Prepping to Go to California: Part II

Happy Birthday to Me today! Hooray!

So, moving to California....

We'd been planning this move for a while, but the free time to actually carry it out never materialized. My husband was (and still is) buried under some side work he was finishing up. That more than took up the two weeks we'd scheduled to have him off, plus nights and weekends since. So he would emerge from the basement occasionally to eat, use the bathroom, and remind our son who Daddy was whilst I packed. And of course, the side work was "For a Good Cause," and part of a longstanding relationship we couldn't just break out of at the last minute.

It was going all right until the other two people involved got a whiff of how much stress the project was under, and then they both flew away as fast as they could, not wanting to put themselves in a situation in which they were underpaid, underappreciated, and then overworked. Can't say as I blame them. But it does mean my husband is now the sole owner of all this junk. Sigh. Even an extra two hours per week from one other person would make a huge difference. But once the fingers are burned, never a charred digit did program.

Anyway, so my husband is basically AWL (Absent with leave) from the moving process, I'm uber-pregnant, and our two-year-old is hyped up, knowing that something is going on but not sure what it all means or how to handle it. It's all a blur, but I do know that the day before I threw a bunch of papers into a bag so that they wouldn't get packed away in an anonymous box. We also stacked a pile of stuff to take down in the car -- ladies who are eight months pregnant cannot fly, they must drive -- and taped to the wall a big note saying, "Do not pack!" Then we threw everything out of the fridge that we couldn't give away, took out everything we still had that was intended for Goodwill, and filled up two trash cans with bits of trash from every which spot.

But, somehow, and I'm not entirely sure how, it all gets figured out and moving day arrives.

On moving day, I showed the foreman what all we wanted to have packed. He thought we had 10,000 pounds of stuff (actually we had 9,500 - so darn good guess). We'd only budgeted for 7,500, so we hoped it didn't come out to much more than that. (It didn't.) The foreman started his team of five people in the backyard, with the shed and patio. That took a couple of hours. Then they moved into the garage and kitchen. My husband had ruthlessly pruned the garage, thank goodness, so there were only tools and essential things to pack. The kitchen was pretty straightforward, but I came to understand that 20 boxes of kitchen stuff is not unrealistic when you fill about half the box with packing material. I stared at what looked like a pretty blatant waste of material, but then relaxed, knowing that packing costs were fixed, and these boxes did have to live through being stacked to the ceiling in the truck, unpacked in storage, packed back up two weeks later, and then unpacked in our new house. So I shrugged and just watched.

Whoops! Then it turns out that the movers can't pack anything that's been "opened." So I packed what had been opened, and they marked it "Packed By Owner." By this time, Mom took my son on a walk, and on the way picked up protein bars for the Red Bull team. I was afraid they would crash about 3 pm, collapsing on top of packed furniture and unpacked computer parts. (They did not stop for lunch.)

So here we are, one big pregnant lady, five burly men, and enough paper to pack up three million dollars' worth of china, all madly stuffing boxes full of stuff.