Apartment Packing!

In about a week, I move into my new apartment and start my sophomore year of college (I still feel like a 16 year old. It's weird). I am excited beyond belief. My roommate is perfect; she was my freshman roommate and somehow we were matched up perfectly and became best friends. We're both obsessed with food and crafty things and the like.
Throughout the course of the summer, we've realized how much work and money goes into furnishing an apartment (at least to our standards, which I admit are a little high for college students). We lucked out with a two bedroom, one bath apartment with a standard sized living room and kitchen (although, being the avid chefs that we are, ideally the kitchen would be 19039845 times bigger). So it's not like we're furnishing a studio apartment here. No, we need to think about five rooms, a hallway, and a little balcony (isn't that wonderful! We're planning on having a little herb garden).
Our bedrooms are the easiest, because we're mostly just transferring our rooms in our parent's houses to this one. We already have dressers and beds and clothes. Only minor updates, if any, are needed there.
But for all the other rooms, we set out to somehow acquire couches, a dinner table, side tables, cookware, bakeware, dinnerware, utensils, drinkware, bath rugs +mats, shower curtains, lamps, cleaning supplies, etc, etc, etc, etc. That is the most compact version of the list I could give. We somehow found most of these things for good prices, at secondhand stores and from friends, and I'm currently making a master packing list. It's color-coded green and yellow: green for the things I have, yellow for the things I still need (I don't like using red on lists, it makes me anxious).
My two big challenges are a) finding a full-size mattress to go on my floor, futon style, and b)packing all my clothes.
Challenge A is a little consumerist and, I'll admit, bordering on unnecessary. I already have a twin-size bed. But sleep is my biggest indulgence, and to be honest, I don't want my boyfriend sleeping on the couch/floor every time he visits (he's a tall skinny giant and doesn't fit on my twin bed with me). I'm going to put it on the floor, futon-style, to save money on a bed frame.
Challenge B has been looming on the horizon for a long while. I have way too many clothes, a wardrobe that has been accumulating since I was 13. I have never really done a major clean out of my closet, because I get attached to material things easily (sigh), even though I don't love or wear most of what I own. So it's time. I'm planning on giving away around 80% of my clothes (maybe more), and I've been putting off the grand sorting all summer. I have to do it tonight or tomorrow if I'm going to have it done with by move-in day.

Here goes!

Like Planted Hearts

Lo! Young we are and yet have stood
like planted hearts in the great Sun
of Love so long (as two fair trees
in woodland or in open dale
stand utterly entwined and breathe
the airs and suck the very light
together) that we have become
as one, deep rooted in the soil
of Life and tangled in the sweet growth.

-J.R.R. Tolkien on his wife, Edith

He called her "his Luthien", which, if you have read The Silmarillion, says it all (he wrote an epic poem about two lovers, Luthien and Beren). They met when she and Tolkien were 19 (as she is in the photo above) and began a courtship when they turned 21. She was his muse. I would love to know more about her; to be muse to the writer of The Lord of the Rings is, to me, evidence of a great love.

Underground Supper Clubs

I recently found out about "underground restaurants". Some are more secret than others, and some are not secret at all, just highly selective (such as the 24-hour, all-you-can-eat Chinese-food-oriented Paiza Club on the 36th floor of the Venetian in Las Vegas, where you need a minimum credit line of $1000000 to get in the door). Most, like the one I found below, are like private "supper clubs"; dinner at a secret location, perhaps in someone's home, or on a rooftop in the city. Some are held by aspiring restaurant owners with limited funds, or an aversion to official restaurant regulations (read: illegal). I read about one that smuggled in and served cheese from Paris that is apparently illegal in the United States.

I'm sure I will never know every underground chef's reason for doing what they do, but it fascinates me. I'd love to go to one, especially this semi-secret one that I found, called the Wild Kitchen (http://foragesf.com/home-foragesf/). It's in San Francisco and is centered around foraged ingredients.


To get in, you have to "apply" and sign up for the email list. If they decide you're in, they tell you the date of the next dinner, and on that day, email you with the exact location. I want to do this so badly!