Keep moving

Our weekend was fairly productive, if you call moving four carloads of stuff from one apartment to another productive. Movers are coming next Monday to pack up all of our remaining things, and Tuesday they'll move us to our new apartment, which is about 10 blocks away. The new place is e exactly a third of the size of our current place, so we'll be taking only what fits and putting the rest in storage.

We'll no longer have the luxuries: the gym, the guest room, the second bathroom, and the utility closet. Anything that doubles as storage will come with us. Most of our neighbors have moved; those of us who remain have the same conversation: We can't believe we're finally moving and that we'll never see our places again. Many of us secretly hope, like a governor's stay of execution, that the whole arena project will go away and somehow we'll be able to stay. Maybe they'll let us rent a few more months, maybe we can buy our apartments back. Maybe we're just deluded. Despite our new, exciting opportunities, we waver between denial and bargaining.

We dismantled our our 8-foot-high armoire into 8 flat sections and took them over in the car to the new place. When reassembled, the armoire is Godzilla-like in the living room. The ceilings are high, but they're 4 feet lower than ours, so the armoire looks a bit out of scale. There's nothing wrong with the apartment. It's a typical size for a New York brownstone. Heck, until I was 16 I shared a bedroom with my two brothers in an even smaller apartment. It's just that having our luxurious space has raised our expectations.

Luis jokes that we'll be saying things like, "It's my turn to sit!" and "You can't come over till someone leaves." The new apartment is temporary until we determine how long the building we're buying will take to rezone and renovate. Living in the new place has more advantages than drawbacks: We'll be staying in a neighborhood we like, with friends, near our favorite restaurants, near a subway, near our new building. And we'll be saving money. As my mother taught me, never forget where you came from because you never know if you'll end up back there again.