Thursday, October 30, 2008

Packing, Moving And Procrastinating

Some Park Slope photos, and a gratuitous shot of Stella and the BBD.








The Brooklyn Baby Family sleeps right now, but for me. I'm supposed to be packing our stereo, but I'm putting it off. A few things cure insomnia right away, having a kid for sure, but also monotonous, laborious work does the trick too. Moving puts me right to sleep, yet we have a lot more to do.

We got back from Kentucky and slammed right into our move. We'd found the apartment almost kind of by accident. Because that's how things go in New York when you're not rich, at least when it comes to housing: by accident. We'd seen god knows how many places before Stella was born, and it all came to naught. We'd seen a few more in the past few months, and it also yielded zilch. Then I saw an ad on Craigslist.com, and called it. The broker, Barbara, showed us a spacious two bedroom apartment that we really liked, but we hesistated, no lie, two days and it was long gone. Ugh, this city. Sometimes it can make you want to live anywhere else, doing anything else, just to avoid the petty complications that plague life here.

Then a few days after that the broker called us with another place. It was on Ocean Parkway, a scenic stretch of Brooklyn that until now we'd avoided. Why, you ask? After all, it's scenic, and peaceful and all that. But it's also an extremely Orthodox Jewish area. And while we're Jewish we're not Jewish like that, and moving out there just seemed so removed from the action. Park Slope has lots of shops, lots of pedestrian traffic, and, yes, lots of construction, but it's still a happening place. And while Ocean Parkway also has pedestrian traffic it's all on Saturday's when the Orthodox strut on by, like they owned the place. Which they do.

But we were desperate. We really have reached our wit's end with our apartment. We've been here four years, and grown with it, but there are mitigating factors that make life here a little tough. One is that there are, as noted before, FIVE construction sites on our block, with one right next to us, and two right across the street. One lovely feature of this hardhat work is that apparently Teamster rules require them to hire a guy who does nothing but hit a metal pole with a hammer all day. I swear to you this must be true, because very little actual construction actual seems to happen next door, but it's noisy as hell. In fact it's all noisy as hell, and dirty, and it takes up all our parking, too.

Also, it's just going to get worse. At one corner of our block they are building some massive McCondo that's going to both blight the neighborhood and block out the sun. It's like eight stories on a block where everything else is three, and it's huge and I have my doubts that they built any additional parking for it. Because developers are shifty that way. There is a condo across the street that "officially" split itself into two different addresses in order to avoid building the parking spaces required by law. How they got away with that is anyone's guess, although I assume money was involved.

Additionally, our place has a small but irritating flaw. The door leading to our one and only bedroom isn't solid, but rather it made up of slats. Why? I don't know. Maybe they were on sale. But this is irritating, as Stella is a light sleeper so she is now more vulnerable to light and noise. To combat this we've put a bedsheet in the slats, but, boy it's not exactly a look approved by Martha Stewart.

Finally, one bedroom apartments just aren't all that big. Which might be an obvious point. Simply put, there comes a time when you just want more space. Which is funny, coming from a New Yorker. After all even our new, "big" apartment would be tiny by the standards of most of the rest of America. But, as I've said many times, I don't live in America, I live in New York. And if we say our new apartment's big, well, it is to us.

Ugh, Stella is crying, and I'm not sure whether to go in yet. I feel bad for Randi, as she has to deal with our child all day. But sometimes nothing I do can calm her down. Still, I think I have to try. Here goes nothing. And the stereo, for now, remains unpacked.

6 comments:

Lauren said...

Good luck with your move!

I guarantee that, within a week after your move, you'll look around and wonder how you managed for as long as you did in the smaller space. ;)

Anne Stesney said...

I second what Lauren said. Going from 1 bedroom to 2 is magic. MAGIC. You will be much happier.

David Serchuk said...

Hi Guys,
Yes, that's the hope. It's funny, the moving process kills so much space in the place you are leaving that it drives you out of there screaming, no matter how much you enjoyed being there. It's like nature's way of saying you have too much stuff.

--Dave

David Serchuk said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Hope the move went well! Hope its also not messing up with Stella's routine.

David Serchuk said...

Hi Rosewood,
The move went fine, and actually, for the most part Ms. Rae is sleeping better than ever, just at the point where other babies aren't sleeping at all. Irony, and all that, but I'll take it!

Dave