furniture, and “reminded” me that I’d have to empty out the kitchen cabinets as well. And I put that in quotation marks because he hadn’t said a thing about the kitchen before. Now, in retrospect, of course I should have assumed I’d have to pack the kitchen as well, but maybe I thought they showed up with a bunch of Rubbermaid bins and stuck everything on their truck. Or maybe I just didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know the answer. But the upshot was that I had to take Tuesday off, go buy an assload of boxes, and pack up both the kitchen (including all the tchotchkes on top of the cabinets) and everything that was on the floors in the closets (where the floors would also be replaced). It took six hours and forty-two boxes, I did it all myself, and I cursed Dave almost the entire time. I only almost started crying when I had to unhook all the electronics on Dave’s desk and around the TV, because: complicated. But what made me feel better was realizing that since I’d had to pack everything by myself on an inflexible deadline, it will only be fair when we return for Dave to unpack them by himself while I get a massage.
