Tag Archives: Moving

Masters of adaptation…

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I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating – the dogs are even more creatures of habit than I am myself. That’s no small accomplishment. Watching them wander from room to room trying to sort out what to make of the stacks of boxes was fun for the first 30 minutes. Now it’s just sort of sad.

These two southern dogs have been here now longer than they were in Memphis so it’s as much or more home to them as anywhere else. Conveniently, dogs are masters of adaptation and will settle in to the new and different far more quickly than I will. Well, they’ll adjust quickly enough to everything except not having a fence. I know I’m going to miss that far more than they will, but it’s a mercifully easy fix – in theory.

I love these little hoodlums, but having one under each foot every time I move is wearing a little thin. I’ll be glad of getting them introduced to the house a bit this weekend so we can start getting back to our own warped version of normal. If we keep up the current routine much longer there’s a fair chance I’ll accidentally kill myself while tripping over one of them, falling into a sea of cardboard, and never being heard from again.

Getting boxed in…

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One of the most challenging aspects of keeping this blog is always trying to sit down and say something even on those nights when I have nothing to say. In this case, maybe it’s more of a case of not having anything to say for public consumption. There’s plenty going on here at the cardboard box factory, but none of it is even mildly interesting – and certainly not interesting enough to stretch into an opinion piece. I have the distinct feeling that these next couple of days are going to be more about grinding the job out than having anything entertaining to say about it. There are only so many ways to say moving is a pain in the ass and I feel like I’ve delivered that message effectively already.

Through foreign vacations, career changes, the occasional personal issue, and the regular ups and downs of a life lived I don’t think I’ve ever declared an outright operational pause for this blog. I don’t think I’m going to do that now either because no sooner will I say I’m taking a week off then something stupid will happen and I’ll be right back here writing about it. Maybe I should just say that unlike every other normal week, posts for the next few days may not keep to any particular schedule. Then again maybe they will, but I don’t want to box myself into a case of over promising and under delivering.

For now, jamming the rest of my life’s accumulated possessions into cardboard boxes feels like it should take precedence. In a day or so it’ll be down to me, a few critters, and the network I wouldn’t be able to convince myself to take offline until the last second. The last few days of this process really are nearly intolerable.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Customer service chats. I like the customer service chat functions available through most major businesses. They save me from calling an 800 number and sitting on hold for half an hour. They save me from sending an email that “will be answered in 2 business days.” It’s instant enough gratification that I can call up a chat from my desk at work and get on with my day while resolving whatever issue I happen to have. I’m always surprised when I’m doing business with a large commercial entity that doesn’t offer this convenience… and it always makes me want to deal with them a little bit less.

2. Boxes. I forgot how incredibly awful living eyeball deep in cardboard boxes really is. Now that we’ve reached the stage of the process when just about everything that’s not tied down is living in a box, running into a moment of “oh, I can’t do that because X is packed already” is becoming situation normal. Although the situation will theoretically resolve itself in short order, I’ll be a far more content human being when there’s more stuff coming out of boxes than there is going into them.

3. Staff work. Some weeks there’s more work than three people could do washing across my desk. Other weeks it’s a challenge to keep the cobwebs from taking over. This week has been a case of the latter. The nature of the work doesn’t exactly lend itself to a nice constant flow, but damn it would be nice if it did.

Pooped…

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Usually writing is my pressure release valve. Tonight it’s feeling a bit too much like real work to be particularly enjoyable. I’ve got plenty of ideas – and even a “by request” still in the queue, but the fact is I just don’t feel like stringing together a little slice of life story this evening. It’s not so much that I’m physically tired as it is my brain just feeling a bit pooped. With eight days (assuming everything goes to plan) between now and closing, the volume and velocity of things that need done are picking up dramatically.

Then I remember that the pace only increases after closing – with the first round of household goods making the move the following day and then the vast majority of my gear making the three mile trip two days after that. I’m doing my level best to stage everything to make it all happen as seamlessly as possible… the down side of that being it all requires a pretty precise level of attention to detail to make sure all the gears mesh. They way everything is set as of this evening the plan gives me seven days to tear down, move, reset, and establish some semblance of order at the new place before jumping back into my version of a normal routine. Of course it it happens to be raining on any one of those days the whole schedule gets shot to hell and the process gets to start over from scratch. No pressure.

For now I’m going to throw down another few cups of coffee and push back the whole pooped feeling and get a few more things checked off the list tonight. At least when I hit the sheets tonight I’ll feel like I’ve earned it.

The realm of the possible…

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Since I’m in between moving estimate appointments it feels like a good time to jam a blog post into the day. It’s been a big one here at the Rental Casa de Jeff. After the requisite dose of coffee I spent the better part of three hours extracting boxes from their long term storage spot in the crawl space. At least half of them were still full – and taped shut – from the move back to Maryland from Memphis. I’ll be curious to see what it was I paid to haul a 3rd of the way across the country yet haven’t touched for almost five years. Personally I’m rooting for pirate treasure, but I have a terrible feeling it’s going to be a dozen boxes of plain junk. At least the crawl space is empty and the basement is 2/3 the way along towards being packed out.

In the last two weeks I’ve been making an effort to cut down in all the extraneous spaces – the office, basement, guest bedroom. If I pushed I could have all three finished in an afternoon. That leaves the living spaces we occupy as the next items on the hit list. My bedroom is a spartan affair. No more than an hour or two of work there. The living room is the same story. Two or three medium boxes and all the rest is furniture. That leaves the kitchen as the last redoubt. It’ll go into boxes as late in the process as possible. By the end of the week, I should even have several estimated costs of having someone show up and haul it all a few miles down the road. On the packing front at least I feel like I’m running ahead of the curve.

The documentation is even coming together. My mortgage approval came through this afternoon. The appraisal came in better than expected and more importantly with no lender-required repairs. I’m throwing electronic reams of paper back and forth with the closing attorney. I’m just trying to stay on top of Mount Paperwork in hopes that we can get to settlement at the end of the month as smoothly as possible. It’s one of those rare times that being a natural born worrier seems to be paying off. No one has asked for anything I can’t dredge out of Ye Olde Electronic Files. Being an electronic pack rat does have an occasional upside.

There are still 1,276,384 details to be worked out between now and the closing table, but on the whole it’s feeling less intimidating today. It’s entered the realm of the possible.

Books…

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One of the first things I do at the start of every move is box up the contents of two large bookshelves. They’re the “quick hit” to get the process started and they’re not going to be something I can’t live without for the month or so it’s going to take me to get them unboxed and back into their proper place. As part of my current “ask the blogger” segment, someone asked what the books were and why I’d bothered hauling them around across 10,000 road miles and 15 years. There’s a story there, but I’m not sure it’s a particularly interesting one.

I’ve never counted the exact number of physical books I still have – at 13 boxes I’d guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 175-200. Measured by weight it’s got to be something on the order of 3,729 metric tonnes. Since I’ve loved books since long before the Kindle came along, they’re something I’ve acquired over a lifetime of reading. I’ve purged the collection before many moves and seem to have it down to a core group that I just can’t bring myself to part with. They’re mostly biographies and histories – covering everything from Cicero to the Iraq War. There’s a much smaller mix of historical fiction and the occasional “classic” a la Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and 1984.

As someone pointed out there are these buildings called libraries where large volumes of books live permenantly. Theoretically I should love libraries, but I’ve always had a hard time with the idea of giving a book back once I was done with it, especially the once I’ve found interesting or meaningful. The habit has gotten easier since the rise of the e-reader, but that doesn’t do anything about the stack of bound paper I already have.

I have a tendency to hold on to them for the usual reasons – maybe I’ll need to reference them some day (which I actually have done for more than a few blog posts and while I was working on my last short story). In all likelihood I know the only time most titles will ever leave the shelf is the next time I move. Still, I like the idea of having them. I like the way they look on the shelf. I like the way a room full of books smells. I like the way they feel in my hand.

Plus there’s the one I never talk about – the fact that the furniture has changed, the clothes of changed, the critters I have around change, the locations change, but the books stay the same. Maybe they’re the touchstone; the hearth at the center of what whatever house I happen to be in whenever I get where I’m going.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Boxes. I’ve moved five times in the last 15 years and I always, always grossly underestimate the number of boxes it’s going to take to get the job done. Sure, the planned upcoming move clocks in at just three miles on the nose, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend three weeks shuffling crap back and forth 20 boxes at a time. This is the operative definition of wanting to work out a one-and-done situation. I’d settle for two or three, but the heavy lifting is going to get done in one shot. In the meantime I guess I’ll have to live with the every growing mountain of cardboard that’s slowly taking root in each room.

2. ISIS. I think I’ve made it clear that I harbor no love for ISIS and those who adhere to it. I guess you can chalk the fact that they’re currently busy grinding historic artifacts that have survived thousands of years into powder because they’re “heretical” and go against the teachings of Islam as just another reason. Since these artifacts were created a few thousand years before anyone bothered to come up with the tenets of the Islamic faith, I guess they’d pretty much have to be. If setting people on fire and cutting off heads wasn’t enough of an indicator that we’re dealing with savages, the fact that they want to ignore every part of the vast sweep of human history that doesn’t agree with their crackpot view of the world is a pretty good sign that they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the modern world.

3. Legalization. If the people of the District of Columbia want to legalize, regulate, and tax, marijuana I say God bless. Yes, I know, it’s a federal district granted limited home rule by the Congress, but just for the sake of argument I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the US Congress has more important things to do than legislate whether John Q. Pothead is entitled to smoke up. As long as we’re a nation that likes its cigarettes, beer, whisky, and prescription meds (and we’re ok making enormous amounts of money taxing those things), I’m not buying the argument that mary jane is a gateway to anything more dangerous than a late night snack.

The search is on…

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This little project to find a new and improved Casa de Jeff is beginning to get serious. How you know it’s getting serious is I’m altering the long-established Saturday routine in order to fit in meeting with a realtor and checking out a few potential houses. Between now and then I supposed I’ll have to firm up my list of must have options and the list of things I’m willing to trade away. Right now the must have list is pretty short – 1+ acre, 3 bed, 2 bath, and not in needing a gut-to-the-studs renovation. The willing to trade list includes central air, garage, and basically everything else. I like to think I won’t be picky or overly demanding, but I think we all know that’s a pipe dream.

Judging from the few places I’ve driven past to eyeball in the last few weeks, I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that the dollar doesn’t stretch as far here in the Baltimore/Philly exerbs as it did in West Tennessee. I’m doing my best to adjust my expectations on fit and finish accordingly… on the bright side for you readers, very soon you’re going to be able to play along with my little game of taking pictures inside other people’s homes and wondering what the hell they were thinking with their design and decorator choices. That’s always a treat.

In the meantime, if I seem to get in too much of a rush, feel free to remind me that there is absolutely no timeline associated with reaching mission complete on this project. The plan is mostly to keep plugging away at it and hope I know it when I see it.

3rd anniversary…

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I’m approaching today not so much as a 36th birthday as the 3rd anniversary of making a 900 mile drive from Memphis to reclaim my Maryland residency. Frankly, it’s the event that feels more important… and I’ll explain why (of course).

As far as my birth, I had very little to do with that other than being present. While I’m pleased that I’ve managed not to step in front of a bus or be eaten by a shark between 1978 and this morning, a lot of that has probably been simple dumb luck more than anything else. As you might guess, celebrating simple dumb luck isn’t really my style.

What is my style, though, is celebrating a very intentional decision I made to extract myself from what had become a hopelessly toxic situation. That’s a real milestone event for today. It’s one of the few decisions I’ve ever made without having doubts or second thoughts after the fact. Coming back to the good soil of my home state was arguably the single best decisions I’ve made to date. That’s not to say that everything is puppies and butterscotch, but at least as I’m sitting here looking out the window writing this post, I know I got the geography right this time. Human beings are generally a resilient bunch, but I’ve long suspected that we are each best suited for and thrive in a particular place… and even as I rant about the out of hand taxes and lunatic nanny government here, this place seems to be it for me. No matter where my travels have taken me, I always seem to come around again.

If nothing else, I can say with certainty that enjoying this fresh-brewed Kona in the rental kitchen is superior in every way to being just past Nashville and screaming east at 90 miles an hour with two dogs and a truck loaded to the gills. I appreciate and thank you for the birthday wishes today friends, but what I’m most proud of on this June 1st is my 3rd anniversary.

Officially settled in…

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After a weekend of furiously breaking down boxes and moving crap from one room to another, I’m please to say I seem to be more or less settled in here. Of course there is the spare bedroom that is crammed full of things I’m not at all sure what to do with and a garage stacked with cardboard boxes that need to be bagged, but for the most part stuff is where it’s going to go.

I also had my first visitor yesterday. The spaghetti seemed to turn out well, confirming that I can still boil water (with only one slightly alarming boil-over). The conversation was pleasant and all-in-all it was nice having someone around… especially when it came time to clean up. Any time I can avoid actually doing dishes, I’m pleased as punch (Thanks for the company, by the way. And come back any time).

One thing that has consistently amazed me over the last two weeks is not so much how much stuff I had actually been living with, but how many things I find I need that I didn’t have. I’m not actually talking about frivolous purchases here, but things like ladders, random hand tools, and a solid grip on basic carpentry. I’ve probably gotten more use out of my old set of Craftsman tools in the last two weeks than I have in the last five years. God help me, I actually spent time on eBay this afternoon looking for one of those big red tool chests for the garage. And after a week of using the kitchen counter as base of operations, I have come to the conclusion that I’m actually going to have to build a workbench in the garage. It can’t be that hard… right?

Yeah, I’m already planning on ordering at least twice the amount of material as I think I’ll need.