> > I hate moving. Moving is depressing. It's hard, exhausting labor. It's taking not only your personal belongings, but also your cherished memories of times both good and bad, and packing them up into little boxes.
>
> I feel for you, Grish. Moving sucks. Even when you are moving to a place you want to be, the actual move is never fun for me.
>
> A word of advice to those currently at or who will be going to college: If you can, find a place that you can stay in as long as possible. I moved after every year in college and that gets old fast. I know that it isn't always feasible to stay in the same place the whole time but it is worth trying.
>
> Fer"And don't buy things on credit"rick

I can also relate. I would have replied to Grishny's original post, but what Ferrick said about college is very relevant to what I have to say.

I did follow Ferrick's advice (well, no, I did what his advice would have advised had I heard it six years ago) and tried to find stability in my living accomodations. For various reasons, this did not work. What follows is a synopsis of my living accomodations since high school. (I start with 1988 because of the end of that first period and its connection to the start of my string of moves.)

June 1988 - June 1995: Living with my parents in Grimshaw. I completed grades 6 through 12 during this period. Obviously, living with one's parents during school is the most stable you can get.

July 1995: Living on my own in my old house. My father was doing contract work at the time, and my mother was working for Telus (our provincial telephone company). Mom's office was being closed and she was transferred to Medicine Hat, 1200 km away. I had a good job for the summer, though, so we decided that I could stay up north, keeping one vehicle (the car I drove all the time anyway) and any living necessities I could fit in it. I could only stay in our old house for one month, though, because it passed into the possession of the realtors at that time. During this month, I had a mattress, a microwave, and a fridge and a stove (which were staying behind), plus clothes and my stereo and other necessities for an eighteen year old. :-)

August 1995: When the realtor took possession, I moved up the street about four houses, and housesat for some family friends. The parents in this family were both teachers, and were going on a teacher exchange program, but left a month early to do some vacationing before the start of the school year, and let me be a live-in house-sitter for the month. My close friend Jason moved in as well. (Yes, I did have permission from the owners to let him in!) That month was, well, kinda weird. I had stereo cables running everywhere, we had an iguana live with us for most of the month, and of course, we partied (though usually not in the house). The less said about that month, the better-- Although there is one EXCELLENT "Bleeding Excessively" type story.

September 1995 - August 1996: Living with my family in Medicine Hat. I did my first year of engineering at the college there.

September 1996: Living in Rundle (in the northeast of Calgary). I had to transfer to the University of Calgary to continue my education, but put off doing so until the last day of August because I was working three jobs in the Hat and paying no rent. We only stayed there for a month because we had four people in a small three bedroom apartment, and one guy (Ryan)'s sister was moving out of a nice big four bedroom two bathroom duplex and recommended us to the landlord.

October 1996 - March 1999: The duplex. The place was nice and big, and relatively inexpensive to rent, but our lifestyle was awful. No responsibilities were assigned, so the lawns got mowed when the city threatened us (or we felt like it), the dishes got done every two weeks at best, and collections of up to seven or eight garbage bags accumulated by the back entrance (INSIDE!) until the smell got bothersome enough for someone to take them out. Worse still, two of the four of us usually ended up doing all the cleaning, and this was the main reason why it went so long-- we would get sick of doing all the cleaning, and leave it for a couple of weeks hoping that someone else would get sick of the fruit flies breeding on the dirty dishes (I kid you not) or the stink of the garbage and clean-- but then we usually ended up just doing it ourselves, and having far more work to do when we did. Jason was the first to get sick of this, and moved out in August 1998. His replacement was much worse than he was, so with me being the only regular cleaner there, I got fed up. The people that Jason had moved in with got married and were having a baby, due summer 1999, and Jason was going to be kicked out when the baby was born, so I did some phoning in March 1999 and found a new place for the two of us.

April 1999 - August 1999: Holly Acres. I moved in in April, but Jason couldn't move in until May. As well, because of the short notice (I had about three days from the time I decided to move until the time when I did move) I had to pay rent at the old place as well. To make matters worse, the landlord at the old place said that with me moving out, he wanted the rest of the guys out too (I think he knew who the good ones were, and with the last leaving, he feared for the condition of the place). I ended up spending almost $1000 on rent that month because of all these things. Even worse, the damage inspection at the old place did not go well. The landlord kept our damage deposit and charged us another $500 in additional damages. Oh, and did I mention that I was the guy who paid the rent, and got paid back be everyone else? Well, one of the other guys hadn't paid rent in two months, and another hadn't paid in three. At this point, you can probably guess who ended up paying out the extra damages on the place. You also probably have an excellent idea of why I wanted to move out of the old place. But anyway, back to the new place. Jason and I set up a weekly cleaning schedule and stuck to it. We did our dishes pretty much daily. We found that we LIKED living together. Everything worked. Then, at the beginnning of August, Jason found out about an opportunity to move into a nicer place. Due to an unfortunate series of events, though, he could not give notice until after the August deadline, so we had to move out at the end of August but paid for September.

September 1999 - Present: My current home. Jason and I spent all of August trying to find a third roommate for our three bedroom basement suite. We tried both our brothers, but neither was coming to Calgary in the end. (Both ended up in Edmonton-- one because of a girlfriend, the other because of football.) We finally decided, with great hesitation, to take Ryan back as a roommate. We did so with great caution-- we laid out specific rules on housecleaning and set up a payment plan for him to repay his debt to me (he was the roommate who had not paid rent in two months in April). Things have worked out quite well, though.

I would love to say that the story ends here for now. This is not the case, though. Jason is getting married on July 14th, and Ryan and I have agreed to move out so he and his bride can keep the basement suite. We have confirmed that my brother will come to Calgary to live with us if we can find a place in his price range. But it still STINKS that I have to move again. As you may have gathered, I move far too often, and often, there are bad circumstances surrounding my moves (high expenses, rushed moving, etc.) At least this time I know who I'll be living with, and I have some time to pack and look for a place.

Don "I originally intended to give a brief summary of my moving experiences, but it rapidly turned into a novel. Oh well. I like stories. :-)" Monkey