Moving twice = double agony

Since my two-month absence, I’ve participated in two, or maybe two and a half, big moves. The first was the one I’d been dreading for years, enough so to write two columns about it — my own and Nathans. It counts as one and a half moves, since we cleared out one space to move the stuff to two separate spaces.

It was every bit as tedious and heartrending as I imagined it would be, but it was made much better by the help of some good friends, namely John Paul, Sophie, Roark, and Alice. Besides providing the necessary muscle power to shove my furniture up the rock wall of my patio and through the bamboo, all the helpers lightened my mood from “suicidal” to merely “bleak.” Somehow John Paul and Sophie got hold of some walkie-talkies, and when the men-folk drove around hauling things we were able to keep in contact with the ladies back home — mostly cutesy chatter, but also some vital operational info. My dad was on hand to ensure that U-Haul would rent me a truck and to boss my friends around, which he did quite well. I inherited all my father’s assertiveness, but my friends have learned to tune me in out in a way that they somehow can’t with him, probably owing to his grizzled, elderly appearance. Just kidding, Dad.

Predictably, Nathan and I didn’t start hauling boxes and things to our new places until Saturday night. Keep in mind that we had to be gone by Monday morning. It was hectic, but with lots of elbow grease and such from all involved, we pulled it off. The defining moment came at 2 in the morning on Monday, officially past our lease by two hours. Six of us (the four above plus Bryan, who had to work during the day) had been scrubbing the apartment from top to bottom for five hours, hoping to recoup some of my security deposit. We were getting ready to leave, and I was taking the last bag of garbage out to the dumpster. This bag included all the random junk lying around all day, plus everything in the fridge not worth taking with, and weighed forty pounds or so. It was too full to pull the drawstrings shut, and in any case the plastic would have torn, so I slung it over my shoulder like a dead body and made for the door. Just before I reached it, an almost-full can of tomato paste tumbled from the bag, hit the carpet, and went off like a bomb, throwing tomato sauce all of the carpet, ceiling, and windows — all of which we had just finished cleaning. By that point, all of us were so exhausted with the entire affair that we broke into hysterics of laughter, completely halting the cleaning process. Luckily Nathan is tall enough to clean the ceiling without a chair, given that all the chairs had been removed by this point. We ended up getting almost half of our deposit back, an unexpected windfall. We had fully expected our landlady to screw us out of every red cent — we were only cleaning because we felt sorry for the two guys scheduled to move in the following morning.

Last weekend, I hitched a ride down to Gig Harbor to help my parents move three miles into their new house. We had much longer to complete the move than with my place, but the gross furniture weight was many, many times higher. My parents have never thrown away a single piece of furniture, and that just serves to classify everything as “antiques” and make my parents even madder when I break something. I’m pretty sure they own every end table in the tri-state area. My older brother and I were the only kids, out of five, who showed up to help — technically my little sister was there too, but she wasn’t much more helpful than the furniture itself — so at least now they know who to will all that stuff to. We filled and unloaded the rental truck three times, made countless dolly-trips to haul cabinets and appliances, and even after we were all done there were still more non-furniture items in the house than I would care to move. I made it clear to my parents that they had better die in their new house, because I would never undergo that process again.

I also bought a car and drove it back to Seattle, which is absolutely unprecedented. Ask any of my car-owning friends, they’ll tell you all about it. It will get chronicled in due time.