Tag Archives: moving

The Perils and Pains of Moving

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Moving is painful and in the hopes of feeling like I’ve accomplished something in the past two weeks, I will detail the stages of moving here for your amusement. Feel free to laugh at me rather than with me; I don’t have the energy left over from moving for anything but a meaningful look at this point.

1. Packing. I didn’t have to do a lot of this, because most of my things were still packed from my earlier move. That’s a good thing, because I’m pretty much awful at it, having approximately the spatial awareness capability of a turnip.

I pretty much just threw as much stuff as I could into bags and then shoved it into my car. Since the new place is only across town from the old place, this actually worked and nothing was crushed into tiny little pieces.

2. Moving. This involves actually picking things up in one place and putting them down somewhere else. I moved the small stuff myself, causing an incredible array of aches and bruises, but for my anvil collection and my prized set of giant boulders, I had the assistance of coworkers Brian and John, both of whom have trucks, and more importantly, muscles that do not consist of 98% Grade A flab, like mine.

John is also gifted with some sort of moving superpower–he can fit way more stuff into one trailer than should be possible. It was like a clowncar, only instead of clowns coming out of the trailer, it was furniture. (Thank goodness. I mean, clowns. Brrrr.)

3. Cleaning. I haven’t even started on this, but I will have the invaluable help of my mother. She’s extremely persnickety about cleaning, and whoever gets my apartment after me will probably be able to eat off of any surface in it, up to and including the ceiling.

4. Unpacking. … do I have to? Isn’t there some statute on the books that says you must keep at least one box packed after every move for at least ten years?

Well there should be.

Glorious Weather

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You know you’re a Minnesotan/North Dakotan when you roll your windows down ’cause it hit 35.

Of course, this weekend it was a great deal warmer than that, and pretty much everybody rolled their windows down, or wore short sleeves. Even those with thinner skin dispensed with their coats.

It’s been great weather for moving.

So naturally I slacked the whole weekend and moved a bare three carloads of stuff across town to my new apartment. On one hand, slow and steady wins the race, and I have generally ambled in the direction of moving more stuff over there. After the first trip with just one carload, my… well, my everything hurt.

And if I were keeping a swear jar, I’d probably have enough money to retire by now, between hitting various bits of my anatomy on various sharp and/or hard objects, dropping things, and dropping various sharp and/or hard objects on various bits of my anatomy.

But after four trips, spread across several days, I’m only a bit stiff.

This is an especially good thing because my wonderful coworker is going to help me move a couple of the larger objects this evening after work.

You know, the larger objects, like the table that weighs more than 17.3 Indian elephants, and the TV stand that I have about as much chance of moving with the power of positive thinking as I do with the power of my flabtastic arms. I think my end tables are made of rocks, or possibly anvils.

Oh, Ugh…. Not Again

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I’ll be moving again next month.

I shudder to think about it, honestly, even though it’ll be just across town. Moving is a special sort of suffering, in which you have to pay for two places at the same time and also, clean one of them really, really thoroughly.

This isn’t that big of a deal in this case, but somehow I have reached the age of 31 without learning how to clean an oven, my vacuum cleaner and I are barely on speaking terms and I don’t even know where my Windex has gone.

It probably left me for someone with more mirrors.

 

Losing My Marbles (And Other Items)

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Moving is chaotic. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever had to move.

The great thing is, I’m not having any trouble finding stuff. I find stuff all the time. Sometimes it’s stuff I remember packing, and other times it’s stuff I haven’t seen since the last time I moved.

This morning I found several vital and critical items I doubtless could not live without:

  • My coffee mugs for work. Currently I am rocking a china mug with pink flowers on it. It’s a little girly but I am in fact an actual, card-carrying girl. So that’s all right.
  • My ParaSail water bottle. It’s just an ordinary bottle from Newport Labs in Worthington, where they make ParaSail–the first vaccine against swine flu. (Note: It is actually a swine swine flu vaccine. Not for humans, for piggies, who unfortunately can catch swine flu from humans.) The water bottle does not contain any ParaSail, but it is cool.
  • My Tums. I can’t stop fretting but at least I can do something about it, right?
  • My candy dragon. Unfortunately I haven’t got any candy to fill his belly with yet, but that’s the next step.

But I’m always finding stuff.

I look for my coffee mug and find a Kleenex box. I look for a Kleenex box and find canned goods. I haven’t looked for canned goods yet, but I have a feeling that when I do, I will probably find Jimmy Hoffa.

Hello, Jamestown

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Annnnnd we’re back!

I’m now typing from a sweet little desk in the newsroom of the Jamestown Sun in Jamestown, N.D. It’s going to take me a while to get situated here, so my blogging may be pretty sporadic for a while, but I’ll try to keep posting from time to time.

Jamestown is an awesome place so far, and the people here are pretty friendly as far as I can tell. There’s a bit of weirdness with the town layout, which had to be arranged around the James River, but they seem to have kept everything on more of a grid layout than is generally possible when you have a lake in the middle of the town.

Jamestown stores its lake north of town, which I think is pretty sensible of them.

I have already learned a couple things about North Dakota.

  1. It is not actually filled with nothing, contrary to the beliefs of famous people who have never set foot on North Dakotan soil. I suspected this before, of course. Turns out it’s full of crops and cattle and people and roads and trees and rivers.
  2. North Dakotans like blowing stuff up. Then again, who doesn’t. That’s pretty much what the Fourth of July is about, right? Commemorating our nation’s history of freedom and liberty through explosives. People here seem pretty patriotic in general, which is nice.

(What happened to the rest of the post? I’m not sure. Maybe the buffalo got to it. I hear they like to hide in trees and drop down on unsuspecting bystanders, like ninjas but without those cool throwing stars. Or maybe that’s drop bears.)

Report Cards

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I spent yesterday in my mother’s basement going through toys, tossing out cheap McDonalds Happy Meal Toys and retaining important items like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and my brother’s Power Rangers.

Then we hit the box filled with my old schoolwork, and I learned several important things about myself and my family:

  • As a young child, my brother’s writing tended to center around bodily functions and was pretty typical for a kid his age. I think he may just have liked writing the word "puke."
  • I got above average grades in first grade in everything except social studies and penmanship. This is a surprise for me because my handwriting has degraded since first grade and if Mrs. Asche were to test me now, I would probably get a "needs improvement" grade. She would have been far, far too polite to have written "What the heck does this say?!" on my papers, though.
  • My mother saved everything. Including a note I had written her about unplugging the toilet circa 1988, and pictures of my brother’s work in the Jackson Boy Scout troop. We threw away a lot of the useless stuff, but kept everything that was funny.
  • In my advanced beginners swimming class report card, my teachers wrote I needed to improve my breathing on the crawl stroke. To this day, I really can’t swim the crawl very well, because turning my head so much makes me slightly dizzy. Are there any swimmers out there who could give me some advice on this?
  • I was not a good speller. I became a good speller later, but in first and second grade, you could tell I needed practice. Unfortunately, after I started taking German in high school I reverted to my bad-spelling ways. And then I learned just enough (barely any) Russian to make it even worse.

I also learned that we had an awful lot of beanie babies in the house for a family who did not collect them, and that my mother is willing to do Barbie’s laundry on her behalf. That blonde slob hadn’t washed her clothes in 20 years, can you believe it!

Currently there are tiny doll clothes hanging all over the downstairs bathroom in a stunning tribute to my mother’s patience and rust-removing capabilities.

Feedback Feedback… Loop Loop?

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I had an unusual experience in a restaurant Friday evening. After a perfectly delicious meal that I pretty much inhaled, I left the building with my family.

My dad had forgotten something at the table and went back to fetch it, and while he was there, he had a brief chat with our waitress. She recognized his last name as mine, and told him she enjoyed his daughter’s columns, and even commented on the first-grey-hair piece.

I’m always oddly surprised when anyone reads what I write, and I surely do appreciate the feedback.

In other news, my parents’ new house is coming along nicely.

My mother and I went through about ten billion books over the weekend and decided to give approximately three of them away.

Actually, we managed to put five or six bags in the "recycle-or-give-away" pile, which is pretty good when you consider that my mom, dad and I are all avid readers and accrue books like squirrels accrue nuts.

We had some challenges telling dad’s and my books apart (we both took philosophy and religion classes in college), but we did the best we could. I keep telling myself we didn’t need four copies of "Utopia" anyway, and that one copy of "The Consolation of Philosophy" is really enough, and that my mom probably isn’t ever going to need a list of 201 French verbs again. Also, four German dictionaries is just excessive. However, having three different translations of Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales," plus the original, could come in handy some day. Maybe. Possibly. Okay, so it’s not likely, but you never know.

I did find something incredibly cool, however: my family’s Bible. My great-grandmother’s name is written in ornate, old-fashioned handwriting in the front.

The Bible is in German, too.

The other cool thing I found was a gorgeous Bible printed in 1970 with illustrations by… Salvador Dali.

A Moving Experience… of Moving

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Last weekend I helped my parents move. Not as much as I should have, since I slept in like a big lump and had to rest after every couple of boxes, but I did help. We moved two bookshelves full of books, almost everything from our downstairs bathroom and almost everything from my brother’s room.

Quite a bit of it involved going up and down the steps to the basement in the new house, and yesterday I was walking around the office like an old woman: taking very small steps and moving quite slowly. My knees are bad but they’re not as bad as my mother’s knees, so I tried to be the one going up and down steps whenever possible. It worked out pretty well, actually, but apparently swimming every day isn’t sufficiently exercising my calves, because yesterday and today they were on fire.

Okay, so that’s an exaggeration. They’re just very stiff. Oddly, my arms and back don’t hurt at all, so clearly the swimming is helping. I simply have not mastered the stairs. I need a stairmaster. I also need the willpower to actually use a stairmaster, which would pretty much be a miracle, so while I’m asking for that I’d also like a pony, thicker hair and the ability to play the guitar while still having long fingernails.

Anyway, the house is looking better and better every time I see it.

Plenty to Be Thankful For

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Yesterday I got to see my parents’ new house in Jackson for the first time. It’s across town from the house they’re living in now, just on the edge of the city.

And it’s a lovely house, with a gigantic garage and more storage nooks and crannies and closets than I’ve ever seen in any house.

It also has a truly astonishing number of electric outlets in every room. I think we counted up to 13 in the small office room alone; the people who lived there before my parents must have been very forward-thinking in terms of electricity because in most houses I’ve lived in, I have to add a surge protector in every room. Not this house. I’m not sure what they’re going to do with all the extra extension cords and splitters they have, but I won’t feel guilty for borrowing them and never giving any back, because they’re definitely not going to need any.

I’m pretty sure you could run a LAN party in every room in the house except the bathrooms.

My brother and I, both of whom are out of the house, chose "our" rooms in the new house pretty easily and dad told us both about a million times that we were both welcome any time, and that we’d each (of course) get keys to the house.

The kitchen is small, but it has a ton of storage space, a built-in microwave and a built-in spice rack. It also has carpet, which I’m not wild about (ten bucks says I’m the first one to drop a can of tomato sauce on it, mom), but lots and lots of counterspace, which I am wild about, helped by the microwave being up and out of the way. I hate not having enough space to make a really big mess, because usually that’s what you have to do to make anything bigger than a TV dinner.

It’s a great house.

And now, in exchange for the 5-10 times my poor parents have helped me move from dorm room to dorm room and apartment to apartment, I get to help them pack and move into their awesome new house.