Moving Day

      So, moving day is over.  Sort of.  I apologize for the lack of pictures with this post, since I intend to make this a picture-intensive blog, but right in the middle of moving day I thought to myself "I should be taking pictures of all this but I don't know where the camera is located."  So no pictures of this one.  Moving day was pretty typical as moving days go, although I will admit that it was not the smoothest.


Our U-Haul looked just like this one and it was
pretty much full, although we had some space to
stack more things on top of other things.

       First off, it took a lot longer than I thought it would take.  Twelve hours from when we started was when I finally sat down and took a load off in a meaningful way.  Honestly, most of the reason it took so long was because we weren't as ready as we could have been, and we weren't as ready as I thought we were.  Traci did a fantastic job of getting things packed up, but I know for sure that I could have done a little more to help us be ready.  Also, as it turns out, we have a whole lot of shit.
      Second, we didn't have as much help as we needed for as long as we needed it.  I failed in my quest to find people to help us move, because many hands make light work.  But everyone seems to have been working or out of town or busy with something.  So for the first few hours I was doing what I could to get things into the truck while Traci worked inside.  That being said, I have to give HUMONGOUS thanks to Rachel and Jim who did come help with the moving.  We would still be working on it two days later if it weren't for them.  So thanks, guys, you were life savers.
       So it took forever to get packed up, and truthfully the last of our things didn't get moved out until Sunday when I went to clean the old apartment, which was the day after actual moving day.  Sometimes it just goes like that, and thankfully it wasn't a super long distance cross-country move that we had to make or we would have been in a heap of hurt.  But the moving things into the house went well until...
      Until we tried to move the couch.  We received a new-to-us couch from Traci's parents, which was very nice of them, but it is a sort of overstuffed affair and there are no patio doors on our house.  In fact, there are really just old 30" wide doors, and no matter what way we contorted or moved or flipped or wedged that couch it wasn't going in.  So for now it is living in our garage, and our options are a.) take apart the couch, b.) remove a picture window and take it through there or, c). remove door jams until it can fit through the door.  I am currently leaning towards options a or c but we will figure it all out eventually in one way or another.  That was by far the biggest snag.
     There were a few small casualties, that is for sure.  We - and by "we I mean "I" - broke a mirror that was a sort of specialized, one-of-a-kind sort of thing.  It was Traci's, and thankfully it wasn't broken too bad.  The load shifted in the back of the truck and it sort of wrecked one of the bed stands, but not so badly that we can't get it ship-shape with a little wood glue and some screws.  We lost one framed map that was not put away correctly, and we got a dent in the microwave.  Oh, and I accidentally took out an overhead extension cord at Traci's parents when we went to pick up the truck.  And one of the hoses on the dryer wasn't long enough to hook up to the water supply.  And we took out an outdoor light fixture with the couch when trying to wedge it in.  But nothing terribly tragic.  And it is done, which is the most important part.  We are almost totally unpacked too, but there will be more about that later.