June 1st – Move-in day!
I found a great studio apartment, right in the middle of Montpelier. Just about everywhere I need to go in a normal day – the various school buildings, Shaw’s grocery store, Rite-Aid – is within walking distance, maybe 3-4 blocks. Since my only transportation up here is my motorcycle, and it’s been doing nothing but rain since it got here, that has worked out real well. 🙂 So Paula and I packed up the truck and her car with bed parts, desk parts, my computer, clothing, etc, and headed up here to get things going. Paula was staying the week with me to help me get settled in until school started.
We managed to get just about everything up to the apartment, so I started shuffling things around. Some of the furniture was already here, provided by the landlady – two couches, three small tables, and the kitchen supplies including a microwave. I had picked up a table and lifted it up sideways, and found out rather painfully that the marble inset was not actually attached to the table. It tilted out and smacked me right in the bridge of the nose. :/ I saw stars, for sure, and honestly thought I had broken it (my nose, not the table.) So here we are, not even in the apartment two hours, looking for a hospital because I now had a nice little bleeding gash across my nose. It wasn’t huge, and certainly not life threatening, but Paula wanted me to get stitches.
With the help of a woman who happened to be outside looking at the chickens (yes, you read that right, more on that later) we found the Vermont Medical Center in nearby Berlin. Some paperwork, three stitches, and an hour and a half later, and I was back home. They gave me cream to put on it so it wouldn’t scar up on me, and said I had to have the stitches removed in 5 days. (After 2 days, one of them fell out on its own, and I ended up cutting the other two out myself.)
We came back to the apartment and finished getting the bed set up and clothes put away. Since we had no food in the place other than the few things we brought along, I walked down to Main Street to get food. Well, this may be the capitol, but they still roll up the sidewalks and turn off the street lamps at 9. Only place open at 10pm was Chinese food, which was fine by me.