Friends help you move. (Good friends help you move dead bodies.) elsaf and I are real good friends with judiang, but she didn’t have any dead bodies for us. So we just helped her with the moving bit. Her actual moving day isn’t until April 15th, but we helped her to pack her kitchen & living room. We had a good routine going. I built the boxes & labeled ’em, Elsa worked on packing the kitchen, starting with the Fragile stuff, and Judi packed up the books & stuff from her entertainment center.

We worked for a couple of hours and then headed to Hackney’s for lunch. I ordered the fish & chips and followed it with the Leprechaun pie (mint chocolate chip & chocolate ice cream pie). Yummy stuff. Judi paid for our lunches (wehey! and she’d paid for supper the night before – we love our Judi!) and then we got back to work packing. The goal was to stop at 6pm no matter how far along we’d gotten, but by 5:15pm, we’d pretty much taken care of the living room & kitchen. Judi figures she can do the bedroom & bathroom on her own. (Plus, she’s gonna be needing her clothes for the next two weeks.)

Our next adventure for the day was Elsa’s competition in Extreme Sports: Driving through Downtown Chicago when Assholes were Out As Well. She did a great job of swerving & dodging and got us safely to Office Depot. Judi sat in every office chair that they had before deciding upon the birthday present from us to her. We wheedled & deedled (I like that better than wheeled and dealed) with the salesguy until he sold us the floor model at 10% off and threw in a free box of cheese doodles. (OK, I’m lying about the cheese doodles.) Elsa & I also got her a plastic mat for the chair to roll on. And when we got down to the main floor (it’s got a mezzanine where the furniture is) the salesguy had someone make up a bow out of crepe paper and stick it on the chair. Awwww! Happy Birthday, Judi!

Well, Elsa had passed the preliminaries of the Extreme Sports (where we got a bonus for stuffing an office chair into the back seat of a Dodge Stratus) so she went onto the finals: Finding the Bed, Bath & Beyond Hidden on N. Clybourne Drive when Assholes were Out As Well. It was hit & miss there at the end when we took a wrong turning trying to get to the parking lot. But Elsa prevailed against all the odds & we arrived at the lot & got the last parking space. Yay!

While in Bed, Bath, & Beyond, Judi stuffed everything she could into the cart (including things that couldn’t fit) and we sent some stuff for next day delivery to her apartment. We packed up the trunk and then looked for supper. After some aimless wandering, we wound up at a Chinese place. I got General Tso’s & eggrolls, plus a mango & pineapple smoothie. It was good eats. (And Judi let me have her crab rangoon, cuz she’s da bomb.)

Elsa did her Extreme Sports victory run by getting us back to Judi’s old place, where we grabbed enough shit to totally pack the car, including Lance. And if that wasn’t enough, we did a stop at Jewel to get breakfast and a few other essentials (like amaretto). Then it was back to the new place where we crashed while the original Manchurian Candidate played. (I think Lance and I were the only ones watching it…) Then we all slipped off to bed.

I shall write about today when I next write. And tomorrow, we’re gonna meet up with miz_em for supper to celebrate both Judi’s & her birthdays. 🙂

PS: Hope y’all had a lovely April Fool’s Day!

Happy Birthday to the April Fools: judiang & shebit! I know Judi’s gonna have a great birthday, I’m gonna be there to make sure it happens. Hope you have a great birthday, too, Shebit! 🙂

Judi’s kept elsaf & I very busy these past two days. So busy I’ve not had much of a chance to write. But I’m gonna try to rectify that now.

Tuesday night, I drove up to Elsa’s place and got to sleep on her new sofabed. Her living room is wonderful! She did a great job on the refurbishment. And the carpet is really nice. I made up an amaretto sour & watched Pitch Black halfheartedly and eventually fell asleep.

Wednesday morning, we both got up bright & bushy tailed. And when we got on the road, I started keeping track of things.
9:10am Leave Elsa’s
10:01am Done w/ errands (and McDonald’s breakfast) and on the road again!
10:29am Pulled over for going same speed as the rest of the traffic (he CLAIMS we were going 80mph, but I seriously suspect he made that bit up…)
10:32am On the road again!
10:50am Pitstop
12:00pm Swapped drivers (Trina gets vanilla Coke to drink while driving)
1:15pm Rest stop & swap back
3:10pm Arrived @ Judi’s (320 miles traveled)

We picked Judi & Lance up and then headed over to her new apartment. It’s brilliant! And the same distance away from Jewel (her current grocery) as her old place. We ate at a cafe not far from her place or Jewel. I had a BLT & some cream of broccoli soup. We then picked up some things from Jewel and returned to the apartment. The plan was to be at the old place when the movers brought around the boxes & tape, and then go shopping to Bed, Bath & Beyond for some items that Judi wants for her new place. What ended up happening was that we waited, waited & waited for the boxes and ended up going to Bar Louie for supper. I had four-cheese “pizza.” Well, it wanted to be pizza. It was warm cheese on hard bread with some marinara in between. But the highlight of the Bar Louie experience was the chocolate, chocolate, chocolate cake that we shared. Damn, that thing was HUGE! But we et it all. And it was wonderful.

When we got back to Judi’s place, we set up our airbeds in her living room and put on the new Doctor Who ep. And since the only TV that Judi currently has at the new place is this little 10″ screen TV, I’d brought around an LCD projector from school and we shone it up on the big white wall. That was way cool. (And since I forgot to bring speakers for the laptop, we used Elsa’s FM transmitter to send the audio of the laptop to Judi’s clock radio. Yay for ingenuity and too much technology!) We then hooked her cable box to the projector and watched BBC America. I got to see an episode of Coupling from season 4 – cool! I’ve yet to get the DVD set for season 4.

I moved my airbed to the den/guest bedroom and slept there. Elsa slept in the living room. And Judi was on her airbed in her room. We all slept well.

Perhaps I’ll write about today during my next post. Elsa mentioned it in her post tonight. Judi REALLY put us through our paces today. 🙂