Moving Weekend Installment I: Rookie Mistakes

This has been the most expensive weekend of our lives.

One lease, three beds, a couch, various other items and delivery fees, 48 hours and roughly $10,000 later, we have our apartment. We also have stuff- and lots of it. Our lease officially starts tomorrow- which means this is our farewell night to the Murray Hill Air Mattress Club. It does not so much feel like a teary good-bye yet- probably since I will still be here daily to use the Internet and do laundry. Not to mention the fact that there is no way all of our junk is getting out of here in one day. Not a chance.

After the lease signing on Friday night, we ate at Au Bon Pain and decided to buy some pastries for breakfast on Saturday. The clerk informed us that if we waited 15 minutes, we could get them for half-price, so we shamelessly watched the clock to get our bargain croissants while we mapped out our weekend schedule. We made it down to Sleepy’s to get our mattresses before they closed, and bee-lined for the back to find the best deals on twin mattresses. That’s right, we are 22-year-olds investing in twin beds. I am fairly confident that the only time in my life that has been spent in a twin bed was my freshman year of college, as well as the time I spent at camp and studying abroad.

Saturday morning AV and I woke up and headed to this Saturday/Sunday event on W. 25th called the Antiques Garage. I plan to go back for decorative items eventually, but we were not in the market for paintings or . We met up with KR and took the train to Brooklyn to check out some second-hand furniture stores. Brooklyn, for all of you Texans reading this, is across the East River from Manhattan.

Brooklyn Heights is a particularly nice area, but I would compare the rest of Brooklyn to the former Soviet region of Eastern Europe. By that I mean one minute you’re walking down a beautiful cobblestone street, and the next you’re on an abandoned ghetto sidewalk covered in graffiti with weeds growing through the cracks in the cement. But it’s charming- seriously.

And then we got ambitious and decided to go to Target. Target sounds easy in theory, it really does. It seemed like familiar territory until we remembered that Target stores are few and far-between here, and there are about eight million people who need cheap house-ware items just as much as we do.

We knew we were in a whole different ball game when we walked in to see the escalator in the middle of the store, and something none of us had ever seen before: a cart escalator. That’s right, you literally push your red buggy onto a ramp that drags it up next to you to the second floor. This was a Target of advanced technology, it was a Saturday afternoon in New York, and our eyes were bigger than our arm muscles. At one point we even looked at a T.V. stand for a space that we had yet to measure and a T.V. we did not yet own. We had to draw the line somewhere.

After several hazy hours which included selecting an accent color for our black and white bathroom (KR wanted to make it look more “warm” and less “Beetlejuice”), vague directions about the unavailability of a certain black coffee maker from incompetent Target team members and managing to get a full-sized ironing board on and off the subway at Grand Central- we were defeated. Target: 1, Weak Girl Arms: 0.

Once we returned home and regaled MK with our tales, we ate supper at a place with guacamole worth mentioning, and went to see the new “Elizabeth” movie. Cate Blanchett was at her finest- and the costumes were amazing. I usually know I’ll enjoy a movie when the previews give me chills, and I wasn’t disappointed.

So that was Saturday, and today was a whole different adventure for which I will open a different can of worms tomorrow.

“You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
- E.L. Doctorow