Although I consider myself to have officially moved, my lease on my old place has not yet ended, and I still need to move all my stuff out of there. I’m selling most of the big pieces of furniture, but I’ll still need to either rent a small U-Haul or borrow my parents’ car to move my two six-foot-tall bookshelves and my 27-inch TV and accompanying TV stand. In the meantime, though, out of impatience and a desire to lessen the burden when I move the big stuff, I’ve occasionally gone back to my old place with a suitcase and loaded it up with CDs or whatnot. I have a few hundred CDs, and in two trips I’ve managed to move over half of them, but I’ve still got two trips left. And I’ll probably take my CD stand on the PATH train with me on that last trip as well.

The coolest thing I’ve done so far, however, is to move my computer, which I did a week ago. I thought it would fit in my suitcase, but it didn’t (I should have measured beforehand), so I had to borrow Matt’s, which is bigger. I took Matt’s empty suitcase to my old apartment, unplugged all the computer stuff, wrapped the CPU in a towel and put it in, along with the keyboard (also wrapped in a towel), the mouse, the computer speakers, and the assorted power cords. I fortunately have a flat-panel monitor, so I managed to stuff it into a big backpack (after sticking it in a towel and then a plastic bag). So I walked to the PATH, rode the PATH, and walked to the new place lugging a very heavy suitcase and wearing a computer monitor on my back. Matt was somewhat shocked, but he shouldn’t have been, as I really wanted my computer.

The new apartment has a small room with shelves that we’ve turned into a combination walk-in-closet-and-Jeff’s-Study. Matt helped me set up the computer on a desk we’d stuck in there, and then he strung together a bunch of wires to connect it up with his Internet router. I put together an extra IKEA chair that belongs to the building, and voila, Jeff has a study, with a small window, even. I was worried that I might have damaged the machine by pulling it in a suitcase along bumpy sidewalks, but it emerged unscathed.

Matt and I really needed two computers. When I was unofficially living with him at his old place, we had only his, which was difficult, because we’re both Web addicts. If he was using the computer and I wanted to as well, I had to find something else to do. Now we can both do computer stuff at the same time.

And if I get really lazy, it’s nice to know I’ll be able to IM Matt across the apartment.