The Aftermath

After the move i was so exhausted that i crawled into bed at seven and slept until 6:30 Saturday morning, when i got up and discovered another complication: i found my coffee grinder, but couldn’t find the coffee maker or the beans, so i had to walk across the street for emergency coffee.  Alas, the elevator in my building wasn’t working.  Not that i can’t descend two flights of stairs to street level and climb back up, but the return is slow and painful.  And not that i can’t climb to the fifth floor to get to the Lounge for wifi access it i take it slowly, but a more serious problem is that using the Segway is way too tedious because i would have to let it down two flights of stairs to the ground floor on Waller Street, go on my errand, and then return to the other building entrance on Market Street, wrestle the Segway up ten steps, ride to the elevator for the Market Street building, go up to the fifth floor where there is a connection to the Waller Street building via the rooftop garden and the Lounge, let the Segway down two flights of stairs to my floor, and then roll down to my room at the end of the hall.  Grrrrr.

So i’m stuck using the Prius if i want to go anywhere, but of course to use the Prius i have to make the roundabout journey described above because the only access to the garage is via elevator, and only the Market Street elevator is working.  Sigh.

Not that it couldn’t be worse, as we’ve all read about the frequent outages of the elevators in some of our public housing where disabled old folks are trapped for days in their rooms….or worse yet, are stuck on the ground floor and can’t return to their rooms.  And besides, i can still shuffle along.  And besides, this ain’t Public Housing, so i have a feeling that, except for moi-même of course, the whole Venn complex is packed with highly entitled landed gentry or worse yet nouveaux riches who have been screaming bloody murder over not having an elevator, especially those on the upper floors.  So i expect a return of elevator service tomorrow.

The rest of the good news is that That Pig Jeff came over this morning and demonstrated that he has qualities even finer than being my favorite dinner companion. Turns out he has a highly developed spacial sense and was able to look at the chaos in my two overstuffed rooms and figure out a way to rearrange things so i hardly have to get rid of anything, well, after i’ve consumed the ton of food that formerly packed my old pantry and now crams my cabinets to be eaten top to bottom, front to back as i dig into it.

Sure is good to find that, properly arranged, the apartment seems nearly spacious.

And speaking of space, when i was an undergraduate i had my first experience as a lab rat by volunteering in a research project for the development of an intelligence test for the blind.  Not, of course, that i was blind in my youth but rather that they needed sighted study participants who could take a battery of existing intelligence tests against which to compare their scores on the new test for the blind being developed.  And to factor in other aspects of learning, we were given a variety of other tests.

All the subjects were quite interested in how we did on these tests, certainly i was, and i was of course gratified when my handler met with me periodically to give my my results since i scored fairly high on the intelligence tests.

But one of the areas in which we were tested was our grasp of spacial concepts since the intelligence test for the blind was to be based on them.  I should have suspected what was coming when my handler prefaced telling me my score on the spacial test by pointing out that it was a very short test, so every item was highly weighted and that just a couple of wrong answers would dramatically lower your score.

Ummm, yes, and then he dropped it on me that if i’d got only a couple more right, my score would have reached the average level.

Below average?  I hadn’t been below average at anything since high school PE class.  Well, OK and college calculus.

And the reason that Jeff is so much better than i at this is because this is one of the gay genes that i failed to get.  Yes, gays typically score much higher than average in spacial relationships, which is why they tend to make good interior decorators.  And my failure to get that gene explains the decor in the places i’ve lived.

So now i feel much better about my new place, and i’ll be a happy dweller as soon as my phone, internet, and elevator service have been restored.

Meanwhile,  another leftover pic from the handful stored on this laptop, a Fillmore Street window treatment: