Blonde moments and stupid accidents

Yesterday when we were moving furniture to our new house, my flatmate got her finger jammed in the couch and, after screaming, swearing and crying for a bit, settled on laughing through the pain. I, somewhat awkwardly, didn’t know what to do with myself, so wandered off to carry on packing things into the car.

Today, we were unpacking things in our new house. I was in the kitchen, she was in her bedroom, down the hallway. As I unpacked cups and plates and put them away in the cupboard, I heard a noise from the end of the hall. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, because I’d been thumping around with boxes. I paused for a moment to listen, and from her bedroom I heard the faint sound of hysterical laughter, and knew that my flatmate had hurt herself once more.

The day didn’t end until we’d each been hurt several times. For me, most of the times I hurt myself involved banging my head on my car boot. For my flatmate, it was a variety of things. She even cut her finger trying to pick up a pile of blankets that I’d accidentally put down on some broken glass. Whoops.

We each had our blonde moments too. My flatmate spent about five minutes hunting for her car keys and starting to sound as if she were stressing about it, only to find them in the lock on her car boot. I found a big puddle on the laundry floor and tried to dry it with a bathmat, and then said that I didn’t have anything else to mop it up with, completely forgetting that right in front of my very eyes, there was an actual mop sitting in the laundry, just waiting to be used.

Moving is fun.

Moving mishaps

Tomorrow we move into our new house, and I am probably more excited than a normal person would be.

We shifted a few things over today from the flat we’re in at the moment, and I’m getting overly pumped about the fact that I’ll have a marginally bigger bedroom. I mean, I’ve spent the last year and half awkwardly trying to fit all my bedroom furniture into my room and failing miserably, and it seems like my prayers may finally be answered.

Sacha and I tried shifting my couch over to the house, because it’s in pieces. It’s a little weird to describe, but here’s a terrible (and I mean terrible) photo of it. 

Each of those little sections is its own piece, so we can move them all separately. We thought that meant we could load them into the backs of our cars and take them over in one trip, but as we discovered after Sacha got her finger jammed by one and ran away screaming, they’re not easy to move, and they’re not easy to fit into cars. As a result, we’ve moved over about three pieces of the couch and have another three to go.

I now have a sore back and a tired body. Still, excited for tomorrow!

The spur of the moment

My flatmate and I are moving house in a little over a week, and my boyfriend doesn’t really understand why.

The rent isn’t cheaper, the location is marginally better for getting to and from class, and we have to pay the letting fee for it. It’s not an overly logical decision that’s for sure. My boyfriend said we were being very blase about it, and thought that it sounded like an impulse decision. I gather from this that he doesn’t approve. When I said that to him, he said “It’s not that I disapprove. Disapprove is the wrong word,”which as we all know, basically means ‘yes, I disapprove.’

But here’s the thing; what’s wrong with making an impulse decision? What’s wrong with moving house even though we don’t really need to and it’s a bit of a hassle? What’s wrong with seeing something we like and just going for it?

As my flatmate so aptly put today, we are young, we aren’t tied down with mortgages and children. It’s the perfect time for impulse decisions. It’s not as if we didn’t weigh up the pros and cons beforehand. It’s not as if we’re moving house because leprechauns came to us in our dreams and told us to. The leprechauns have told me many things, but that wasn’t one of them.

So it shouldn’t matter that it’s a little bit stressful and doesn’t make much sense to move house. We want to. We’re going to. We might as well now, because we’re not going to get the chance to do something like this later on in life.

Endings

I lost a friend today.

Don’t worry, nobody died. But somebody who I counted as a very close friend walked out of our home and – for the most part – out of my life. He said that maybe we can work on our friendship somewhere down the track, but we’d be fools if we didn’t know that everything would be different.

Our friend of over two years and our flatmate decided the other day that he wasn’t happy living with us. I still can’t figure out what we’ve done to upset him, or what we could have done to make him happier.

Sacha is taking it well. She’s the kind of person who, when she feels wronged, will get angry for a bit, and then stop caring. She just dismisses it and carries on with her life, with a ‘screw you’ kind of attitude. Sacha would be a strong, independent black woman, if she was black. But at the moment she’ll just have to settle for strong, independent white girl from Tauranga.

I, on the other hand, am feeling sad. The funny thing is, it’s a kind of sad that I haven’t felt before. I think I’m caught somewhere between mourning the loss of what was once a great friendship, and thinking: “good riddance, I don’t need somebody in my life who will turn on me  at the drop of a hat.” And I will tell you this, friends, it is a strange combination of emotions. I feel a little lost, a little empty, and a little pissed off.

The worst thing is not knowing. When somebody refuses to talk to you, refuses to tell you why they’re doing what they’re doing, it’s tough to put yourself in their shoes. It’s tough to understand them, or to feel sorry for them. It’s tough to feel anything but anger, really.

So, while I’m sure he had his reasons for doing what he did, without any information I find it hard to believe that any of them are fair and valid reasons.

Life is sad, sometimes.

The Big Wash

In our flat there’s an exciting event that happens two or three times a year, which, as you may have guessed, I like to call The Big Wash.

The Big Wash is a half week long extravaganza where my flatmate, Sacha, commits to doing the gigantic pile of laundry in her room that I have dubbed “Clothes Mountain”.

The event is usually celebrated with excited ooh’s and aah’s as we catch a rare sighting, (some of us for the very first time), of Sacha’s bedroom floor.

Granted, this elusive “floor” quickly retreats into hiding after a couple of weeks, but I have managed to capture a photograph of it so that it can be used in history books to prove its existence.

Photo copyright: Melissa Wishart

Legend has it that if you catch a glimpse of the “floor”, your firstborn son will win the Lotto at the age of 25, but there has been no recorded instances of this happening.