I sold my couches!!

For those of you unaware of my couch saga, I purchased a couch and love seat when I moved to Orlando in Oct. 2006 to furnish my bare apartment. At that time I never thought I'd be moving back in with my mom, nor did I think I'd ever be moving back into a dorm. Needless to say both of those are now realities and after moving in with my mother in Oct. 2007, her 2 bedroom apartment suddenly became crammed with two apartments worth of furniture. You see, she already had a completely furnished apartment (what became my bedroom was a den) so now in addition to finding space for the furniture that formerly occupied the 2nd bedroom, we had to find space for my couch, love seat, kitchen table with four chairs and all of my random belongings. To accommodate this clutter, we turned the dining room into a storage room, pushed all the extra furniture in there, covered it with a sheet and pretended it wasn't there (which was tough). When I finally realized it would be more hassle than it's worth to move to Boston with all of my furniture (and pay to store it for 2 years), I decided to sell my like new couches the cheap way -- through CraigsList. It took more than two months of posting and re-posting my CraigsList ad (and subsequently lowering my price twice), until I was able to successfully sell my couches last night after a spur-of-the-moment call from a man in Titusville.

Around 7 p.m. last night he called asking when this week he might be able to come see the couches and before I knew it, we arranged for him to come right then and there. By 9 p.m. I had $600 cash in my hands (too bad it went straight to my credit card bill) and a lot more space in our dining room/storage place. Next up I've got to try to sell my mom's extra couch, our extra kitchen table and my mom's butcher-block sideboard. And then we plan to have a garage sale later this month -- currently 1/2 of our garage is packed with all the items we want to sell. There's so much stuff that I can barely fit my car in there!

Somehow I find de-cluttering so....well...cathartic! Plus, my mom always says that when you clear your life of all the things you no longer need, you make room for wonderful new things to enter. Too cheesy? Maybe, but I secretly hope she's right!

In HBS news, the Round 2 Admits received their admissions decisions the other day and the bulletin boards are back to being flooded with congratulatory remarks and get together invites. So far I haven't seen anyone respond to my original "Florida" posting. It would be nice to find a few more Florida folks at HBS so we can commiserate during the winter! Maybe Round Three!

In other news, I'm finally close to finishing my third HBS tutorial -- the one on Technology and the Internet. I've got to say it's the most boring one I've done yet -- no funny animation or cohesive storyline -- and sometimes I feel like I'm trying to learn a new language with all of the vocabulary thrown at me. I've already "failed" the tutorial (for this one there were 6 mini-quizzes and you needed a 60% on each to "pass" the tutorial) -- I got a 50% on the first quiz because I could not calculate something to do with bits, bytes, megablips, megahertz...well you get the point. Thankfully this was our "optional" tutorial, so failing doesn't have any repercussions and hopefully we won't have any cases on technology this detailed -- I never thought being an executive meant you also have to be an expert in computer science!

This weekend I am heading down to Boca to visit my grandparents and hopefully see one of my best friends, Tausha, who lives in New York but will be down the same weekend (Hi Tausha!). I can't wait to give my grandparents the HBS merchandise that I bought during Admit Weekend -- my grandfather has dutifully worn his Gator cap for the last five years so I think it's high time he replace it with a new crimson HBS one! I got a calendar for my grandmother -- she likes sentimental things like that and since she won't be able to come visit me in Boston, she can at least look at pictures of the buildings I'll be in every day and envision me there (sounds "out there" but it keeps her from feeling so lonely).

Back to the daily grind...!