allyson and bryan

"Guess how much the stuff we moved to New York weighed?" I asked Mike in the car as we made our way back to the airport on Wednesday. "1,200 pounds?" he, who has seen the 16x9 storage space our stuff occupied for all of 2006, said. "Nope!" I proclaimed proudly. "2,450 pounds!"

"Wow," Mike answered. "You literally have a ton of crap."

Which is honestly pretty crazy when you take into consideration that after the movers came to pile our stuff onto a cross-country truck this past Sunday, we gave the following to The Salvation Army: our couch, a full-size bed, a file cabinet, a desk, rugs, end tables, and a framed Chagall print. (Oddly they wouldn't take the life-size Buffy cut-out we inherited from Sue and Mike many moons ago.) On top of that, Bryan and I made two Civic-sized dump runs prior to the Army arrival to put, among other things, our 1993 Ikea Ivar wall unit out to pasture. We bought that wall unit -- the cheapest Ikea had at the time -- right after college graduation and finished it ourselves, brought it to California and happily housed our TV and books inside it for 13 years. Dropping the various parts and pieces into a foul-smelling junk pile in South San Francisco felt like the end of something, for sure.

So yeah, we had a lot of crap. I guess that's what happens when you live together for 13 years without the space censorship of a 625-square-foot NYC loft.

Before the dump and the Army part of the story, we missed our connection from Logan to SFO by hours and ended up spending the first night of the trip in a Hyatt looking longingly across the harbor. Luckily American Airlines provided us with a luxe $10 per person meal voucher to compensate for our troubles. Once arriving (nearly a day late) in San Francisco, Bryan and I immediately set to work on the various moving-related tasks at hand. In four days we tipped the movers and the Salvation Army generously, closed our account with Self Storage 1, saw nearly all our friends and/or our friends' babies, celebrated one one-year birthday, went to our old neighborhood yoga studio, jumped John's car after killing its battery, ate at In-and-Out, got my hair cut for the low low price of $35, and managed to do a little bit of sleep repair on our under-eye circles. Oh I also found my Very First Gray Hair, for which I believe American Airlines and an exhausting past six months share the blame.

Now our 1.25 tons of crap is somewhere in motion across the country, scheduled to arrive between 3 and 14 days after June 3. We'll then turn our attention to the challenge of finding a place for everything that comes off that truck. We'll also throw ourselves into making our first independently owned and operated apartment a cool and comfortable place to live, with projects like built-in shelving and a new toilet on the horizon. We'll focus on falling in love with Manhattan the way we did San Francisco, and we'll figure out how to become New Yorkers.

And, clearly, I'll be dyeing my hair.

stars, they're just like allyson @ 1:44 PM