The Move From Hell (Part One)

Not wanting to sound like a post from "The Devil Queen" I will describe what I hope was the final moving experience of my life. We planned to move into the "Old Crack House" the week following my fund raising pancake breakfast. Which was great by the way. In fact, the local paper wrote a story. Deborah took the whole week off of work so we could pack and move stuff. Then we hit the first snag. Deborah had to show up for jury duty on the Monday. Of course, with all the people they could have chosen, she was picked ..... for a murder trial ...... that would last the entire week. The good news was she was home early on Thursday because she would deliberate on Friday. Since it seemed to be a slam dunk case, she knew what her verdict was going to be and if everyone was in agreement she would be home early on Friday. One person of the twelve did not agree and so it took the entire day to decide a verdict. In between appointments, amusing Elizabeth and attending the odd meeting, I managed to pack a lot of boxes.

By this time we are behind on our packing. We moved a few things over during the week in a borrowed van but the big move was going to happen on the Saturday when we would rent a 16 ft Budget Truck. We were only moving 4 blocks so we didn't mind having to make a couple of trips. While we were moving stuff out, the renter of our other house was moving stuff in. We warned her that we were running a bit behind on our plan and she had no plan to actually reside in the place until Tuesday. So we had four days to do a weeks worth of work. We moved on Saturday and we moved on Sunday which was much worse than Saturday because I miscalculated my ability to judge distances by 3 inches and clipped the bumper of the neighbors car with the rear step of the truck while pulling in front of the house, doing a mere $1200 worth of damage to her car. So while we are actually moving into the "Crack House", I have been relegated to the "dog house" but I've been there so many times I am used to it. We have been paying insurance premiums without an accident since 1990 so I was long overdue and since bad things come in threes, I will let you all know when I have the next two accidents and whether I make it out of the dog house before those happen! We moved again on Monday and got more stuff Tuesday and I still have to retrieve items from the garage and one corner of the basement.

I never realized how much crap we had! I hadn't seen some of this crap since I moved to Dayton from Pittsburgh fifteen years ago! If I stick it in the basement here it won't be found for another 30 years! I remember that old skit from Saturday Night Live, "If it's not Scottish, it's crap!" I can safely say I have very little stuff that is Scottish and what I have that might be would certainly fit in an extra small sporran! Of course, since it belongs to us, it is stuff, but in reality it is crap. Now here is what some of our rooms look like so you have an idea about the magnitude of our crap collection.







These are big rooms. This is a lot of crap!