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Hillbilly luggage

"What? No update?" Oz looks over from his computer, where he's just made his daily visit to this blog.

"Hah."

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth. I've been shopping.

Actually, that's rather like descending to one of the outer circles of hell, so maybe I have.

We carried a load of stuff up to the apartment in Alexandria yesterday. I've been unpacking and cleaning. Oz has been helping. Through the magic of random button-pushing, he even washed a load of dishes (the apartment has a dishwasher other than me). The cats have been … not actively destroying anything, so that's like helping. For them.

Moving without moving is still moving. There's just more shopping involved and the list grows ever longer. For example, I took our old coffee grinder up to the apartment. This morning when I ground up some coffee, I heard the gears slipping. "Oh, that's why we replaced this machine." So now I need to get another coffee grinder, lest I be reduced some morning to chewing on the whole beans in an attempt to get my RDA of caffeine. That would probably be more efficient than drinking coffee, but the time savings would be eaten up by picking black bits from my teeth.

But even with all the stress, we still like the apartment and the neighborhood. We walked the two blocks over to the commercial area for lunch (walking down the middle of the street and saying "Hi" to the people we passed, marking ourselves as obviously from somewhere else). At the café bakery where we ate, the lady asked if it was our first time there. Oz said, "Yes, we're just moving into the neighborhood." And she gave us a loaf of ciabatta as a welcome gift.

Amazingly enough, Del Ray manages to be a densely populated residential area with commercial development down a principal street, including several restaurants which do not have parking lots. And yet, there is no parking problem. Richmond city council, take note. In Del Ray, I can walk two blocks to a Cuban sandwich. In Church Hill, I cannot. Please explain.