Level Orange

For the last two months now, we’ve been busy working on our new home, painting and repairing, removing and replacing. The whole process has dominated every spare moment we’ve had, resulting in my lack of presence just about everywhere else. There was even a war in the meantime.

It’s been a lot of work, especially for a house that we’re just renting, and we so totally expect to see the payoff come around in the long run.

That was just the beginning, because as you may already know, moving doesn’t just require that the new place be in good shape, but you must also box up all your shit and then proceed to move it there. And as it turned out, that was the harder p. Things like connecting utilities, forwarding mail and updating addresses…that’s all a walk in the park. Even repainting the entire inside of the house, purchasing new appliances and repairing all sorts of broke shit was relatively painless.

Oh yeah. The pain didn’t kick in until it was time to pack up everything at Location A and move it to Location B in a straight-forward, organized manner. When the day your supposed to move is just one day after your big monthly deadline at work, things can’t end up well.

It wasn’t enough that I hadn’t been resting much since we’d started working on the house, but then work began to demand more of my time than I was willing to give. So the packing had to wait. This created a very unfair situation for Carol, having to pack what she could and take care of our baby boy. I was not pleased with this, and neither was she.

Then came that moment when I realized that I hadn’t reserved a truck.

The last time we moved, I had made it a point to get a U-haul way ahead of time, thereby negating any worries about availability and unexpected costs. This time, I kind of let that whole step slip right by me. Of course, using the last experience I had with U-haul, I expected this time would still be just as simple and accommodating. And, you know, up until the part when we actually got into the truck, it was.

When they told us that they only had a 24′ truck, we kind of shrugged it off. I mean, what’s a little extra space?

Even when they revealed to us after we’d already signed for it that it was a 5-speed truck, I figured that wouldn’t be a problem. After all, my car is a 5-speed. How much different could it be?

I’ll let you take a guess.