the captain is on the bridge

Last night after my troupe rehearsal, I stopped in at the Spaceship to, well, gloat. It's going to take me a little while to move in (for example, I no longer own any sort of bed and will need to find some reasonable facsimile) and I have the luxury of a month of a half before I need to be fully clear of the dojo space. So my plan is to move things as conscientiously as I can, instead of just packing everything in a frenzy, only to find that I've transported trash from old place to new. There's a funny family story about that, incidentally, which I may tell later. But last night, I mostly wanted to finish up taking measurements, gauging how much space in the hall I can use for bookshelves, and cracking everything that could be cracked to let the smell of new paint, plastic, and melamine escape into the night.

So I wasn't expecting a knock (!) at the door at 10:45. It was a little creepy! Through the fish-eye I could see a couple of harmless-looking gents, one tall and Asian, the other--rumpled. They turned out to be the architects who designed the building; they live in units ten and eleven. They had come into the building through the garage and noticed that some things that had been in my unit were now in the garage, and they were wondering what was going on.

It was really pretty funny. They weren't expecting a tenant so soon; there are a couple of things that still need to happen in my unit (the shower tiles need to be sealed, a wardrobe needs to be installed) and the back patio slab (to which only I, of all the tenants, will have direct access) still needs to be poured. So the presence of an actual tenant, a sweaty tape-measure-wielding post-dance-class tenant, was as much a surprise to them as their knock had been to me. But I invited them in, and we talked for a little while, and they asked if I had any feelings about what kind of wardrobe/storage thingie should be procured and where it should be placed; if I had any ideas about how the back should be landscaped, and it was just cool. They seem like nice guys, they're happy that I'm happy with the thing they made, and I now know two of my neighbors!

It's a weird thing, having all the neighbors in a place be new at the same time. By the middle of this week the property manager expects to have the building half-rented. He told me that he's trying to choose people he can talk to easily. Not just because we'll need to be able to communicate with him about maintenance issues and so forth, but because he understands that he's building a community, and it's in his best interests if we all get along. So I'm the writer/dancer in the basement; there's also a chef, the architects, an interior designer, and an accountant so far.

I have a lot to get done today--I was so excited yesterday that I didn't get anywhere with my article, and my deadline is this afternoon, and I'll probably break down and go haul some more things from place to place or waste too much time dreaming about bookshelves. So I'll leave you with this rogue's gallery of angry felines, drawing your attention in particular to the apoplectic Katt.