Category: Moving

For better or worse, I’m done with the moving. There was a brief amount of panic on my part last night as I lay in bed, trying to get asleep … I checked out the weather forecast and saw a nasty line of storms over Memphis headed my way. What time would they be here? 0400-0500, just when I wanted to be back over at the apartment, making my last run. Thankfully, all those storm cells died a quick death when they hit the Shoals, either drying up all together or just moving up into Tennessee. It’s a bright, sunshiny morning here in Madison. 🙂

Now, time to unload that last load, take a shower, and get on the road to Nashville… four hours of sleep or not, I have things to do today.

I have one more load of stuff to go get from the old apartment, and then I’ll be done. D-U-N done. As it is right now, there’s a large fork sticking out of my back. I’m still wiped out from the wedding and the travel, but I’ve gotta have the keys in to the apartment office in the morning so that they can do their massive re-paint-and clean job. As much as I have little in the way of energy or motivation right now … I still gotta do it.

Many thanks to Jeff, Jonathan, Jeremy, Rick, and Jessica for their help earlier today in moving the bulk of the remaining stuff I had at the place, and also many thanks to Leonard and Michelle for their insane cleaning frenzy tonight and earlier this weekend. Whatever I get back out of the security deposit definitely goes to them. 🙂

I hate moving. I’m so glad that I won’t have to move again until I sell this house. The only thing that would make me consider moving right now is Roy Moore being elected governor of Alabama. I almost wrote here the other day to say that I’d promise to move to Tennessee and commute if that opportunistic, legalistic wolf-in-religious-clothing were elected governor, but honestly, I hate moving so much that I don’t think I’d do it.

I’d think long and hard about it, though. 🙂

Enough typing … back to moving.

Update, 0038: So, I lied. There’s another load left over there. I’m going upstairs to take a nap and get up before dawn to finish it. They need the keys by 0800; they’ll have them long before that. At 0800, I’ll be on the road to Nashville.

Well, I talked with the folks at my homeowners association today, and apparently, I should be able to plug in my equipment from Knology and keep on truckin’. That’s good. Now, I just need the energy to go to my apartment, grab the stuff I need from there, go home, unpack the TV’s and TiVos, and do all I need to do.

Actually, I’d add “get one of the computers to the house,” but the thought of trying to string up my network tonight leaves me a bit weary. I’ll be doing well to get the TiVos unboxed and outfitted.

Since I’m not going to be paying for Knology’s extended basic cable—that’s part of our HOA fee—I’m contemplating adding a second digital cable box rental, which would be <$5/mo., far less than the $35/mo. I'll not be paying them anymore. It'd be pretty near awesome if I could drive downtown, get my box, and take it home without having to have a truck roll. I consider that probability to be highly unlikely, though. I was amused earlier when a co-worker was shocked that I was at work. "Why aren't you taking the rest of the day off?! Shouldn't you be at home, unpacking boxes and drinking beer?!" Mmmmm ... beer. With that thought ...

Somewhere around 0400, I woke up and started packing stuff up again, taking this apart, etc. I had a lovely sinus headache on Saturday—hopefully, I’ve moved away from whatever’s blooming :)—and that killed anything I was going to get done Saturday. Yesterday, I played catch-up, but I couldn’t get out of low gear. :sigh: This means, of course, that I still have a non-insignificant amount of stuff at the apartment, but most of that is in the category of [keep|pitch] decision-making. I’ll make a pass at it tonight, but right now, I’m pretty tired.

I must say, though … having that nice full-size tub waiting on me for a nice soak at the end of the move was … wonderful.

I swear … at least once a day, I have an idea of something I could build for the new house.

All that time spent watching The New Yankee Workshop has warped me…

Not only did I buy my house from a very, very good friend—a friend who was, at turns, my orientation counselor, upperclass mentor, candidate for SGA President, SGA President and boss as his Chief of Staff, roommate, job application reference, colleague, fellow alumnus, groom in a glorious wedding party, graduate student observer as I was the guinea pig for his research, …—but the attorney who worked our closing is the son of the man that my boss replaced. Charles saw my yellow TBE badge and said, “Yeah, you might have known my dad.” Know him? Charlie Helms is a very good man, well-liked and -respected by his colleagues.

I found it pretty doggone cool that it turned out like that.

My favorite part of the whole event was when Charles asked us if we’d gone to school together; when we said yes, he asked, “High school?” PJ got that surprised look on his face that he always gets when someone says something outrageous, and I laughed as I always do at that look. “Ah, no … PJ is four years older than I am. He was my orientation counselor when I was a freshman.”

It’s a long, long time from Compass ’97 …

I think I just FAXed over the last little bit of paper needed before the closing on my new townhouse.

Thankfully, being a military brat and an aerospace contractor has desensitized me to large piles of paper. And it’s not just these experiences; I remember Dad remarking at all the papers that I and they had to sign when I entered MSMS by saying, “Man! I became a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force with less paperwork than this!”

So, it’s 0306. I’d turned out the light at 0002. I’m awake. Why? It’s really, really quiet.

A minute passes. beep-beep-beep Power’s out. I lay in bed, thinking it’s a standard Huntsville Utilities-on-the-mountain outage. A half-hour or so passes, and I begin to tire of the every-minute beep-beep-beep of my uninterruptible power supplies. [I have three: one in my office, and one for each TiVo. Laugh if you want.] I decide to get out of bed and find my phone. Thankfully, I don’t kill myself maneuvering through the apartment in the pitch dark.

As I get to my phone—visible from the blinking green status light—I realize that other lights are on in my complex. No wonder this thing hasn’t been fixed yet—it’s not a substation outage. I log on to the Web to find Huntsville Utilities’ number [Treo 1, utilities 0], call them, and the guy has me walk outside to make sure that the outage is building-wide and not apartment wide. It is, so they send a truck. I put on more clothes and await the truck.

Around 0410, the truck pulls in, and soon, they have their diagnosis—dead transformer. They wait for another truck to bring them a replacement, and I walk back inside and climb back in bed. Predictably, I can’t sleep, since it’s stuffy and absolutely quiet in my bedroom. [I sleep with a fan and an AM radio on at night. It’s the only way I sleep well.] Finally, at 0608, the power returns. Having slept only three hours, I then go back to sleep.

I am really ready to move. [Nine days until I close, and a month after that, I move in.]