Moving Day, Part 2 and beyond.

[athelind]

It was supposed to be so simple.

Pack everything up, rent the U-Haul, cram everyting inside it, drive up to the new lair, and unpack.

Terraluna (currently between jobs) volunteered to come up the night before, help us load the truck, crash on the futon overnight, and help us unload the next day. hinoki also volunteered to meet us at the new place to help unload. Many many many thanks to you both, guys. I shudder to think what it would have been like with just me and Quel and our son-in-law.

Two snags:
One, the U-Haul wasn't big enough for all our stuff.
Two, the entropy level in the garage was at a record high. Two years of neglected costuming materials, gaming paraphenalia, Christmas wrappings, and Just Plain Trash had formed a homgeneous mass that defied conventional sorting. There just wasn't anyplace to put the sorted stuff.

So... Sunday (8 June, for those taking notes), quelonzia and I stayed home and unpacked stuff. Got the bed set up, figured out where stuff should go, that kind of thing.

Monday, we went back down to finish up the actual packing, with an eye on renting another U-Haul the next day to haul it all up. After ploughing through the Homogeneous Mass for a few hours while Quel worked inside the apartment itself, I told her, "The only way I can function out there is if I have a truck in which to throw all the trash as I sort, and drive it off to the dumpster."

Well, we'd planned to get a local-only U-Haul to haul the washer and dryer over to Quel's daughter's place, so that idea actually worked out.

The next day, we did exactly that -- and managed to pretty well fill a 14-foot truck to a depth of about three feet with just trash. Of course, one item was the battered, bent, and broken futon frame, but still.

Wednesday, we unpacked; Thursday and Friday, Quel went to work while I did stuff around the house and ran some errands. Saturday, we got the Final U-Haul, loaded up the Last Few Things, and moved it all in.

---

The new apartment is great -- very comfy, and in a great location. Quel's job is about 12-15 minutes away -- that's a lot nicer than the two-hour commute she had from Marina. I've been heading back to CSUMB a couple of days a week to do some follow-up work in the lab down there, and, since I'm going opposite the main flow of traffic, it takes about half the time.

Stuff is close. The other day, we caught ourselves bitching about going "all the way down to Lawrence Expressway" -- which is just over a mile to the West. Down on Old Fort Ord, a mile in any direction would get you pretty much... nowhere. There's just so muc STUFF around here!

We're about a mile from Terraluna, maybe two from andreal, rikoshi, and tealfox, and about 10 minutes from hinoki. foofers is about... 20-30 minutes from here? Maybe a bit more, but nothing unreasonable. Nit quite sure where diadexxus, but she's somewhere here'bouts. And we know scads of other people in the area -- apologies if I've left you out.

After a couple of weeks of unseasonably mild temps, the Solstice seems to have been the trigger to Let The Hot Out. It was in the 90s yesterday, and will be again today. This is kind of a new experience after five years in Monterey -- we actually slept with the window wide open last night, and were quite comfy. Historically, I don't do well in hot weather -- but again, after five years of Almost Constantly Being Cold And Damp, there's a part of me that finds this quite refreshing.
That part is called "the early stages of arthritis".

All in all, this works. Huzzah!