The Moving Story

I know, I promised moving pictures. I don't have any. Surprised? You shouldn't be. At least there's some text to read. In all the moving mayhem the guilt of knowing I wouldn't have any pictures to post did prompt me to search out and find our camera, only to discover the battery was dead. The guilt wasn't strong enough to make me drive to the store for a new battery. For that reason and the fact that every time we were packing up or moving stuff I was wearing an old Cleveland Clippers Football XL t-shirt and sweatpants which I did not feel needed to be recorded for all to see, there are no pictures. Maybe this week. Maybe. However, here's the story:

The moving company arrived Thursday morning to load up all the boxes Joe and I had packed and all our furniture. Joe was at work, so it was my job to "supervise." Maybe this shouldn't have been a surprise, but standing around watching three young men lift your heavy furniture without offering to help was very awkward. As my sister said, it's like "sitting around watching the pool boy," except that the chairs and furniture were the first things to be loaded, so I didn't have anything to sit on. This actually added to the awkwardness, because standing for four hours while seven months pregnant is not very comfortable, and finally I had to just hoist myself up on the counter top because my hips were so sore from standing. That's right: my job was to stand and watch three boys carry filing cabinets, desks and a piano, and I was sore. And then before they were finished I was hungry, so by the end I was waddling around on sore hips and eating granola bars while they skipped up the ramp to put the last of the boxes on the truck.

We'd left out a bunch of cleaning supplies, so after work we gave the house one last cleaning, which was a good thing because there were shocking amounts of dust where our bedroom furniture had been. I didn't know dust could accumulate such mass. By about 8:30 I was exhausted (after all, I'd had to watch all that heavy lifting earlier in the day) and finally just set up the cots we'd saved for our last night in the Denver house. I was thrilled to be lying down--for about 60 seconds. I had remembered these cots as being pretty comfortable the last time I'd used them, and keeping them for the last night so we could take care of last-minute stuff instead of going to a hotel or a friend's house had seemed like a great idea. However, cots make sore hips more sore, and rolling over on one while pregnant is an adventure. The combination is not good. To accomplish the 20-point turn to required to roll over in a cot, you must try to counter-balance the weight of your belly with one arm on the far side of the cot while rotating your midsection without using ab muscles, then quickly shift your weight to the other arm as the pendulum of your belly swings to the far side. Then wait five minutes until your hips ache and repeat. It's not something I would recommend.

The next morning I declared an end to the cot adventure at 4 a.m., and by 5:30 we were dressed and packed up to leave for the day of closings and moving. I sat in the parking lot of the grocery store waiting for it to open at 7 a.m. so I could get some breakfast, and then we met our agent for the last walkthrough of the new house in Golden. From there we went to the closing of the Denver house, drove ten blocks to the closing of the new house, and by 1 p.m. we were in the new house wiping out cabinets and getting ready for the movers (rather urgently waiting for the movers, because in our great wisdom we'd packed up all the toilet paper in the moving truck--but that's another story). The movers arrived at 2:30, and this time I took one of the first chairs they unloaded and sat in the sunshine outside the garage and directed traffic with a slightly smaller amount of guilt than the day before. They were done by 4, and we spent the rest of the evening unpacking. By 7 we realized we had nothing to eat and went to the grocery store and picked up a pizza, which I attempted to bake in the new oven and burned to a glorious, sizzling black crisp. At that point I cried, at a few bites of burnt pizza and went to bed on our heavenly TempurPedic mattress.

Saturday a bunch of friends came over in the afternoon to help Joe unload the last of our stuff from the storage unit, and afterward we grilled some meat and had dinner with friends to inaugurate the new house. After two days of beautifully sunny, 60-degree weather, it snowed on Sunday, so we ran a few errands and spent the day getting settled. By the end of last night we had pots and pans in cupboards, I filled and ran my very own dishwasher for the first time ever, and our closet looked a little less like a clothes bomb had exploded. This morning while unloading the dishwasher I discovered that I'd put all the plates and bowls in a cupboard that cannot be reached while the dishwasher is open, so we're a long ways from really being settled, but at least I knew where the plates and bowls were supposed to go. Tonight we'll see if I can sort through the last of the kitchen boxes and actually make a meal.