A Moving Experience

I awoke this morning to a series of IMs from my oldest friend, Jeff, who took advantage of the fact that I forgot to log out of AIM to complain about the fact that after much pestering, he finally started reading my journal on a regular basis, only to find that I haven’t been updating it on a regular basis. Well, it’s a fair cop, and I should write more often, so let’s start with the most recent weekend…

As many of you already know, telynor is moving out of the house she had been renting and in with me and kitanzi for a few weeks. This weekend was at last Moving Day, whereby all her stuff was to be moved into storage.

We went over on Friday and Saturday to help with the packing and sorting of Stuff. Harper is using this opportunity to purge a lot of stuff, so it wasn’t as simple as “Take all this stuff and shove it into boxes”, but we managed to get an awful lot done over those two days.

The plan for Sunday was to pick up the truck at 3:00pm, load all the furniture and as many boxes as were ready to go, and take them to be stored at arimathea‘s house. We had help from Harper’s old friend niquildrvr and her boyfriend, Steve. Steve and I were appointed Lifters Of Heavy Things and put in charge of loading the truck while the girls worked on packing and cleaning.

We ran into a bit of a snag, though, when it quickly became apparent that there was more stuff than would fit into the rented U-Haul truck. Thus, we made the executive decision to do this in two trips. We got as much as we could into the truck and headed off in a caravan to unload it before the light was gone.

The truck turned out to be an adventure in and of itself. For one thing, it had a broken gas gauge. We set off from World’s End with a quarter tank of gas. Because Tim’s place is quite a distance away, we stopped at the first diesel vendor to fill up the tank. Seventeen dollars later, we got back on the road to discover that the gas gauge said we had……a quarter tank of gas. It continued to read this for the entire weekend.

The other silly thing about the truck was the loading ramp. U-Haul’s have a ramp that’s supposed to slide out from underneath the cargo bay and hook onto the end. Well, this truck’s ramp was actually lying IN the cargo bay, having been completely removed from the underside of the truck. This means we had to leave it behind when we went on the moving runs and didn’t have the advantage of it to unload.

We arrived at Tim’s unloaded everything into the garage as tightly as possible, and then went by my apartment for me to get a change of clothing (I had foolishly worn jeans, and it was oppresively hot, so I wanted some shorts), and then set off for dinner at the Georgia Diner, where we had another thanksgiving dinner that just couldn’t be beat, and arrived back at World’s End at midnight to load the truck again.

It was about 2am when we finally declared the second load ready to go. By then, everyone was just plain wiped out, so we bid Anita and Steve goodnight and set off for Alpharetta. Both Kit and I had decided we were just going to take a personal day on Monday to help finish the move. We got back home and crashed about 3am.

Monday morning we got underway about 10:30am, drove out to Tim’s and unloaded the stuff, and then, after swinging past World’s End to get the ramp (remember the ramp?), we returned the truck and had lunch at Applebees and stopped by Border’s to pick up some more boxes. This was actually dangerous, since I hadn’t browsed the bargain books in a while. I found some very nice stuff, including two Calvin and Hobbes collections we didn’t have, A Far Side collection, an interesting looking book on Gender Identity, and, best of all, a hardback volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. The really nifty thing about this collection is that all the stories are actual facimile reproductions of the original Strand magazine publications, with the illustrations. Shiny!

Monday’s strategy was to simply box everything that was left, regardless of whether it was needed or not, since the time for sorting was really past. After accumulating a carload of stuff that was to go to our place, I ran it back ot Alpharetta while Kit and Harper continued to work. They really knocked themselves out, and when I got back the entire upstairs was done, and all the stuff left to go to storage was stacked neatly the living room. We worked on getting the kitchen shipshape, loaded the cars with stuff to come to our house, and set off again. Home and safe at around 11pm, Kit and I crashed while Harper tackled the puzzle of fitting all of the stuff from her freezer into our much smaller freezer.

*whew* All my muscle aches have muscle aches, but it was worthwhile, we kicked major ass, and as a result there’s only a couple of more carloads of stuff to shift into storage, and the Great Harper Migration of 2003 will be, if not complete, at least at an interim. Long weekend upcoming, which will be spent resting, finalizing Harper’s benefit CD project, Java Sutra, and generally recovering from all the activity of LAST weekend. Thank heavens for holidays!