why everybody needs a cliff

When I moved to Minnesota, I packed everything I could fit into the Camry and drove west for eighteen hours. My first night in that place, I slept on a cot. The next week was spent buying and building: building a desk, building a bed on a platform, buying rugs and plants and all the nonessential items that I consider essential in apartment decorating. I spoke with confidence to the men at Home Depot and specified the exact dimensions I wanted for my lumber. I was recently single and out among the cornfields all on my own. I braced, I built, I spilled wood glue all over my hands and peeled it off my fingers.

This time, I just called my father.

I figured I'd already proved four years earlier that I can be capable. This time, I didn't feel like proving anything. I wanted my new apartment to resemble someplace where I could live comfortably for a year. I wanted it to look less grad student, more real job. I wanted to take advantage of the fact that for the first time in four years, I am finally back in the *right* time zone and only six hours from Buffalo.

Mission accomplished.

We didn't build furniture; thanks to the miracle that is Target these days, it's cheaper to buy decent-looking flat-packed stuff than it is to buy the lumber, cut the lumber, sand and rout and stain and stain and seal and assemble the lumber. But that's okay, because we used the time we saved for drinking beer out on the back deck. An embarrassing amount of beer, actually. Thank god for Michigan and their 10 cent returns.

Anyway. We did build some overhead shelves for the kitchen--a place to hang pots and pans--and we repurposed some desk lamps to give me lighting over the sink. Also switched the fridge bolts, angled it and built a little table in between it and the stove. Cliff donated the roll-y table he made some thirty years ago to my new place, so I have a butcher block to pull out and use as a counter, a cutting board and, with the addition of some stools, a dining table.

He fixed the shower so that it no longer collapses around my head when I bathe or look at the world shower curtain funny, and he installed little shelves in the Murhpy bed ("Murph") closet so that there's a place for the iHome and a reading lamp and my glasses and the ever-present Naglene. We took down ugly, dirty blinds and hung new white curtains. The dogs helped by eating the glue and chewing the little golf pencils to nubs and sitting helpfully at Cliff's feet:



and offering constructive (oh, ha) criticism:



And we even finished with enough time on Saturday to take a walk around campus and drive out to the lake, past all the u-pick blueberry bushes, to sink our feet into the sandy beaches of Lake Michigan.




The man is good. The place is pimp.



Murph goes up in the daylight hours, there are plants, the pictures are hung and actually level, the fridge is stocked with diet Squirt and rosemary and a fresh bottle of Sriracha, and I finally have a desk to sit at. Which is good, actually, because I have a day and a half left to finish reading my textbooks all the way through and formulate some syllabi. On Wednesday my orientations and meetings and seminars begin, and there is talk of supper clubs and visiting a new brewery and checking out one colleague's neighbor's band, who supposedly cut the saccharine with their live shows, during which they wear matching vintage stewardess outfits. And there's two weeks until classes start.

It's probably about to get really fucking busy.