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I’m 99.9% moved into my new place in Santa Clara.  I feel it’s appropriate to liken my experience to the Jefferson’s theme song, “Movin’ on up”, which you best watch right now:

This is partially true, except the whole part about moving all your things is that it’s a royal pain in the ass.  At least in my case, this was due to a series of unfortunate events.

As some background, I moved into 2265 Pulgas Ave last June, slightly desperate to find a place to put my things before I headed off to China and Thailand for three weeks.  Some of my friends had been living off-campus at said house for the past year, and were on their way out, just in time for a few people in the same situation as me to move in.  We all knew at least two other people in the house coming in, and upon meeting each other, agreed it would be a good living situation.  There were four of us, who will now go by Amy, Ben, and Clyde.

Throughout all of last year, there really wasn’t any drama.  Since I had the master bedroom, I sort of kept to myself, and with free food at Google, I never cooked.  I’m probably being overly dramatic about a lot of this, but here’s the rough outline:

• Amy doesn’t have a job and stays at home playing my Guitar Hero game or doing whatever else.  To help pay rent, she pulls in her friend, Darma, to foot the bill of one room.  No problems there, except it was frustrating to see her fail Freebird on Medium.
• Amy then decides to accept a research position in Yemen and leaves a month later, leaving Darma responsible for the room’s rent.  I slightly suspect Darma is miffed by this.
• Landlord turns out to be utterly useless – water goes off in the house for a day because she forgets to pay the water bill, the front lawn is just dirt, and we have a rat problem for a few weeks.  I also think the toilet was running in the common bathroom for over a month.
• Ben graduates a leaves the house a month before the lease ends.  He pays rent for the month he’s not there, but…
• This week, with the lease ending and needing to completely move out, it’s up to Clyde and I to do everything.  Darma lives nearby but with no car and no picking up her cell phone, she’s not there to help.
• As Clyde and I quickly found out, our kitchen, laundry room, garage, and closets were full of random, useless, broken shit left not only by Amy [now in Yemen], Ben [now in Sacramento], but also the former housemates who moved out last year, and some of their random friends.
• For example, when cleaning out the garage, I found over 300 CDs of a Stanford a capella group.  Who the hell put them there?  I emailed my housemates, got CC’d to Amy’s friend who put them there, emailed him, who never responded, and finally emailed the group’s alias after looking on Stanford’s website with an ultimatum that we were gone on Thursday.  That got their attention, even though the person who picked up the CDs told me the original person CC’d got the email, but didn’t feel the need to respond.  Bastards.
• Additionally, over five large garbage bags of random clothes were found in the front closet.  Get this: they were apparently a former housemate’s [now in the Midwest] former housemate’s before she moved into this house in EPA’s clothes.  I guess they never got around to picking it up.  Those were donated to charity.  But, along with that find, I also found a bunch of high school yearbooks.  So, Angelica (yes, this is a real name now), if you’re looking for your high school yearbooks, they are sitting on the sidewalk outside of this house, under the wire coat hangers and cardboard boxes.
• As you may also suspect, Amy, who went to Yemen, did not take all of her things.  I think she had the most random shit left over in the house – a typewriter (seriously), a motorcycle battery jumper cable pack, and one of those hats Chinese people wear out on the rice patties.  We also had to throw out a random armchair from the living room that she happened to have picked up off the street in San Francisco.  Again – if you want any of this, go outside the house.
• Our old housemates were also kind enough to leave their crap behind.  It would have been nice to have a Magic Swiffer, a plug-in heater, and a wooden clothes drying rack, except it was just the boxes!  Oh, we did have a broken heater, a cassette car stereo system, and a 50 ft long cable cord for the non-existent cable TV we had.  There was also a lot of random tupperware, a wooden dresser, a bookshelf, and heavy-metal filing cabinet to take care of. If you want any of this, you know where to go.
• So, to top things off, it was only me and Clyde who ended up cleaning this mess up tonight.  Instead of moving my own stuff out, I think I handled the accumulated junk of 10 people.  To make matters worse, the vacuum we had was clogged from the crappy carpet (remember – crappy landlord = crappy carpet), so we spent about 30 minutes unclogging it.  This meant fishing out some wire hangers (thanks random people who left those in the closet) and poking at a horrid bundle of dust, hair, and who knows what else.  The vacuum tubes were also clogged, so I did have a moment of genius where I swung the tube around (centripetal force!) to move all the dust to the end of the tube to get out.  Is this what you learn in Applied Math?

So, I guess that’s about it.  I was moved out yesterday, but spent about 6 hours of my life cleaning a crappy house to begin with and the taking out trash that wasn’t mine.  One thing that made some of this worth it, was my neighbors kids – 6 of ‘em, who were playing outside when we were cleaning.  They’ve always been friendly with me, asking about my car or bike whenever I come home, but today, they were especially interested, with all of the things we were throwing out.  I brought a random chair outside and one of the children, around 8, had the courage to come up and ask if he could take it.  In my mind I thought “well, this was going to be all consolidated into things for Ecumenical Hunger to take, but seeing as how they’re located on 2411 Pulgas, and we’re at 2265 Pulgas, it’s going to go to good use.”  So, the children had a good evening, rolling a chair up and down the street, playing monkey in the middle with a wiffle ball we found in the backyard, and taking some random photos, books, and boxes (for their dog to play in).  I’m at the very least happy that some of our (and whoever else owned these things), went to some use and not a landfill.

Well, that’s about it.  Clyde and I still have to do some follow-up work – as we need to make sure all of the crap outside our house gets disposed of properly.  Ecumenical Hunger is supposed to pick up the four mattresses on the front porch and who knows what will happen to the boxes of things for free and if all of the trash will get picked up next Monday.  Guess I’ll need to make a few extra trips to the house to check that out.  I also need to drop off the Comcast modem at their store in Mountain View tomorrow morning.  I hope that all gets squared away – their so-called 24 hour on-call system is only applicable to questions on how to upgrade service or troubleshoot your connections.  If you want to cancel, you must call during normal business hours.

Sigh, well, it is nice to be in my new place, although almost all of my things are still in boxes or bags.  Except my clothes.  Gotta have my clothes :)

I guess that’s it for now.  I think what made a lot of this situation less than ideal is that I moved entirely in the evenings of this week, since I didn’t want to take a day off.  Work has been tiring enough so coming home to do some packing and moving sucks.  Oh, but another good thing that came out of this situation was that my old dorm fridge, which had been collecting dust (and fungus), in the garage for over a year, is now the beer fridge at work.  While I don’t condone the placement of Miller Lite in the fridge, I’ll put up with it, since the alternative would have been the sidewalk.