And thus the adventure begins…
We all slept in a bit after the party last night. I have nothing going on today except for the drive from Greece to Ithaca. The truck was all packed and the apartment just needs its final round of cleaning before we turn over the keys and walk away from Rochester. Josh and Amber had already moved and were done with the place. Andy was heading back to his parents’ house, I believe, until he found another apartment. They aren’t very far away from Greece and just as close to where Andy was working in Brighton as we were up in Greece on Lake Ontario.
Andy was wrestling with his future plans all day I guess. As of this morning his plan was to keep working at the Wellesley in Brighton (right across from Monroe Community College) and to remain in Rochester. Nicklin Associates had offered him a position working on the Waste Watcher project that I was leaving to work on but he had decided that he wasn’t ready for it and didn’t want to move for such a risky project.
But as we were doing the final pack and inspection of the truck and were getting ready to start off down to Ithaca (Andy was driving my Buick down for me while I drove down in the rental truck) he decided that he had had enough of Rochester and wanted to set off on an adventure as well. So he quit his job. I can still remember him calling on the cell phone and getting Esther who was working at the time. She was not happy about having to deliver the message to his boss. We had been working at the same place but I had done my last day on Friday, if I remember correctly. And off we were to Ithaca!
It was dark when we arrived in Ithaca and drove up the east hill on route 13 to look for Nathan Parker’s apartment where we were going to be roommates for the next month. Nate and Bob Winans were there and helped us to unload the truck which was pretty full as I owned, even then, a significant amount of stuff. In fact, I had much more stuff going into Nate’s apartment than he had had there before. Luckily he had a two bedroom apartment but, once again, only one bath.
There was no space at all to deal with all of the furniture and computers that were pouring into the apartment. We ended up using as much furniture as we could in the living room and putting the rest into the dining room and just counting that space as lost to us. The second, smaller bedroom was used purely for storage and everything that could go in there did. I just slept in the dining room on the floor and Andy slept in the living room on one of the couches. For the first time in quite a while we had a place to actually set up my 32″ Sony Trinitron CRT television that I had bought when I first moved in to Greenleaf Meadows and had had no television of my own.
It was a very tiny amount of space for three people with so much stuff but we managed. We had no real plan of how this was going to work long term or if it could at all but at the moment it was purely temporary. Andy and I were only scheduled to be in Ithaca for exactly one month so we didn’t have to make it work for that long. Then Nate would have the apartment to himself with my stuff all crammed into it as that was going to be stored there until we had a better solution for it all.
The apartment was on the top floor of the Gaslight Apartments on Uptown Road in Lansing very near to the Triphammer Mall. The mall was just down at the end of the driveway which made a lot of things extremely convenient. It really wasn’t too bad of a location and the price wasn’t bad at all. Nate was teaching down at the middle school at the bottom of the hill so it was a really good location for him.