moving, part two .......

And so it continues.  Everything in my home in Houston had been gone through, marked for storage or packing and taking or relocated.

1992      Then came the big day.  The movers arrived and started the packing process.  I’ll tell you what, those guys are efficient.  Four of them managed, in a single day, to wrap, pack and box everything in that house and then get it loaded onto the truck.  They left to go wherever it is big trucks go for the night.  They would meet us in Colorado in 4 days.  The next day MHN and I rented a small U-haul truck, packed it with a few things I would not trust to the movers, a few things that had been forgotten, and all my plants (which were legion) plus the big dog and two cats.  We also were towing my car.  We set off heading north and west.

It’s a two day drive to Boulder – most of it through Texas!  We went up through the panhandle, crossed that little piece of Oklahoma and stopped for the night in the southeast corner of Colorado.  That night the temperatures dropped below freezing – a large number of my plants froze.  Not a good omen.

As we approached Boulder, the snow started to fall and by the time we got to our rent house, we were having a full white-out blizzard.  Really not a good omen.  At the house, MHN unloaded my car.  Then we both unloaded the U-haul.  He was in a rush because, he had to catch a plane and return to Houston for 6 weeks.  As I watched him drive off in that snow, I think the screams were close to the surface.

The moving truck arrived early the next morning.  OK, so here’s the thing.  When you move many boxes whether you do it yourself or the movers do it for you, all the boxes are numbered so you can check them off as they come into the house.  That way you know all the boxes are there, everything is put in the right room, and nothing is lost.  Sounds good – right?  Well, it doesn’t work that way.  There were 3 guys unloading that truck, for heavens sake, and they unloaded it at a dead run!  Nothing got put into the room it was marked for.  Boxes got put any and everywhere.  They were stacked as high as the ceiling!  They just about couldn’t get the furniture in because of all the boxes!  And, we couldn’t put anything outside because it was still snowing!  Then, just to make things really annoying, we discovered the movers couldn’t get the box springs for the bed up the staircase because it was really narrow and the ceiling was really low.  This did not thrill me. 

Finally the movers came up to me with the final bill of lading and said – “Is everything here?  You need to sign this saying everything is here and in good shape so we can leave.”  Now why do they do things like that?  I couldn’t have told them or anyone else if everything was there, much less the shape anything was in.  Every answer I could come up with started with a really bad word.  I just signed the paper and sent them away. 

Then came the unpacking, which I got to do alone.  I carried, shoved, pushed boxes and furniture all over that house, up and down the narrow staircase and down the ladder that led to the black hole under the house, otherwise known as the basement but was really was not.  One good thing happened – the garbage man told me that he’d take all the boxes if I’d stack them by the street – I didn’t have to break them down or do the recycle thing.  After about 4 weeks of trying to get everything unpacked AND work at my new office, I called MHN and in a moderately hysterical state told him that he had better finish up and get to CO very soon – tomorrow would be good – I was tired of of working all day most of the night and really tired of sleeping on the floor!  He arrived shortly after that conversation.

I hate to move.  And I did it three more times.

Take care.

p