Pack Rat

I've spent the past 4 days unpacking. Not unpacking at a destination I'm moving to, but at a stop-over, in Towson, Maryland.

The big container, "the cube", that had a bunch of our stuff in Mountain View was delivered to my parents' house on Thursday morning. As I saw the truck pull up, I had a sense of relief and anxiety. It had arrived, I was relieved; it had to be unpacked, I was anxious.

If my parents lived in a flat area and I was dumping all the stuff into a garage, that would be one thing. My parents' house is on a hill up from the street, which involves climing up 18 steps to get to their front door....


The plan was to put some of our stuff in the basement, climbing down 12 steps...

...or the attic, climing 14 steps to the 2nd floor...

...then a ladder-type thing to get stuff into the attic...

If all the stuff we were moving was sheets, towels, and pillows, it wouldn't be a problem. But we're moving books, and bookshelves, and furniture, and more books, and a heavy sewing machine, and a heavy printer, and even more books. None of this was going to bode well when it came to climbing up and down stairs.

To top off the anxiety I was feeling, the newscasts were going wild of a snow storm headed to the Baltimore area starting on Thursday night and going into Friday morning. Needless to say, unpacking was going to be oodles of fun!

I started unpacking almost immediately and took my first break a 1/2 hour into the venture. I noticed that walking up and down stairs was giving my left knee some kind of pain. Walking stuff all the way from the cube to the attic or basement was not going to be a good idea.

I came up with a plan: I decided that during the day I would take stuff to the first floor, and dump it in the living room, forming 2 groups - basement and attic. Anytime I needed to go upstairs or down to the basement, I would take a box with me. At night, I would move boxes into the attic from the 2nd floor where I had piled them in my sister's old room.

Day one was frantic. With the "big" snow storm (it wasn't very big) on its way I wanted to get as much stuff into the house as possible. I spent Thursday evening attempting to balance boxes, while walking up the ladder-thing to the attic. It's a minor miracle the only injury I had was scraping my back against some metal thing on my way up to the attic.

Day two was "snow day". All of 1-2 inches of snow fell and did nothing to affect my unpacking, other than making sure I didn't put boxes in the snow. Day two ended up being the most productive day of packing. I estimate that I unpacked somwhere in the neighborhood of 26 boxes (I'm not being specific by saying 26, I just don't see why 25 needs to be so special all the time). I moved stuff into the attic and into the basement; I was a machine. By the end of the day, I could see the end of the unpacking, which, hopefully, would be done by Day three. I was wrong.

I was lazy on Day three. I moved stuff to the attic, and got a bad scrape on my pinky which discouraged me from packing much on Saturday, so I went to see a movie instead. Up in the Air just might be the most overrated movie of 2009, and diverges so much from the book that I left the film dispointed.

Because it was Saturday, my dad was able to help, and we were able to move our mattress and box spring (do box springs have springs in them? I've never had one that does) into the house. This was the biggest thing that needed to be moved, so it was a relief to get that done.

I probably could have moved everything into the house by the end of Day three, but I was just not in the mood. Instead, I played with my neice, made nachos for the family, and made a make-shift lamp shade collar for Geordi, who has been licking a surgery scar periodically over the last few days. At the end of Day three, while watching "48 Hours Mystery", I made the decision to empty the cube on Day four.

I finished packing on Day four. I had 13 boxes left at the begining of the day, in addition to some furniture pieces and our futon (which my sister was going to take directly from the cube). In the morning I was able to get all 13 boxes into the house, putting about 1/2 of them in the basement and the others into the attic. In the afternoon, I brought in the furniture peices. I spent the evening moving furniture pieces into the attic and then I was done.

Today is Day 5. The day the brings the next leg of the journey. Tonight, I hop over the pond and begin life as Kodwo in Jeffersonia.