Second Wind

It’s midnight. I laid down for a while and napped, then arose and finally showered. The dishwasher finished running and I’m just now starting a load of clothes to wash. It’s 44 degrees and raining. Yesterday it was 84 degrees.

We are full to the gills with moving boxes and not nearly done yet. Mostly we are blessed by friends who come over and spend several hours in the trenches, packing. Tonight Jan brought us tasty BBQ AND dessert and helped pack our Italian majolica, my mother’s bone china and all the most expensive framed art on the walls. [We are leaving the priceless quilts on the walls for now as we’ll put them in the car and leave them with Jim’s folks for the duration rather than put them in storage.] Jan was tired when she went home a couple of hours ago. Nothing like having an art museum curator to pack the delicate stuff!

I know, it’s an embarrassment of riches. First an MIT grad helped Jim wrap the big bulky stuff (sleigh bed, sofa) then an energy and finance whiz for the smaller items to wrap, now a museum curator. I think Obama’s stopping by tomorrow for a couple of hours, then Warren Buffett on Saturday to finish up.

We finished most of the books, including my extensive and esoteric cookbook collection that includes volumes on home cheese making and a trail mushroom guide, Sicilian vegetables, a Jewish settlement cookbook and one from a friend’s mother’s church and JIm’s mother’s VA cookbook. I didn’t even know what I had!

When we moved here from Austin we rented a garage downstairs for a week. Whenever we had a dolly load of packed boxes, Jim brought it downstairs. Here we’re just inundated. Tomorrow we finish the books and shelves, rest of the pictures, and start on the laundry room/pantry, master closet and kitchen. Hope I can sleep tonight but I may just be too bone-weary to do so.

Today we went to the office supply store so we could have an “in your face” way to designate boxes that must go with us in the car. So the yellow ones designate “Fragile” and orange designates “Car.” As I went around tagging the car boxes I put one Car sticker on the dog so we wouldn’t forget her. Hey, one needs some light moments in the exhausting tedium of moving a life into storage.

Hope you’re having a great day. I think we have three packing days before us before we hit the road. When Jim moved from Texas to San Diego he had three linear feet in a freight truck. When we moved from San Diego to Texas we had 12 linear feet. He tells everyone the girl he met in San Diego and married there cost him Nine Linear Feet! Now we’d take at least the entire 20′ truck.

Perhaps we remember the days when all our belongings went into the trunk (college) or pickup truck (post-college). But even in 1,028 sf that we moved into with a kitchen, office and bed… now we have a dining room, living room and bedroom and that’s a lot of stuff.

Hope you’re having a great week. We can’t wait to get done and have a paycheck start coming in from work starting a week from Monday. Cheers, Dee