Tuesday, April 8Today has been tough.
The movers are coming either Thursday or Friday, and I won't know which until tomorrow. So I've been trying to sort the remaining stuff that is in the "might come with me" category. I'd already spent two days on the kitchen without making much progress, because I'd work for an hour or two and then stop for the day. Today, I probably spent 6 hours on it. Lots of "work for an hour, sit down for an hour, get up again, repeat throughout the day." Around 7:30PM, I decided to quit for the day. I made pancakes for dinner, because I haven't wanted to buy groceries and have run low on some usual staples. There's still frozen food I should eat, but I forgot about it.
After dinner, I went back to the kitchen and did a few more things anyway.
I wrote down a list of the things I want to do before the movers get here and before the car leaves (car is scheduled to go on Thursday). Because I've been afraid I would forget them. There are 12 items on the list. They are not quick items. I am not getting all of them done tomorrow.
One item is to scatter Lut's ashes in the backyard. I want to do it here because the one thing he wanted most, whenever he was at a hospital or rehab facility, was to come home. Every time I think about it, I start to cry again. I didn't want to write it down because it's making me cry again. I plan to bring a little bit of the ashes with me. They make memorial necklaces that will hold a little bit, and I want to use one, but I haven't picked one out yet.
Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about getting most of the kitchen done, until I made the list and realized that, ideally, I would do all of it tomorrow while I still have the car and when the movers definitely won't be here. Now I feel panicked instead.
Most of it isn't that important and the stuff that is That Important is not time-consuming. So I shouldn't panic. But I'm panicking anyway. I'm gonna go do an easy important thing: Pay Taxes, which is separate from File Taxes; I can get an extension for filing but I need to at least guess at what I owe and pay it, since I am retired and do not have withholding. Ideally, I would do this after actually doing my taxes, so that I could pay the correct amount instead of guessing. But no. Paying taxes now lets me cross both "paying" and "filing" off the list of Things To Happen Before Saturday. I can file an extension on Sunday or whatever. It's fine.
There, now I only have 10 things to do tomorrow. That's more manageable, right?
o_o;;;
I'll go do another one.
Okay so I did the important part of another little task. And then added another thing to the list. But it's only a little thing! (Clean the litter boxes I'm taking with me.)
It's 10:17PM and I think I'm just gonna be done worrying about stuff for the day. Tomorrow may have 11 items on the list but only four are critical to do before the movers get here. Good enough. I'll finish editing the chapter of The Jewel-Strewn Night that I started this morning.
Wednesday, April 9
Before I went to bed on Tuesday night, I added another item to the list, bringing it to 12. I fell asleep around 1AM and woke around 6AM. When I couldn't get back to sleep after an hour, I got up and made pancakes, then sat down to watch Veo's stream and completely ignore my looming to-do list.
Veo defeated Ganondorf and then Ganon to win Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, after several months of streaming it. So watching the grand finale was time well-spent. But after it finished, I got up to start working on my doom-filled list.
I carried some bins of stuff to donate out to the car, adding to the bins already waiting to go. With six bins filled, I delivered the donations to the thrift store, then came home and cleaned out the car. I even, for the first time ever, brought my dustbuster out to the car to vacuum it. The dustbuster works great on furniture and carpets, but was not good at car floors for some reason. Still, it helped. The car had to be cleaned today because the auto transport was supposed to pick it up on Thursday. (It didn't need to be vacuumed, just have all the loose stuff taken out.)
Once I finished with the car, I came in, undressed because I don't like outside clothing, and checked what else was on the priority list.
Oh right. Cry. Because I needed to scatter Lut's ashes.
I dressed again, putting on my favorite comfy black dress and a necklace, because Lut always liked it when I dressed up for him.
It was a little windy out: the tornado warning siren had been going off when I got home, though it was quiet now. I transfered a little bit of Lut's ashes into a small bag to take with me, and scattered the rest over the daffodils planted around the patio. I still had some left, so I scattered the remainder by the peonies. Lut didn't much care about the flowers, one way or another, but I always liked them. They came with the house. I made a few minor attempts at gardening in the first spring after I bought the house, but I never cared for it. The peonies and daffodils have survived 22 years of my neglect. They're pretty hardy.
And I thought about Lut, and I cried.
Lut is home, and he's staying here.
He didn't care what happened with his remains, but I had them anyway and this was the most appropriate thing I could think of.
Afterwards, I did the next item in priority order: pack my jewelry. The movers can't pack jewelry, not even costume jewelry, so I had to handle this one. I am not very good at packing but I managed it.
The last must-do-Wednesday item was pack luggage. Because even though I don't leave until Saturday, I needed to set aside everything I was bringing with me to make sure it didn't get shipped over land. Since the movers may not deliver my stuff for as much as two weeks.
But instead of doing that, I decided to work on pruning more of my stuff. This was also on the list, but lower down because while it would be annoying if some stuff I didn't want got packed, it would be much more aggravating if I didn't have luggage for the next two weeks.
However, the thrift store stops taking donations at 5PM, while I could finish packing any time before bedtime.
So I went through the kitchen and bathroom and filled up the car with 5 tubs plus the roaster oven. Because I was weeding out stuff from the kitchen, much of it was ceramic or glass, or oversize, making it unfeasible to fill the car with 10-11 tubs for a trip the way I had for the used bookstore.
As the day grew later, I became hopeful that perhaps the movers wouldn't come on Thursday and the move would happen on Friday, giving me more time to prepare. But around 2PM, I got the call: they'd be here on Thursday morning between 9 and 10AM. Alas.
Around 4PM, I returned to the thrift store. While unloading, I realized I'd forgotten to grab the DVDs I wanted to donate. I checked with an employee that they took DVDs (yep) and considered trying to squeeze in a last trip before 5PM. Maybe I could do it in the morning before the auto transport came for the car? Maybe the thrift store could take later donations if I didn't need a receipt?
Then the auto transport place called and asked if they could pick the car up tonight.
Me: "Um, I guess? Tomorrow would be better, but it's fine."
Them: "Great! We want to deliver it Friday, is that okay?"
Me: "...I don't arrive until Saturday. But my parents and also my brother and sister-in-law will be around so...sure. It's fine."
I called my mom and emailed everyone with this new development, and then started packing my luggage because another trip to the thrift store was out of the question now.
A little after 6PM, the driver arrived. He took a zillion pictures of my car, very sensibly documenting its current (dinged-up) condition.
Me: "So you should have the phone number for the destination. No, wait, I mean, I gave the people who contracted your service the destination phone number. Whether that has been passed along to you is another matter entirely."
Him: *checks phone* "Yeah, they only gave me your number."
So I gave him my parents' number.
Him: "Okay, let your mom know I'll be there before noon tomorrow."
Me: "..."
Me: "HOW? It's a 16 hour drive and it's after 6PM?"
Him: "I'm getting gas and driving there as soon as I load your car."
Me: O_o
Him: "I'll call your mom in the morning with an exact time, once I'm closer."
After he left, I realized I'd forgotten to take the empty bins out of the trunk. Oops. I had wanted the movers to pack stuff in the plastic bins where possible, because the bins are sturdier and it's likely stuff will be in boxes for A Long Time. Oh well.
So I called my mother and sent a new email, and went back to packing luggage. Packing luggage took longer than usual because I kept getting distracted by other tasks, but I finished it around 8PM. After a short break, I went back to the task list. The extension had almost nothing I wanted to keep, so I moved the handful of items I did into the living room. Then I poked through the accumulated piles of stuff to see if there was anything else. The stuff I'd collected from my office in 2020 after 6 months of working from home was still in there, unsorted, because anything I hadn't needed for 6 months couldn't be important.
Lut never liked to be photographed. I have very few pictures of him, and most of those are of the cat and he's partially out of frame. Once, when we dressed up for an office party in the early 2000s, the party photographer took a film photo of us and we got a copy later. It is the only good photo I have of him.
I'd forgotten I kept it on my desk at work.
If I hadn't gone through that stuff, I would've left it behind.
I was profoundly relieved to find it, all the more so because I hadn't been thinking about it during the move prep. I'd looked for the photo a few times since Lut passed, but figured it'd turn up eventually and there was no reason to worry about it.
After that, I went to the basement, partly to look for more stuff I wanted to keep and mainly to clean off the free weights. I have several sets of dumbbells that I'm bringing with me. They were kind of nasty from being unused in the basement for 15+ years and I didn't really want to bring them into a new house in that condition. So cleaning them was on the list. And I was running a load of laundry anyway. While I was in the basement, I updated the disclosure form for the house sale with some things I'd forgotten to mention. I also moved some other items I wanted to keep: model horses and the tiny artificial Christmas tree Lut and I owned.
After getting the dumbbells clean and dealing with laundry, I cleaned out some of the stuff stored under the center of the bed (not in a convenient drawer). I threw out a bunch of stuff and then decided there was nothing to rescue there and I should do a different task. I cleaned out two of the four litter boxes so they could be packed.
By 11PM, I had added 6 more items to my move-prep list, and completed 12 of the now-18. I decided this was much as I was going to do, and stopped for the night. I played some Time Princess and did some reading before going to sleep at my usual 1AM.
Thursday, April 10
I woke up at 4:30AM, thought, "I have to get back to sleep" and spent the next 90 minutes or so alternating between playing with my phone and trying to sleep. A little after 6AM, I gave up and got up. I figured I could nap after the movers were gone.
I ate breakfast and then went back to work.
Finding the lost photo last night inspired me to conduct a more thorough search of the rest of the basement and Lut's closet. I rescued two sweaters from the office stuff, and found a box in the basement with my extensive Vampire: the Eternal Struggle collection and also some Magic: the Gathering cards. I don't think there were any valuable M:tG cards in this box, though I didn't go through them. My collection (from the early 90s) has some valuable cards, but I am pretty sure my collection was upstairs. Lut had started M:tG even earlier than I did, but he had traded in all his valuable M:tG cards for Warhammer 40,000 miniatures in the mid-90s. He had kept lots of commons and uncommons that had no meaningful resale value, though. For a little while in the early 2000s, we'd used his collection to build decks and play M:tG because if no one's using rares the game is pretty balanced.
I also found a mostly-empty box with some books in it, that I'd missed when I went through the basement and donated all the books. Aww.
Lut's closet had nothing of particular value to me, but it held two full bins of books.
Oh no.
It's also very likely that I am the one who put those bins there. I remember clearing out Lut's closet in 2017, when I was trying to make the house easier to navigate for him. I suspect the bins had been elsewhere on the first floor, and that I'd stuffed them into Lut's closet after throwing away enough empty electronics boxes and dead monitors to make room for them.
A few weeks ago, I’d bought a 3.5” external disk drive. Lut and I met on FurryMUCK in 1996, and we talked and roleplayed there for around a year before meeting in person. I saved logs of most of our interactions; before we met in person, I often re-read them. After I moved to his city, I seldom looked at them again, though. I saved them on my hard drive and backed them up to ten or so 3.5” disks. When moving computers at one point in the late 90s, I failed to copy over the logs from my hard drive, and didn’t realize it until it was too late and I’d reformatted my old computer.
Of the 10 backup disks, I’d found three on the first floor while going through stuff, and one more in the basement, along with a box of other disks, mostly for writing that I still had on my current hard drive. I hadn’t plugged in the drive yet to see if any of the disks worked.
I hadn’t yet tried using the new floppy drive, but I had put it on the list of “do before moving”, because I was afraid if I packed the disks, it might be months or years before I unpacked them again. And the odds of them being readable after almost 30 years were already slim.
So a bit before 10AM, I finally unboxed and plugged in the drive, and started checking disks, starting with the ones from the first floor.
I had some trouble with the files from the first disk I checked, one of logs between Lut and me. Some copied over to my hard drive fine. Others wouldn’t copy until I changed the name to have a .txt extension instead of .LOG. Some wouldn’t copy over but I could open them from the floppy and manually save them to the hard drive. A few were corrupted and wouldn’t open no matter what I tried. But I got most of the files from the first three disks. Not as nice as getting all of them, and I’m still missing so many. But it was nice to get some.
The disks from the basement were all unreadable. I threw away most of them, since I was 95% confident that they’d contained stuff I already had copies of. The last one was of logs with Lut, and I kept it just in case there’s another recovery method that would get some data out of it.
The window for the movers to arrive was 9-10AM. Around 10:15AM, I called the office to ask for a status update.
Office: “Hm. Let me call them and call you back. They left over an hour ago, so .. they should be there by now.”
Me: “Oh gosh, I hope they’re all right.”
A few minutes later:
Office: “Soooo they were double-booked for 9-10AM. They’re delivering now and will come to you around 11:00-11:30AM.”
I got two calls from the driver, the first confirming that estimate and the next when they left.
Around 11:30AM, three movers -- Nicole, Xavier (guessing at the spelling; he pronounced it “Ex-zavier,” which is pretty cool. Nicole called him X), and...Roger, I think? It’s been two days and he made less of an impression on me than the other two. Xavier was really kind, admiring the artwork I had hung up and asking if I was an artist, so I showed him and Nicole some of the books I’d written and did the covers for. I have print copies of most of my books and they were gonna see them while packing them anyway. Xavier liked Lut’s sword, too. Lut used to fence and owned an actual combat rapier made by a swordsmith, from when he and his wife did Renfaire and SCA events. He’d wanted to get rid of it when we moved because he didn’t fence anymore or take care of it, but I kept it because it’s beautiful. I’ve worn it with costumes a few times.
It turned out this team was just here to pack. Another team would be here on Friday to load. I don’t know if I’d misunderstood when Travis explained, or if it varies whether they pack & load on one day or break it into two.
The movers were there until a bit after 6PM, taking a break around 1PM for lunch. They waited to pack my office last, and left my computer and its peripherals unpacked so I could use it after they left.
At 10:15AM, my sister-in-law, C, emailed: the car transport would deliver at 4PM. Later, we found out that he’d been delayed by trouble with the truck, rather than, say, needing a nap or lunch or something.
Nicole and Xavier were very conscientious about labeling the boxes they packed, writing down not just where it came from but what it was. Roger marked where it came from but for many boxes he packed, he just wrote “stuff.” This is less of an issue for the basement, where almost everything was Kill Team, Warhammer 40k, or painting supplies for them. For rooms like the office and bathroom, more inconvenient. But there were only a few boxes from the office and basement, and he did a better job with the bedroom. Overall, I think it’ll be fine. The labels will be particularly nice because much of my stuff is likely to stay in boxes. I just won’t have anywhere to put it, and the miniatures wargame stuff tends to live in boxes anyway.
Although I’m hoping to make a place to display the painted miniatures. I brought one big bookcase and four small ones, and very few books. So there may be shelf space for knickknacks. We’ll see. One advantage of storing them in boxes is that the miniatures won’t get dusty in them.
While the packers were there, I alternated between pruning more stuff that hadn’t been packed yet, checking areas that weren’t being packed (extension and most of the basement) for stuff I wanted, and sitting at my computer to play games. It was many times easier than packing things myself, but still tiring. My parents used professional movers for every move when I was growing up, and I used them when I moved to the house in 2003, but I’ve never done a move like this, where I had to explain what to take and what to leave.
Before they left, I realized Nicole had packed Lyric’s gabapentin (100% my fault: I forgot to put it with my luggage despite knowing I needed to give Lyric some for the flight). I only remembered because Nicole had written “pet meds” on the side of the box. She fished it back out for me cheerfully.
Roger also packed my trackball (I took it out of the room when he went to pack, but then needed to check something on my computer and brought it back.) They got it back out for me, too.
They packed 49 boxes.
49 seems like so many boxes.
It was actually under the estimate in almost every category, because I’d pruned out a bunch of stuff that I’d told Travis I was taking. Even at the original estimate, Travis had called this a “small move”. Maybe it’ll be fine.
The loader, Joey, called in the afternoon to say he’d be at my house at 8AM. The moving company called a few minutes later to give me an 8AM-9AM window.
I asked Nicole if she knew how long it would take to load, and she waffled for a bit, then gave up. “Just assume it’ll take all day. It’s hard to estimate because every house is different. Like it goes faster if you can back the truck up to the front door and you don’t have any steps, but neither of those is true here.”
Around 4:30PM, my sister-in-law called because my car still hadn’t arrived (it was 5:30PM there, so 90 minutes late) and his voice mail was full.
C: “And I can’t text him because...”
Me: “Oof, what happens if you text him?”
C: “Just a minute.” *taptaptap* “Okay, that went through.”
C: “We were going to go out to eat but when we got outside we realized the car wasn’t here. He’d said he’d leave it in the driveway and the key in the mailbox. I didn’t want to leave if you want us to wait here for the car, though.”
Me: “It sounds like he wasn’t planning for you to be there anyway? So go ahead, have a nice dinner.”
A little later, she texted me that the car had arrived. It showed up while they were heading out. Yay!
After the packers left at 6:30PM, I went “oh good, I feel gross and I can finally take a shower.” I went to the bathroom and realized they’d packed the soap/shampoo/conditioner.
This was a mutual fail: Nicole had asked if I wanted them to leave it, and I had said “yes, please do”. But I’d left it in the shower stall instead of moving it to an area marked "do not pack". I’d put a towel and hair towel with my luggage for this reason.
I waffled; I had a bar of crappy soap I could use, and I could skip washing my hair. But it’d be Saturday before I’d be at my parents’ house, and I didn’t want to go three days without washing my hair. I don’t really like skipping it for one day unless I’ve kept it braided (which I hadn’t).
So I opened and searched 2 of the 3 bathroom boxes to find the shampoo and conditioner (already regretting the lack of informative labels), sealed the boxes again and put better labels on them, then showered.
Much better.
I spent the evening at home, mostly just trying to decompress. I made dinner with the stuff that hadn’t been packed. (I left most of my cookware because my mom has lots and mine is only better in a few cases.) I think I played some Time Princess and Race for the Galaxy. Maybe I edited The Jewel-Strewn Night? And wrote about April 9. I didn’t get to much of the 10th. It’s the 12th now as I’m writing this.
I called my local friend to give him a status update. We planned to get together on Friday after the loaders left.
I went to bed early but stayed awake until 1AM like usual.
Friday, April 10
I woke at 7AM, and couldn’t get back to sleep. After a bit of playing with my phone, I got up and tended to some remaining tasks. Somehow there were still things left to take care of, even with virtually everything being packed.
I hadn’t noticed how much stuff had been left in the pantry unpacked; apparently I forgot to look. Peanut butter and nutella are “liquids” for purposes of both TSA and movers, and cannot be transported. I stuffed the three nutella jars in my auitcase. I figured if it was over 50 lbs when I got to the airport, I could throw it out or put it my carry-on.
At 8AM exactly, while I was still eating breakfast, the driver for the movers arrived. I showed him the furniture and boxes that I was bringing. He got to work moving boxes. His assistant arrived a little bit later. I watched Vicorva’s stream; they were playing The Exile Princes, which looked pretty fun. I might play it sometime.
They left the office for last, but by 9:00AM, they were ready to start loading it. I switched the stream to my phone and got up to unplug my computer and all the peripherals.
By 10AM, they had everything loaded, went over the paperwork with me and had me sign everything, then headed out. The driver told me he would deliver on Monday -- the earliest date in their time frame! -- which was great news
I sat down in Pretend Coffee Shop, which still looked mostly-normal because I’d only brought the robot vacuum, wall decor, and bookcase from that area. I read fediverse and played Time Princess while the movers finished fiddling with things in their truck and headed out.
A few minutes after they’d pulled away, I realized I’d forgotten to tell them to take the free weights. Oops. I had the driver's number but I didn't try calling him to ask him to come back for them. I haven't regularly used the free weights in over a decade, and I was only bringing them with me because I thought I might be more likely to use them if they weren't in a nasty basement. I was put out that I'd gone to the trouble of cleaning them and now they'd just be thrown away, though. But so it goes.
Around 1PM, I called my local friend and we agreed to get together along with another friend around 3-4PM.
While I waited for them, I remembered that I needed to close my safe deposit box at the bank. Many years earlier, a teller had asked me to get a safe deposit box. "Employees get one for free, so it won't cost you anything, and the front line has an incentive program running now for opening new safe deposit box accounts." So I got one. I'd thought to put data backups in it, but I was pretty sure I never had.
I hadn't seen the keys for the box in years and had no idea where they were. I'd had some mystery keys in the jewelry armoire, but they didn't look like safe deposit box keys and two of them said "property of state of Ohio" on them, so those couldn't be it. The last time I remembered seeing the safe deposit box keys, they'd been in my desk at work.
...
Wait, did that mean they were still inside one bag of stuff from work?
I went to the extension and dug carefully through a bag that had something jingling in it. I thought it was an empty key ring that I'd noticed on my earlier search, but I found at the bottom a key-sized red envelope. Inside: two safe deposit box keys.
AW YEAH.
Triumphant, I set off on foot to the bank. It's less than a mile away, and checking the box's contents and closing it would take a little bit, so I didn't want to make my friends come with me for it.
The box was, indeed, empty; I'd never even gone to it. Let this be a lesson in accepting complimentary things you don't particularly want: they can come back to haunt you later. I was just relieved I wouldn't have to pay to have the box drilled. (No, there are no backups for safe deposit box keys. No, bank employees cannot open the box without the customer's key. If the customer loses the keys, the bank pays a locksmith to drill out and replace the lock and charges the customer for the service.)
I went home and played on my Chromebook while waiting for my friends. After they arrived, we hung out in the living room for a bit, then headed off to the thrift store to drop off the remaining stuff I'd bothered to bag, and Half-Price Books to get rid of my remaining 2.5 boxes of books. I hadn't realized Half-Price Books was an actual used bookstore. They have more of a discount retailer vibe. I don't expect a used bookstore to be a chain. Anyway, they wanted me to wait around while they priced everything (and presumably entered it into their system), so we hung out and looked at used books and chatted for a bit. I got $20 out of it and used it to defray the cost of buying dinner for my friends.
We went out for Mongolian barbecue, where all the sauces were weirdly much spicier than expected. Like my friend got "sweet soy" which doesn't sound like it'd be spicy, but was. The roti was so tasty I got a second order, though.
Afterwards, we went to my friend's house to hang out, because he and Other Friend had work to do -- mostly running ice-dyed clothes through the washing machine. Around 9-10PM, he took me home.
At home, I gave Lyric her gabapentin for the trip, played some Time Princess, and flopped early.
Saturday, April 12
This was it: the worst day of Lyric's life.
Lyric hadn't come to bed with me the night before, but she was at the foot of the bed when I woke at 5AM. She walked up to the head of the bed and flopped down on top of me. I stayed in position under her until it got too uncomfortable, then rolled over. Usually if I move when she's on top of me, she leaves, but this time she stayed flopped on top of me in the new position. She had an "I'm too stoned to leave" weight to her. I managed to fall back to sleep like that.
I got up around 8AM, took care of a few things, then sat down for a bit to eat breakfast. A little after 9AM, I resumed Final Chores. I packed the GFiber router and extender in my bag; the fiber was already out, though they'd said it wouldn't be turned off until 4PM. No real issue, though.
What was much more inconvenient was that I was suddenly out of space on Google services: drive/email/photos. I wrote an angry email to Google support, because why did I only have the 100 GB I got from paying for Google One and not the other terabyte that I'd had for as long as I'd been using Google Drive.
I was at 120 GB, so I started deleting big files that I didn't really need -- things that had gotten sucked up by Google Drive when I started using it to backup my data. Getting down to 103GB was easy. Getting below 100 GB was painful because I had to dig through lots of small files for ones I didn't want. I abandoned this effort to do physical tasks around the house instead. I cleaned out the fridge and put one full trash cart on the curb for pickup on Monday. Then I started emptying liquids into the sink so I could throw those out, too.
I got increasingly anxious as time went on. I have never had a panic attack but I felt as if I was on the brink of one. I focused on breathing, telling myself I was doing great, and continuing with steps. The realtor will hire someone to clear the house (and bill me for it) so I didn't really need to throw away the food. I just thought that food was a particularly gross thing to leave sitting around and I didn't want to risk that the pantry wouldn't get emptied (since the kitchen didn't have much junk left in it the way the basement/extension did).
I discovered a bunch of chocolate I'd been keeping in the freezer, so I put that in my luggage since it wasn't as if it needed to be frozen. It was just there so it'd keep longer.
I gave Lyric her second gabapentin around 10AM, an hour before she'd go in the carrier, per instructions. She was pretty mellow.
My friend arrived a little early. As I'd told him the night before, I was not ready to go. I wanted to put Lyric in the carrier as the last thing I did before leaving the house. I finished throwing food away and taking out the recycling while he petted the cat.
During one trip from the house, I accidentally left both the kitchen door and exterior door open and Lyric followed me out, but she hung out on the sidewalk and only complained a little when I picked her up to carry her back inside.
Loading Lyric into the cat carrier was easy: I put some catnip in it and she followed. She was quiet up until I carried her out of the house, and then she started meowing. She did intermittent meowing, every minute or two, for most of the drive to the airport.
At the airport, my checked bag was a few pounds overweight, so I threw out all three jars of nutella to get it under again. If I'd wanted to check another bag, I could've put it in there, but I wanted to keep my devices with me.
The line at security was short, but they needed to run the cat carrier through the X-ray machine with no cat in it. Because I wasn't sure I could get Lyric back into the cat carrier again without her escaping, they took us to a private screening room. With the door to it closed, I let Lyric out and held her while one TSA person took the carrier for screening and the other waited with Lyric and me.
When he returned with the carrier, I flattened out the puppy pads again and coaxed Lyric back into it with some kitty treats. She was not thrilled.
While we waited at the gate, Lyric started scratching at the puppy pads, the way she would at a litter box, and I smelled urine, although the scent wasn't strong. The puppy pads ended up crumpled together at one end of the carrier. I hadn't brought any puppy pads to replace them because I hadn't expected to be able to take Lyric out of the carrier. Southwest's instructions had been clear on this point: once the pet arrives at airport, the pet must stay in the carrier until you leave the airport. The actual airport was more flexible; the TSA person told me there was a designated free-roam area where people could let their pets out.
But Lyric didn't appear to have made much of a mess: nothing was leaking or detectably damp from outside of the carrier, and I didn't have much time before the plane left.
I freed up enough space in Google Drive that I could modify files again, which was important to me because I wanted to be able to write on the plane. I opened a few files in offline mode before the plane took off.
The plane was mostly empty and I got row of three seats to myself. The flight attendants said Lyric could stay on the empty seat beside me during take off and landing, and I'd figured out how to get the carrier to expand as well as condense with the cat still in it. Lyric was quiet during the first part of the flight; I don't know if the engine hum soothed her or just made her think drawing attention to herself was a mistake. She started mewing again partway through. I wrote a little on the plane, about Thursday and Friday, but mostly I read Angel's Grace and Feathers of Dawn.
The flight was nonstop -- if I hadn't been able to get a nonstop, I would've driven with Lyric so she could have food/water/litterbox while traveling instead. At our destination, I went to baggage claim, while my sister-in-law texted updates about their status. My bag was one of the first few on the conveyor belt, so I grabbed it while I waited for them to come to me after parking.
In the car, I learned that the litter box I'd added to my parents' grocery order two weeks ago had never arrived. So we stopped at a store on the way to my parents' house, because I didn't want to let Lyric out of the carrier without having a litter box available, and I still wasn't sure if she'd peed in the carrier.
Once home, I filled the litterbox and opened the carrier. Lyric had urinated on the puppy pads, which had soaked it up entirely. Both cat and carrier were clean. That worked much better than I'd expected! I washed the liner on the cat carrier anyway, just to be thorough.
My sister-in-law cooked a delicious meal for us -- coconut rice, chicken, roasted asparagus, and marinated cucumbers. It was great. :9
Lyric wandered her new home, meowing loudly for a chunk of the evening. This surprised me, because she's been a quiet cat for as long as I've had her. She'd mew when she wanted to come inside, if she could hear me near the door. She'd mew if she caught a mouse. On rare occasions, she'd meow when she wanted something, but that was very rare. Here, she mostly didn't seem to want anything. To go outside, sometimes, but that was about the only thing.
It turns out that not only does the HOA prohibit outdoor cats, but the city does as well. Doubly confined. I talked to my brother and his wife about having a catio built for her. My sister-in-law suggested a kennel run, but that would be much more awkward, since I'd have to carry Lyric to and from it and she'd probably complain every time.
But a catio will require asking the HOA about what my parents are allowed to modify on their property. Whee.
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ursula
