It is July 30th at 7:49 p. m. and I am in bed. Feeling the pain. The back pain. The groin pain. Earlier the headache pain. Vicodin to the rescue. And plenty of wine with dinner to cleanse the mind of memories of the Great Move of 2012. OMG.
Let me state that no one should have space under the house because it collects things like old skis, old golf clubs, Xmas trees, old boxes. Old tools, like axes, rakes, stuff we no long need or want because we have our gardener, Vicente, and he has all those things in his truck which he has been driving to our house since 2004. It took us about 20 trips to empty that space. A trip is defined as a slog up the stairs and down the stairs. Up and down, up and down. Where we insane to keep all this? In a word, yes.
Okay, so every move must end like this with a list of incriminations to oneself, don’t you think? The incrimination department is overloaded because we really went above and beyond to stimulate the economy in the boom times. Evidence abounds. One must not, however, get carried away (with reciminations, that is). After all, Rayman’s mom died. My mom died and we ended up with gobs of stuff. Mom’s bedroom furniture (I sold it on craiglist) made an early exit. Then the 50-inch Sony WEGA set with wi-fi also got sold using craigslist. The big red couch is now sitting in the consignment shop along with those plaid chairs that the Rayman always disliked but put up with. The lone barstool? To consignment. The TV amoiire, to Goodwill. The coffee table in the media room? It’s in the storage locker in Morro Bay (I think). Ditto for the game table which has not been the scene of a game since it was acquired about 8 years ago. But I digress.
It took us several weeks of packing boxes. This move was a product of other moves in our past. We bought mostly small boxes because fully loaded, they weigh less than a medium or large box. And we numbered each box until the very end when it went something like this. “I’m just writing what is in this box because it is the dregs of what is left in the kitchen.” Rayman responds with, “Okay. Whatever.” Up until this point, we were up to box 170. No that is not a typo. 170 boxes. And more without numbers. Then when we got desperate to finish, we resorted to plastic bags, 13 gallon size. Purses in a bag. Shoes in many bags. Pillows in bags. And the list goes on. Then there were waste baskets filled with stuff. Toilet plunger in a waste basket. A regular cornucopia of storage remedies were applied to the wound. Would the bleeding ever stop? Toward the end, many things met a sorrowful death. “I’m throwing this away.” “What is it?” the Rayman queried. “Hell if I know so it’s going.” Or the Rayman would say, “I’m sick of this. I’m just throwing this away.” “Okay by me”, I snorted.
“What is this?” “Oh, that’s the rusted out steel whatchamacallit that I’ve been moving around for 15 years thinking that sometime it would come in handy. Never did.”, Ray demurred. “Well, out it goes”, I announced cheerfully yet with a certain tone of I-can’t-believedness. And so it went.
We ended up with the biggest POD they had, filled to the ceiling with our Lets-keep-this-furniture-to-see-if-it-works. And about 100 boxes thrown in to fill the gaps. And we rented a big storage locker in Morro Bay (henceforth referred to as MB) that is filled to the top with boxes and bedspreads, and god’s-know-what-else. And Uncle Ralph’s house. It looks like Beacon’ Van and Storage. One bedroom is filled with pictures and fragile stuff. And behind his house are bikes, vacuum cleaners, a whale sculpture, all the succulents from the yard, fence art, dust mops and swiffers, cleaning agents, flammable items. It looks like Camp Poodie.
And we paid $178 for GOT-JUNK to pick up our, well, junk. This was the heavy duty junk, the there-is-no-question-this-is-junk pile. Included were about 750 hangers, an old Sony Trinitron 27 -inch TV. ETC. I have already forgotten what was in this pile. But it was definitely junk.
This all lead me to thinking about what we do. We buy future junk, don’t we? We go to the mall, find just the right junk and then buy it. So, you better really, really like the junk you’re buying because once you leave the mall, no one is going to give you anything for it. I tried to sell hiking boots (worn twice and tossed aside because they rubbed my pronated ankle bones), our red couch, our TV amoire, my old antique Jenny Lind spool bed that had been in the family since the early 1900’s, my draperies, my drapery hardware, my golf cart that I bought and didn’t like…no body wanted anything but the golf cart. This experience resulted in my saying, “You guys should have moved a trailer to the front of my house because we have made about 43 trips here with donations”, to the Goodwill donation trailer attendant. Really. They should have. All the thousands and thousands of dollars we spent on all the junk was essentially worthless (disregarding the tax write off). So there you have it. Our lives reduced to this. You work hard, you buy stuff, the stuff becomes worthless, you donate it for a tax write off and then you go shopping. Did I mention that the Rayman bought a new golf club bag today and dropped the old one off at the Goodwill trailer this p.m.? The beat goes on. History repeats itself.
Let me also say that I am married to a saint. He worked his ass off. We both did. But he worked harder. I packed boxes, he lifted boxes. Oh, I lifted them too but he lifted more of them. He was the first one to rise and the last one to quit. This a.m. (we were to be out yesterday) there were still a few things left in the garage. In our defense, we stopped at 6:30 p.m. because Ray’s brother from Virginia was coming through on his Harley with a friend (another man motorcycle guy) and wanted to stay. Well, we had no place to stick him so we rented a Best Western room in MB and took them out to dinner and stayed out unti 9:30 entertaining. OMG. We couldn’t believe it. What are the chances that the timing would work out exactly that way?
But i digress and will continue to do so until I tell you this story. When we actually loaded the POD and the U-haul truck (required for the spillage which was destined for the…wait, wait. Let’s back up. We organized things so that the will-keep junk and furniture destined for the new house would go in the POD. The no-sure-if-this-will-work junk and furniture was loaded into the truck and destined for the MB storage locker. Those two things were parked side-by-side. While in the passion of loading, along comes the Cayucos Sanitary District officials who proceeded to park on the street. I think there were four trucks (they have too many trucks) They were researching a drainage problem that a neighbor below the northern most house on our street had complained about in a letter. So…the very day we had hired three movers to load the POD and truck and 2 workers we hired to move all the garden furniture and potted plants up to Uncle Ralph’s …there appeared an armada of trucks filled with investigators to muddy the waters if you’ll forgive the pun. Oh, and they turned on the water from the hydrant and created our stream through the back yard. Yes, siree. Never a dull moment.
I must retire now. It’s 8:48 and my lids are drooping…along with a few other body parts. Time to go to bed early so i can get up and play golf tomorrow…first time in 2 weeks that we’ve had a day without packing. Oh, joy. But, don’t despair, there is more to come!!
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