We have been moving. I was going to hire a U-haul, chuck everything into the back and go, but oh nooooo, hubs had to jump in with why to you want to waste money like that when X has a perfectly good pick-up and has offered? My response was, "bec ause we have lived in the same place for 26 years and have a gross ton of s tuff",which he took as justification for not hiring a truck because it woul d take a couple days to get everything anyway, and then we would have to si ft through the remains for treasure to boot. I honestly have quit banging my head on my desk, truly I have, mostly because my desk is still back at t he old house. Because his plan worked so well. Next time I am back there ( probably today) I want to get a whip and start cracking to just for the lov e of deity get some stuff done! Of course there are some mitigating circumstances, every single time we hav e moved large objects it has started to snow. In fact I now have people ca lling me to find out if we are moving anything today, so they have early wa rning of lake effect snow. We tried to do it all on one day, but we got sm acked with a blizzard. Literally, a freaking blizzard hit while my mattres s and several other things were in transit from there to here. The same da rn thing happened last time we moved. Fortunately the people helping us ar e better than my idiot cousin who was supposed to be helping us last time. At least I won on the hiring a dumpster issue. I expect I will feel a surg e of pure joy when the horrific couch and chair the man brought home from a thrift shop goes in there. In brief, four cats, a family of 5, one of whic h is a disabled teen, and a couch and chair set that is not just old, but c ream coloured with a print pattern of little green flowers. There is now a rule at my house that says he may not buy furniture without me present.
Just as the cherry on top of our amazing moving adventure, I had called th e shop I bought our cookstove from to see if we needed help in changing fro m natural gas to propane. Oh no I was told, these days the set up is all t he same it should hook right up no problem. Really they should invent a ph one with an auto-warning that tells you when you are talking to an idiot. So the day before Christmas eve I am calling the store back and telling the m that I had been misinformed by someone in their employ. I explained the problem, and that the stove had a pocket on the back with all the parts tha t were needed, and a complete set of instructions. I also explained that s ince the instructions were chock full of words like "dangerous", "flammable ", "poison", and "explosion", that we would much rather that they send some body who knew what they were about to set us up. They said they would sen d someone as soon as they could, which turned out to be the 28th. So I tol d the crew (my turn to stay home with Ash) make sure you get the hot plate I use for batik out of my workroom this trip, as well as the microwave, the crockpot, and the electric kettle. They remembered the hotplate, which pr omptly died in the midst of pancakes. Our moving friend took pity and trie d to help. They brought over a camping "thing". DH was certain I would ha ve some idea what to do with it, since I had been camping a lot as a child. Sadly Civil War reenactors do not generally use propane a lot, so I was clu eless. Give me a fire, a flat rock and some time and I could probably make you pancakes and eggs, eventually. An enormous set of concentric circles o n legs that is somehow hooked to a little propane tank? Uhhhhh... They were going to set it up in the kitchen to play with it. I didn't just put my foot down, I put both feet down (DH says that sane people call that "jumping up and down") The heck if I was going to let a pair of maniacs (a ka mad scientists) burn down my new kitchen very first thing! So they carr ied it out to the porch grumbling all the way. Yes it was cold, it was sno wing, the wind was blowing, and that made it hard to get the thing going an d generated many complaints about freezing body parts off. My kitchen did not burn down! It took them six hours to make ramen noodles, and they ther eafter abandoned the contraption. So we had cheese and fruit and bread and boughten cookies for Christmas dinner. My kitchen did not burn down!
NightMist