I’ve never been one for moving. During my entire life I’ve only lived in five different places (I’m not counting a different room each year in college). My parents still live in the house where I was born, I went to college, spend a year in Germany, and then went to graduate school in Boston. During grad school I was in Cambridge for 8 months before my landlady decided that she wanted to remodel and found out my two roommates and I couldn’t live there while she was doing it. So, we were evicted. After that I moved to my place in Brighton and stayed there for 8 years.
Back in March 2006 I had to decided whether to renew my lease. My roommate Matt was leaving for a PhD program at U Penn and I expected to be done by that point, so we gave the place up. Little did I know at the time that my defense committee would pull a 180 and I’d have more writing and editing to do on my dissertation. Good thing my sister let me housesit and crash at her place until I can get my sorry ass out to my new job at PNNL.
Moving date was July 30th. I had the truck from 9 am until 3 pm and got two friends to help me with the bulk of the moving heavy stuff. I spent the week before editing my dissertation and packing during breaks. Most of the packing was finished up on Saturday, but I still had some shit to take care of on Sunday. As I was finishing up Saturday evening and took a little break at a friend’s place I had the feeling that the following day would be crap. I also only got my friend Mario to help, figured that with another person we’d all just be in each others way.
What follows is a long description of a day that ended up being something in between a reality TV program and an episode of the Three Stooges. I can summarize it by some things that I learned.
- Always fold in the mirrors
- Your worst concerns will come true
- Always rent for the whole day
- Purge before you pack or try not to accumulate crap to fill your space.
- Driving faster does not mean you will get to your destination more quickly. Especially if the vehical has tricky accelerator
- Take care of business in person if possible
- Insurance eventually pays for itself
- Brighton isn’t bad to live in, but it sucks to move out of
