Wednesday was the earliest I was allowed to move into the room so I told the lady moving into my old apt that she could move in Wed night and I’d move out. I put together what I thought I absolutely needed until the weekend when I was going to get a lift moving my things. My bags were Very heavy but I had no ‘adventures’ getting to my new place. The adventure started when I tried to turn on the light in my new ‘home’. Flicking the light switch did not bring forth any light. I used my cellphone as a flashlight and was elated when I saw a desk lamp on the desk. When I tried to click it on… nothing. I thought it might not be plugged in. It was plugged in but to a power bar… maybe the power bar wasn’t turned on. Nope, it wasn’t. I turned it on and… still nothing! The desk lamp didn’t work either. Luckily it was still early enough that I was able to get a cheap clip-on light for the desk. I tried one of the lightbulbs in the provided desk lamp, to see if perhaps it was just the bulb. Nope, the thing was actually broken. So I was rented a room that did NOT come with light. Welcome to Toronto!! Haha. I feel so welcome :-D

There was a chair with the desk (how kind of them). When I sat on it I thought I’d squashed and killed a small child, with the noise that it made. The next day I had to buy a replacement chair…

The floorboards squeak like crazy, of course. ‘But, of course.’

The bed… about the only thing harder they could have given me to sleep on would have been a mat on the floor. Friday night I bought a new mattress at Ikea. That place likes to make things as ‘portable’ as possible so my new twin mattress was actually rolled up and shrink wrapped :-D Still damn heavy though!!

Thursday night was a lot of fun: I thought I’d need some stuff before Saturday (I don’t think I quite realized that was only 1 1/2 days away haha) and I ended up filling one of my wheeled luggage with stuff, Heavy stuff. I left the apt in Brampton around 10:15pm. I waited 1/2 hour for the bus, waited 1/2 hour for the GO bus (to leave downtown Brampton, the driver was nice enough to let me wait on the bus), got to the subway an hour later, got to my subway station an hour after that (not sure how it took an hour but it did). It’s now 1:30am. I’ve missed the last bus going south by about 1/2 hour (would never have imagined it taking this long to get to downtown TO!!) and after sharing this nice little piece of news with me the ‘gentleman’ behind the counter immediately ignored me and returned to his paper. Helping out stranded young women apparently wasn’t in his job description. I might have been ok if I’d gotten back on the subway and headed to union, and caught the Queen streetcar, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I started walking, dragging my very heavy wheeled luggage behind me and carrying 2 bags. I asked the first person I passed (the only one for quite a while actually) if I was headed in the right direction for Queen st (south). He told me I was. After a bit I headed west, since I thought the street I was on might be east of the street I ultimately wanted to end up on and thought I’d cut over so I only had to walk straight down to Queen. This would have be fine IF I’d actually been heading south. This Other ‘gentleman’ (man this town is Rife with ever-so-helpful ‘gentlemen’) let me walk north, thinking I was walking south. (I’ve Always hated asking for directions; it made me feel like an idiot for having no sense of direction. Now I’ll just be afraid they’ll be lying to me, and for good reason!) And when I thought I was heading west I was actually heading east. So I was walking north east, which is towards Scarborough. This is SERIOUSLY out of my way. I left the subway station at 1:30am and FINALLY got to my ‘house’ at 3:30am. Yes, I pulled that damn piece of luggage around for 2 HOURS!! My hands were so sore and the muscles in my forearms ached. Because the luggage was so damn heavy and I was so damn tired and sore I made a bit of noise getting into the house (those damn noisy floorboards) and That’s how I found out there’s someone living in the basement of my new ‘home’. So there’s 3 guys up here on the 2nd floor with me and someone living ‘under the stairs’ so to speak. And here I just thought that door led to a broom closet. Considering the basement guy would be using the kitchen and laundry machines too, AND might be bothered by noisy ppl coming into the house late at night, you’d think he might have been mentioned to me… but nope. The place where I rented a room 2 dwellings ago, there was also a guy living in a bsmt apt, and I wasn’t told about him either until I figured it out myself. The other guy renting a room across from me was told about the bsmt guy, not sure why I was excluded… oh well. Landlords are weird, what can I say.

Oh and the piece de la resistance of the room is that it CONSTANTLY smells like cigarette smoke (I asked and was told ‘yes, it’s a smoke free house’). I brought one of the air filters from my old apt and that did NOT make any diff to the stink. I had to buy a plug-in dealio to mask the smell. I’ll probably never get rid of it altogether, but at least now I get to smell a strong fake-flower smell instead of ciggy smoke  0_O