Three whirlwind weeks

I drove up to the Bay Area on August 20 to start the new job the next day. It's only been a little over three weeks and already I've flown back to LA for work twice. It's disorienting to go to San Francisco on the weekend (to apartment hunt), San Mateo in the evenings, San Jose for work and Los Angeles for meetings and not live in any of those places. But by next weekend, my life will start to make a little more sense. Today, even though I'm totally ill and woke up with a cold my co-workers gave me (thank you!), I'm driving to LA to meet the ex-con movers at my place on Friday. They'll deliver my things on Wednesday and by next weekend, I'll be unpacked and living in San Francisco! I'm hoping then I will then be able to blog more regularly.

Weird back bedrooms and hobbit abodes

Once again, I'm sorry for not keeping up with the posts! I really miss blogging but it's just not something I can do at the moment. I don't have my own space and am so easily distracted that just the sounds of other people can keep me from having enough concentration to write. Maybe it's just my writerly excuse but I find it very difficult to formulate original thoughts in the midst of other's activities. I do my best thinking while exercising, driving and showering and well, unless I can write immediately afterwards, the thoughts vanish and all that's left are a few mindless scribbles. This week, however, I've been clocking 12 hour days at the new job and haven't even had time to decipher my scrawl.

But this weekend, I finally found an apartment! And actually I only was looking for three weekends and with very little to choose from, am amazed I found something I like. It's not EXACTLY what I wanted. I would have liked to be in an upstairs apartment, I would have liked to have a garden and I would have liked a bay window, but apartment hunting in San Francisco is a process of determining which collection of compromises is more appealing that the others. I saw an adorable apartment that same day, but at the same price as mine in Santa Monica, it had probably a third of the space. It looked as if someone had shrunk the perfect apartment down to a size that would suit a hobbit. It had a tiny little kitchen with a tiny little refrigerator and a tiny little dishwasher. it was fantastic with bay windows in the main room and the bedroom but again, teeny tiny.

There were others with beautiful views but that sprawled all over the place and made no sense. One had the kitchen split in two - the refrigerator and stove in one room and the sink and cupboards in a dark little cave of it's own. In the back, the fourth room after the kitchen(s) was a "bedroom" that looked like somewhere you'd wake up after being kidnapped by terrorists, or worse, rapists. It was weirder than weird and yet, being SF, there was a woman there absolutely in love with it and selling herself via her credit report to the landlord.

Others have parking or a washer and dryer but are modern carpet boxes without any charm. It's very difficult, unless funds are no issue, to get that perfect apartment. But I found something very nice: well-maintained, charming, bright, spacious, clean and within my price range. It's a five-minute walk to where the company bus will fetch me, a half-block from the laundromat, a whole foods grocery and an array of coffee shops. Less than a mile in any direction are restaurants, shops, parks, and anything else I could need. And so begins my life in the city!

Ex-cons are the only movers you can trust

I had a conversation with one of my neighbors that I'd never had a chance to talk to before. He's always sitting outside in the sun and I knew his name is Keith, he's a writer and has lots of tattoos. I didn't know that he had just gone through a divorce, lost his parents, and is from Manhattan. I got to see his apartment and it's decorated like a male version of mine. A big comfortable couch and furniture from the 30's, which matches the 1939 building. He asked me if I had arranged for movers yet and when I said I hadn't he recommended a company.

First I have to say that selecting a moving company is one of the most confusing and difficult commercial endeavors I've had to navigate. It's like the industry is still in the 1970's and run by the mob. I was at an apartments site and used a little widget to request quotes from movers. I got responses from no less than ten companies. They emailed and many called and either called or emailed me every day since. Their quotes range from $895 to $1,895 for the same move! Their contracts are confusing and bizarre and I really didn't know what to do.

To complicate matters, I don't have a place to move the stuff into yet and the longer my things are in the Santa Monica apartment, the greater the chance I'll end up paying yet another unoccupied month of rent. So I've looked into pods and storage and movers and U-Hauls and day laborers. There are a myriad of choices, all of which are difficult to decipher which combination will end up costing the least. Talking to my mom about it, she said it reminded her of Bank of America (whom she said she's heard is run by the mob). She works for the government and they have a deal with BofA to handle all of their corporate accounts. But when my mom's purse was stolen on a business trip, Bank of America was the only credit card that wouldn't take off the charges incurred by the thieves. My mom got a ding on her credit report for three years and has refused to use them (corporate or otherwise) since. I have my own horror story about BofA and wasn't looking forward to experiencing what moving companies are doing to people.

A regular Joe got mad and got even by starting MovingScam.com to educate other people, watchdog the industry and inspire people to take action. It's an excellent site and the story is fantastic. He got charged three times the initial rate, waited six weeks to get his damaged belongings, some of which were missing, and spend countless hours on the phone dealing with these thugs. Three years later the ringleader was actual convicted of extortion and money laundering. Which explains why this guy went through the trouble to find out exactly how the industry is regulated (or more accurately, not regulated.) He writes, in regards to the common practice of holding belongings hostage in order to charge up to double the "guaranteed rate": Believe it or not, a mover's "punishment" for stealing from you is to give back what he stole, and that's only if he gets caught and someone forces him to give it back which is no small undertaking in itself.

I know what it's like to be that mad. I spent three months trying to get my money back from Bank of America. The frustration of being victimized by a business legitimized by the government is incomparable. So when I started hearing horror stories about movers - they take forever, you pay more than they say, they break things, they lose things - I really wasn't sure what to do. Then, my neighbor recommended Delancey Street Moving company. He said he'd done three cross-country moves, two were horrible experiences but the one with Delancey was great. He said "you wouldn't believe the care these guys took with my things."

I looked them up online and discovered that it's a Bay Area based non-profit that helps ex-cons (and the like) learn skills, get sober and do whatever else it takes to "graduate" into society. The foundation's website says that The Delancey Street Moving Company is the largest independent moving company in Northern California. "Known for its swift and superb service, the moving company is so popular that they do virtually no advertising, relying on word of mouth." Certainly a refreshing change from the hard sell of these other companies wanting to provide me a quote and get me to sign on the dotted line.

Single female, 35, seeks available apartment

I was looking for an apartment, online, and was struck by how much like looking for a date online is. I spent two months looking through listings just to get a sense of what was out there. I spent entire days making decisions about which apartments were worth looking at.

Most of the ones I meet, I mean LOOK AT, are a disappointment. They looked so great in the pictures, they seemed like the dream apartment but they're not. As I draw closer to the date that I need to move, the places I hadn't considered two weeks ago start to look like possibilities. And I have the creeping feeling that I'm about to compromise and make a huge mistake. Desperation sets in.

And then...just when I gave up on finding what I was looking for, and starting to think about crashing on a friend's couch so I could look longer. Driving home from a day of frustrating house hunting, I see a management sign on a beautiful little building. I look at the website of the management company that night and see a perfect apartment for rent. I go the next day to see it, turn in application and in 48 hours, I'm signing the lease. Just like that!

What you want will find you if you let it. When you least expect it.