So, as I sit here in Wharton, I am giving serious thought to
moving away – as in moving to another city all together. It’s something I have to think about long and
hard because I really don’t like to move.
DEFINATION: MOVING (mo͞o′vĭng) – The process
wherein you pack up all your toys in boxes, trust them to a mysterious
stranger, and move from the known universe to a place fraught with new and different and unusual people, rules and sights.
OK on my “HATE TO” list, add moving. It’s up close to the top of the list, along with
mowing and vacuuming and, oh yeah, buying a house and well, maybe buying a car. All of those things raise my stress level to
saturation. Where moving is concerned, I become overwhelmed standing in my home and thinking about having to take
every single thing and prepare it for a box.
The first big move I experienced was in the early 1990’s
when the powers-that-were within the company where I worked, decided all
internal support personnel would be moved from the field office to corporate
headquarters, which were in a whole other state.
Here are my notes from my first move …..
1992 OK, I’m a native
Houstonian and a Texan of many generations.
Moving out of Texas for the first time ever, is kinda scary. Plus we will be moving to a really different
place – Boulder, CO. I know – “just how different could it be.” Well, for instance … Houston is on the gulf coast – it’s serious
flat-lander country. Boulder is in the
foothills of the Rocky Mountains - everything there is up. Houston is almost a tropical climate. It’s cold in Boulder, all the damn time,
except for about 3 weeks in the summer when it is hotter than bloody-blue-hell
and, oh yes, there’s no AC there.
Houston is a huge cosmopolitan city.
Boulder, not so much. Houston has
housing available out the whazoo and there were no houses for sale in Boulder –
at least none that normal people can afford.
In Houston, commuting was a way of life – most people don’t think
anything about a 45 minute commute to work.
In Boulder, people reconsidered jobs if they had to drive further than
15 minutes. I’d always had access to the
outside world via the Gulf of Mexico and now was going to be in a land-locked
state. That fanned up all my claustrophobia
(yeah, yeah, sounds strange but it did.) And so on …...
I’ve
lived in my house a really long time – had 2500 sq. ft packed full of stuff in
addition to a floored attic, packed full of stuff, a garage, packed full of
stuff, a greenhouse packed full of stuff, etc. etc.. .
Now,
you know there is a whole lot more to moving than packing boxes and hiring a
moving company. And, for that portion of
the move, things were pretty easy. This
was a company paid move – the movers were to arrive on a certain day, pack
everything up, load it into a truck and drive off into the sunset or
whatever.
The
real problem with this move was the prep work and the house we rented there was tiny and Michael would
be dropping me at the rent house and flying back to Texas for another 6 weeks
to finish a job. The house had a large
fenced yard and the owner would allow the animals. Good, since we had a big dog and 3 cats. There were a few problems, most notable, no
heat on the second floor. “Oh”, says the owner, “it’s no problem – heat rises – the heat
from downstairs will keep the upstairs nice and warm.” Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Heat may rise, but I’m here to tell you it
does not rise enough to keep a 2nd floor much above freezing. Also, there were no closets - none - nada - zero.
Back
in Houston, I started the very painful process of going through stuff – trying
to decide what was going to go with us, what was going to go into storage, what
was going to be sold, what was going to foisted off on one daughter or the
other, what would be trashed. I probably
would have just taken everything except I felt sure that little rent house
would explode or, more likely, we wouldn’t be able to get inside
So,
I went through things and managed, after much effort and pain, to accumulate a
small pile of “things to get rid of”. I
was proud of myself. Then my oldest
daughter came over. She was not
impressed. She decided we would clean out the attic together. It was just awful. If I couldn’t identify what was in a closed
box and when I had last looked at whatever it was, then, it was trash. I am just positive many treasures were lost
that day. But, we did get the attic
pretty much cleaned out and a stack of “trash” by the curb that probably gave
the garbage collectors nightmares.
We
had the prerequisite “GARAGE SALE” extravaganza. Once again – this was not a pleasant
experience and I’m positive people left with things that I never wanted
to sell. But, all done, we were left
with a somewhat manageable amount of stuff to move.
Tomorrow, Part Two of the move to another part of the
Universe as I knew it.
Take care
p
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