Wrecking ball

Moving sucks. It doesn't matter who you are, it will always suck. Especially when going from a house to an apartment half its size. And especially if it's been in the same place for a long time.

We swore we'd never do this ourselves again, and it turns out we were right. A moving company is going to show up at the buttcrack of dark on Friday to load all of our stuff so securely into a moving truck that a cockroach wouldn't be able to move around in between the furniture or boxes. The only catch is, we're boxing everything up beforehand, which may require us to pull an all-nighter tonight, so this post isn't going to ramble on as long.

We're learning as we go. Since our stuff is being dispersed to three different places (our new apartment, our new office, and my parents' storage workshop an hour away from the first two places) it's necessary to mark the destination on each box. We figured it'd be a good idea (and it is) to use sticky labels of 2 different colors - pink for San Antonio and green for the workshop south of Austin. We further marked the San Antonio labels for A (apartment) or B (business), along with a short description of the contents of the box (important!) The tough part is trying to anticipate snags, such as should something not fit like we thought it would and it has to go into storage after all, and come up with contingency plans to adapt. We have to be ready for various surprises.

I'm surprised at how slow going the whole packing process can be. Cleaning out my office took the whole day, and it's not like it's a big office, and it's not like I dawdled much at all. I took enough time for breakfast and a couple of hours for lunch, and maybe a check-Facebook or pet-the-cat break here and there, but that's about it.

Bankers boxes, although expensive, are good. They're sturdy, they're uniform, they fit files perfectly (as they're designed to do), they're easily carried, and they stack very well. Our local grocery store not only puts its used boxes where the general public can have at them (and they're completely separated from other trash, etc), but they even organize them by size on a rack. We saved a ton of money by raiding the rack (at the end of a NOT-rainy day).

When you get up before sunrise to take on this little endeavor, keep in mind that at some point, no matter how evenly you pace yourself, the exhaustion and even a little tinnitus from the fumes of fluorine from the permanent markers with which you've been scribbling away on boxes will indeed set in, and you will have to stop and veg out. Watch Family Guy and munch away on a Hershey's Dark Chocolate bar (giant is recommended). Do open a window to air out the fumes, though; you want to wake up after that catnap.