The Tory Party

Moving II: Electric Boogaloo

It’s over. I had been dreading this move like poison, thinking it would be a huge ordeal. It was. But now it’s done, and I have to tell you the story.

Aran Keeng came up the night before to help me get ready, and I baked an enormous amount of cookies in an obvious effort to sublimate my anxiety into food product. The very presence of Aran Keeng mellowed me out, though, due to I knew he would stay calm no matter how many times I bashed his knuckles or knocked him off balance or shouted the eff word or made him sweat up his Wallace shirt. If ever you are doing anything that would make a normal person scream with frustration and pain, you should find someone like Aran. But not Aran himself, because I imagine after calmly handling too much frustration he might explode with hideous anger and go Godzilla on us all.

I should also note he got a half hour of sleep that night due to insomnia. Good times!

Anyway, in the morning, we picked up the truck, dad came to help and fix some stuff, and then Supremegoddess came to help, too.

Now, those who have been paying attention know that Supremegoddess was my roommate at our residential high school, and for no reason I acted toward her like a foaming hellbitch. Yet she insists on not only forgiving me, but also being sincere and non-passive-aggressive and helpful. I don’t know what to do about this. It’s actually rather alarming.

So Supremegoddess volunteered to help me move. I really had no expectation that she would drive two hours to come to my house at 10:00 AM on a Saturday to get sweaty and dusty and gross. But she did, and on top of that she saved my sweet ivory ass.

You see, I’ve never moved a houseful of crap before. And due to extreme shirking of friend duties, I haven’t helped anybody else move a houseful of crap either. So imagine my surprise when my plan of “move the big stuff in first” rapidly filled the truck and left three skillion feet of empty space at the top of the truck.

Then Supremegoddess arrived. She has moved a houseful of crap before. She explained that the way to do it is load the boxes first, due to if stacked neatly they take up the least space, and then load the big, odd-shaped stuff. Then she explained how to spiderweb it all with bungee cord to keep it secure.

I’m not sure why she came to my rescue. She may have sensed a disturbance in the force, and known that somewhere a really sucky truck-packing plan was going down. Or maybe she wanted to assert her essential dominance in a polite and kind but incontrovertible way.

In any event, there are two things particularly funny about her help:

• One is how genteel Supremegoddess was about giving advice, using phrases like “for future reference” and “what you may want to do.” In the given context, it was sort of like a professional painter walking into a room full of people painting with toothbrushes clenched between their teeth and saying, ”Say, I was thinking, and you don’t have to listen to me on this, but maybe what you want to do is use paintbrushes. And hold them in your hand.” Ohhhh.

• Two is how much Supremegoddess impressed my dad. At one point I could see him standing at a diagonal the end of the hall, watching Supremegoddess direct me. He had his head tilted with a vague smile on his face as if watching Johnny Sack or Larry Scott. He kept making references to the scene in Goodbye, Columbus where Jack Klugman yells at his son-in-law for not knowing how to pack a truck: “I can’t believe someone’s been to college and knows how to pack a truck.” She would move her hands to help her visualize where something was going to fit, and dad later compared this to Russell Crowe as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. He also said that he hoped she had learned this from experience, and not just because she could tell by looking at it, because she made him feel “totally incompetent.” Damn.

• Okay, three things. At one point, I’m standing at the front of the truck with a box, and she’s at the back, and I ask her, “Hey, should I put it up here?” And she says, “No, it won’t fit.” But it looks like it’ll fit to me, so I try it anyway. Doesn’t fit. I’m two feet away from what I’m doing, and I’m wrong. She’s fifteen feet away, and she’s right. Weird. Eerie.

Y’see, I am a drafthorse when it comes to labor. I lift heavy things. I force and whisk and try to do things as quickly as possible, leaving no time for things like “planning” and “getting stuff out of my path before I walk backwards over it with a 200 lb couch.” Left to my own devices, there is a lot of frustration and injury and sweat — but with proper guidance, I am a very happy Tory. This is why I closed the door on the truck energized and positive, with vim and vigor and pep and moxie and the rest.

This story is now 1/3 of the way done.

Aran and I drive the hour and a half to Winston-Salem without incident, but for some reason once we get there I’ve graduated from peaceful easy feeling into gung-ho aggression. The furniture is the enemy, and I must destroy it by relocating it 50 feet more.

This takes a while, as I decide the weight bench and 240 lbs of weights belongs on the second floor, as well as the queen-sized bed, coffee table, two desks and more crap than you can shake a crap at. Through this, Aran Keeng is mellow despite dark under-eye circles, the occasional knuckle crunch, and the fact that I am getting more and more irritable and shout “FA-A-AHK!” whenever anything even marginally painful happens to me. I start talking to the furniture. I’m soaking through my second shirt of the day. I discover that the reason they tell you to measure your furniture is because you may want to put it through doorways. By the way, my couches are 33” wide, and the living room doorframe only 30”. The couches get put back on the truck and called a number of insulting names.

Truck unloaded (but for the couches), we proceed to my storage unit to pick up some crap and drop off other crap. Here I find that in three months my ceiling-free, open air unit is coated in tacky dust (there’s a roof over it all, but a cargo net instead of a real ceiling). Ew. In the future, I may spring for one of those sheds with climate control and, you know, a ceiling. Ceilings rule.

Three funny things happen here:

• One is how I’ve gone from irritable to goofy and punchy. I’m still working in a hurry, though, so while moving a mattress I sort of miss the doorway and back right into the wall next to it. This makes a nice “WHOCK” sound. I say “FA-A-AHK!” I told Aran later to admit that this was funny. He said he wouldn’t admit it.

• Two is how we try to move out the red couch stored here. We ascertain it’s the right width (hmm… don’t think I gave my roommate back his tape measure. Gotta remedy that). I lift my end, and think, “This isn’t bad, we can do this, I can do this.” Then Aran lifts his and OMG FA-A-A-HK! The left side is much heavier than I thought it would be, and my left arm has decided to rebel. The couch goes crashing. Aran is afraid that he’s killed me. I am amused by the abject failure of my arm muscles. I say, “Forget it, not today,” and the couch stays. Aran doesn’t know yet that I’m going to try to move it again next weekend. Got to let him recover first.

• Three, an hour after this, I get in the car and see a rough red rash on my cheek, between my nose and my cheekbone. Today it was the same plus sorta swole up under my eye. Ew. I’m not sure what this is about, but I suspect it was the rat poison in the storage shed. Poison gets on the boxes. Boxes touch my shirtsleeve. I use my shirtsleeve to wipe my face – presto! Delicious red rat rash. But considering I don’t know how I did it, I should be pretty damn grateful that it was my cheek and not my eye. Ewww.

We head back to the house and unload for the last time just before the sun goes down (around 8:00 PM, I reckon.) I’ve sweat through my third shirt. Aran looks like he aged ten years. Even Jake is tired, and he didn’t do nothin’.

I let thirty-year-old-looking Aran sit on the back porch while I make one last trip for a shower curtain (must… shower…) and the antidote to all extreme exertion: Yuengling and Subway sandwiches. I should note how NOBODY wants to mess with you when your shirt is dirty, your face has a rash, and your hair is soaked from your third sweat of the day. I never got so little eye contact in my life. However I leveraged my hideousness into getting the woman in front of me at Plej’s to let me go ahead of her, and she was very kind and obliging despite being terrified.

After liberal application of food, beer and shower, we adjourn to the living room where I plug in “The Maxx” (yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Purple. Outback. Julie Winters. Aww yeahh.) I unpack some things and Aran zonks out in an armchair. This is probably because it’s 11:00 PM. Also probably he feels if he keeps his eyes closed I won’t shout “FA-A-AHK!” again.

As I take Jake out for the pippy of the night (“Help me make… the pippy of the ni-i-i-ight…”), I marvel at how I’m so close to campus that anyone from school can see me take Jake out in duckie PJs and no bra. Ew.

In the morning, I sit on the porch eating a bowl of Fiber One (with a little Special K Fruit and Yogurt for body, ‘cause that stuff be tasty) waiting for the landlord to come by and take the living room door off the hinges so we can move the couches in. My body is talking to me, and Aran is still sleeping, so on one level I’m hoping the landlord has forgotten to come because I HATE these couches and I don’t want to touch them ever ever again. I’m not a religious person, but I know when I’m beat, so I sez to my HP, I sez, “I know whatever you decide for me, you’ll give me the strength to do.”

My landlord shows up on time. Damn reliable landlord. But the pin is stuck in the hinge like you wouldn’t believe. Good pin. I ask if Goodwill takes donations on Sunday, and the landlord says I could ask at Vee’s Treasures across the street when they open, because they would know. I’ve met the couple who runs Vee’s Treasures and they’re hella nice and I need new siderails from them anyway, so awesome.

An hour later, Vee’s Treasures has the couches, the truck is empty, a great weight is lifted from my shoulders, and Aran gets to sleep in. Everyone wins.

When we return the truck, I turn too sharply and scrape the side of the truck on a tow dolly. But it hardly leaves a mark at all.

There’s no moral to this story. Except sometimes you get more than you deserve. And though I dreaded moving my crap like a face-full of rat poison, I really lucked out over and over. I am a lucky biatch. Even if dad likes Supremegoddess more than me.

Magic Cookie Bars

These are stoopid easy to make, and that’s why I like making them. You’ve probably seen them or had them before or maybe had a boyfriend whose roommate used to get them from his mom and then you`d compulsively eat half of them when no one was around. Not that I know anything about that or make them as penance.

Sorry the instructions are all English measurements, but being American I am way too lazy to go metric.

You will need:

• 13 x 9 glass baking dish
• 1 stick butter
• 1 package graham crackers (1/3 box)
• Bag o` chopped walnuts
• Bag o` semi-sweet chocolate chips
• * Bag o` butterscotch chips - optional
• Bag o` sweetened coconut flakes
• 1 can of sweetened, condensed milk

Preheat your oven to 325 F for a glass dish (350 F for metal). When it’s good and hot, melt the butter in the dish. Meanwhile, crumble the graham crackers into a big-ass resealable bag and crush them into crumbs with a rolling pin.

Once the butter is melted, swish it around the dish a bit to grease the sides, and then put the dish on the most level (heatproof) surface you’ve got. Sprinkle the graham crackers evenly over the butter.

Sprinkle a layer of chopped walnuts (you`ll probably use only 1/2 to 2/3 of the bag, depending on how much you like walnuts.)

Sprinkle a layer of chocolate chips (you`ll probably use almost the whole bag.) Then a layer of butterscotch chips, if you are so inclined.

Sprinkle a layer of coconut. Then pour the condensed milk in stripes over the whole thing.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until mostly golden brown on top.

Don’t be like me — wait for it to cool completely before you try to cut it. I usually cut it with a Big Nife and then scoop them out with a thin metal spatula (pancake-turner spatula, not icing spatula.)

Spatula.

Now you have magic cookie bars as addictive as meth but way more fattening. Awesome.