And Yet More Transitioning

I got an email from my studio partner yesterday...

...well, I should say, my former studio partner. She hasn't been able to keep up her apartment/studio since she broke up with her boyfriend, and she's moving next month ("next month" starts tomorrow, but I think she means she has to be moved by the end of August.) Her parents help her with her rent and she wanted to get a cheaper apartment, as well as a smaller one which she thinks will help her be less messy. So I went today and cleared out all of my stuff.

She's not in the best of health, so I had to carry it all up the stairs to the living room and form a staging area, then carry it around to my truck in the alley. There was a U-Haul on one side (July is the biggest moving month in Chicago) and then once I was loaded I discovered some dipstick had parked his car right in the only other way out of the alley. So I had to wait for him to come out and move it, and he gave me a look like, "What's your problem?" and only the fact that I was tired and hot and didn't feel like getting out saved him some pretty extensive bodily injury. I was about five minutes away from demonstrating that a V-8 Ford F-150 can move a Hyundai sedan even if it's in park and has the parking brake set. No, I wasn't. That would be illegal. I would never do that.

I got it all home, and brought a few things inside and the rest are in the garage waiting to be sorted. So far as I know all my lights work, and I found my tripods and my light stands and my background system and all the other expensive stuff. However, due to either a leak or just excessive condensation, several boxes and one plastic crate had been compromised by moisture*. I have enough crap I need to get rid of without hauling home moldy stuff which I'll probably never use again anyway, so I just left it in the basement. I told her father (her parents are helping her move) to just have the junk guys take it, since I'm sure they'll have to call someone to take the stuff of hers that got wet or that she just doesn't want.

Absent winning the lottery, that's probably pretty much the end of my studio photography career. It's kind of sad, but it's not like I don't have enough to do that I should be doing anyway.

M

*I kept a lot of my props and stuff in the basement, which it's pretty unusual for an apartment to have, but it did. They couldn't be kept in the main space because she and, until last year, her boyfriend lived in it. The beginning of the end, really, was when he put up a big ol' mirror on the wall facing the area where she and I liked to shoot. It was either cover it or deal with weird-ass reflections, and covering it meant you still couldn't shoot in the corner because there was a sheet hanging on the wall.