While sitting in the clinic office Friday afternoon, frantically typing on my iBook in order to get some serious work done, I chatted on and off with a few of the girls around me. “You know, I haven’t even bought my books this semester,” I said. “I need to, but with so much else in life to spend money on, I just can’t afford my books right now.”

(Truth be told, I’m not entirely keen to purchase my textbooks. Every semester, I fall for the bluff from the teachers that you MUST have all your books in order to make it in the class. I bite the bullet and shell out the hundreds of dollars in textbooks for each class. I then lug them to campus with me every single day because I know how important they are. Only I never use them. And I still learn. And my grades remain pretty good. In addition to this inconvenient factor, textbooks for grad school have gotten out of hand. I’m taking only two classes this semester, and between the two classes, I’m supposed to have SEVEN textbooks. Which, in the modern university market, translates to something like $600. And that’s a conservative estimate. Fuck.)

“I just moved, too, so not only am I super broke, I don’t have any furniture in my living room,” I continued. “But you know, I think I’m going to go to IKEA this weekend. Obviously, I can’t buy anything, but I can dream. YOU CAN’T KEEP ME FROM DREAMING.”

By “can’t buy anything,” I really meant I couldn’t buy anything unless I encountered a deal so good that there was no way to leave the place WITHOUT buying it. Up to now, the only place for me to sit down at home has been my desk chair, which is only comfortable for so long, i.e. until I reach the point at which my butt needs a full-body massage. I’ve been itching to get a couch, but Craigslist has proven fruitless thus far, and I can’t quite afford a new one just yet. So when the IKEA voice directed me to the middle section of the self-serve warehouse floor to a plain yet comfy-looking armchair on sale, I only barely managed not to squeal in delight and football tackle the nearest sample chair.

Enter the delightful POÄNG chair (I’m not sure how to pronounce the brand name; I guess at it and it comes out sounding like “pwang”, which while amusing, I’m fairly certain is wrong), part of IKEA’s “Seize the Days” Sale. A chair for $59 instead of $89 automatically deserved my attention, and when I sat in the thing, one of the IKEA employees had to talk me down and convince me to stand up in order let another customer try it out, because I was not budging.

Thrilled is only the tip of the iceberg. I could barely make the purchase because I kept staring at the box in the shopping cart, and I suffered some pretty serious separation anxiety when I had to leave my new chair at the front of the building so I could get my car and bring it to the loading area. Now that we’re home and I’ve put my fabulous chair together, I’ve been hard-pressed even to get up for a drink of water because it’s just so damn comfortable.

I spent the better part of this evening attempting to further organize my new residence in an effort to make it more homey. I don’t pretend to understand the complex ecosystem that is my little house, but it’s become apparent to me that I am anything but living alone here. Good thing I’m good at sharing.

What I’m not good at sharing, however, is kitchen cabinet space. Especially when that which wants to go in halfsies on the space is an eight-legged monster with a cigarette butt in its mouth and a gun holstered to its hips. Blame for this nefarious roommate lies with the former tenant, who preferred to grow illegal plants in the house rather than ever actually bothering to clean the place.

Even after my awesome new landlord had come in and completely redone the place, I’ve been having to clean and re-clean various areas. Today I attacked the lower cabinets underneath the kitchen counter. While innocently scrubbing away dirt and filth from one lowermost shelf, the hand doing all the scrubbing encountered something light and fluffy. “Oh, cobwebs,” I thought to myself. Only when I looked down I saw not a single strand of web. Oh no, I saw a fucking Six Flags amusement park. With only one guy around to ride any of the attractions.

Spider webs are fine and good, unless they’re where you want to put your dishes. Luckily for me, Renee has been recounting her new camp experiences, and I was able to harken back to my own. That is to say, I realized that a very effective way to rid yourself of cobwebs is to use a broom. And as luck would have it, I only just purchased a new broom this afternoon! So out came the broom, in it went into the cabinet, and after a few swishy swishies, out came the spider web.

The spider, unfortunately, remained. But now it was all alone, and it was nothing a little sneaker action couldn’t handle. Luckily, it was a lone ranger spider (I could tell because of it was light brown with a single dark stripe on its body), and after that all seemed fine and dandy.

Lest I be leading you on with how macho this sounds, this whole debacle by no means butch. Unless butch consists of yelping in surprise and leaping backwards onto the floor as soon as I felt the spiderweb touch the hairs on my arm. Because if that’s the case, then I was fucking Superman.

I’m thinking that it may be about time I consider spraying this place for bugs. After the mess it went through before, it certainly couldn’t hurt anything. Until then, at least Superman has his broom.

Five days, five trips back and forth between the old place and the new one, and five dozen or so boxes worth of worldly possessions, I’m finally to the point where, between the time I get up in the morning and when I go to sleep in the morning, I don’t have to unpack any boxes.

It’s amazing how liberating this is. Things I’m so not going to miss about the old place: EVERYTHING. I love not having to worry about making sure nothing looks like it’s been used, especially the damn bathroom. I love that I can use my own dishes now (I bought some!), and I don’t have to worry about some crazy woman holding up a frying pan like some freaky Jason. Wait, I can put a loaf of bread on the counter? What? You can do that?! YES YOU CAN, MOTHERFUCKER. And I am, it’s on there right now.

One of the perks of living in this place is that it comes with a dog. A dog that’s not abused by being forced to live in the utility room with a little square blanket it’s supposed to poop on, no. (If there’s anything I feel bad about from moving, it’s that the damn dog doesn’t have a decent owner; at least when I was there I could take him out and play with him and try to improve his poor doomed puppyhood. But I digress.) This dog is a genuine big dog, the biggest dog with whom I’ve ever gotten to share the same plot of land.

When I went swimming to cool off this evening (hello, pool!), the dog decided to join me. First it was a game of fetch, and then he got hot and decided that jumping in the pool was the perfect way to cool off. Wait, let me rephrase that: he decided that jumping on me was the perfect way to cool off. It just happened to be convenient for him that I was in the pool when he decided to take that plunge.

That’s Dylan, the best new friend I could possibly ask for. He’s cute even when he’s all soggy.

Here’s some free advice: Never assume that moving will be a perfect process. Not that it ever could be to begin with; by its very nature, moving bites. What I mean is, even when you think you’re moving under the best of all possible circumstances, don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security.

Take me, for instance. I’m so thrilled, this time around, to be moving. And all seems to be going well and, mostly, according to the plan I never really actually laid out. Then today, as I’m busily packing boxes and moving them gradually to my car, Lady Voldemort informs me that the back left tire on my car is low. I’d noticed that too, but hadn’t given it much thought. There just wasn’t enough room in my brain, what with it being full of things from my recent trip and now with the task of getting myself moved.

I made one trip to my new place, then on my way to lunch, I decided to forgo the trip to the gas station to use the air pump, and instead headed to Discount Tire to have them take a look. The decision was based on a combination of laziness, incompetence, and genuine concern.

The tire guy, Dimitri, took a look at my tire and, in a matter of seconds, found the nail that had punctured my little Goodyear. It was exactly what I thought it might have been, only since the nail didn’t reveal itself to me automatically, and I never heard any hissing, I couldn’t be sure. Twenty minutes and $20.00 later, I had a freshly fixed tire and suddenly my car wasn’t tilting dangerously to one side and getting terrible gas mileage. Funny how that works.

Compared to my last move, this one is like a walk in the park. Maybe it’s because I’m only moving 3.5 miles away from where I’m currently at, instead of 800. Maybe it’s because I get to take a few days to make the whole move, and can thus move a little at a time. Maybe it’s because there’s a whole lot less bitching at me for being a big gay disaster. Maybe it’s because I’m almost free from the crazy lesbian roommate who may as well have “666″ tattooed across her chest. Or maybe it’s a combination of all of the above.

This by no means gets me off the hook in terms of moving being a shit ton of work. I’m seriously wiped out. The only reason I’m awake to write this right now is because I took an hour-long nap earlier today. After carrying a box that I had mistakenly packed too full of textbooks and other large volumes, thus making it very fucking heavy, and actually managing to carry the thing into my new place, only to have the thing burst open as soon as I got it in the door, I figured I deserved the shuteye. Not to mention license to write lengthy and confusing run-on sentences.

I can’t believe it, but I’m literally down to less than 72 hours left under the reign of Lady Lucifer. I was thrilled to learn, upon my return, that when I stopped my incoming mail due to my extended absence from LA, it stopped ALL the mail to the house; she actually had to be the one to go to the main post office and pick up all the mail. The fact that she made it a point to inform me of this occurrence the moment I walked in the door indicated that she wasn’t too thrilled about the ordeal. I took it as a testament to my awesomeness. Aw, yeah!