The move--in detail
May. 26th, 2007 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
linden_jayI was checking my settings before I started writing this, changing my profile so that it didn’t list me as being in Ontario anymore, whatever, and found out this is my 300th entry in this journal. Huh. Shiny!
So, moving. Thursday was more or less just packing until the movers showed up, and shock of all shocks we were actually just about ready when they arrived. About 65 boxes and 26 additional things (bins, chairs, desks, and whatever else) got picked up and tossed in a truck—and just for reference point, I completely loved having someone else do the lifting and toting and playing truck tetris. LOVED it. I’ve literally lost track of how many times I’ve moved at this point, and the lifting and toting and all has just gotten completely old, especially since the Academic Husband has seven thousand boxes of text books to lug about.
Everything’s loaded and in a truck that’s lord knows where—Toronto, I think—and it’ll be getting driven out here sometime in the next 2-4 weeks. I’m betting it’ll be closer to 4, AH thinks closer to 2, I don’t really care because it was so relaxing to know that I wasn’t going to have to climb out of a vehicle after traveling across the country and start lugging boxes right away. And when it gets here, it’s almost all just going to get loaded straight into a storage locker until we find an actual home, so even then it’s not going to be that big of a deal.
Of course, once everything was out that was being moved, that meant we had to deal with throwing out the rest of our crap/having people pick up the stuff they said they’d buy and/or put in a garage sale for us, and cleaning. UGH. Even though in Ontario you don’t have to go quite as nuts with the cleaning stuff because they don’t take a damage deposit that they hold hostage unless you’ve got the floors clean enough to eat off of, it still took longer than I’d like—10:30pm or so was when we finally gave up for the night and headed down to a friend of the AH’s who lived about a 10 minute walk from where we did, since he said we could spend the night on his sofabed so we didn’t have to sleep on the carpet at our old place. Which, y’know, much better, really. Floors=overrated, especially when it’s just a thin layer of carpet over concrete.
When we got to the guys house, there was a small group of folk that AH knew from university who were all there for the visiting and saying goodbye and drinking beer and all, which was good for the AH, but a little less good for me since really, threeish hours of talking about the hiring structure/shenanigans in the history department of a university just really doesn’t interest me all that much when I’m not in the history department and don’t know any of the people involved.
They all finally took off at about 1:00ish, and we got to crash on the sofa bed for a few, since we had to be up by 4am at the latest, because there was a little last minute cleaning had to happen at our old place before the cab came to pick us up at 5:30am. AH crashed after a little while but it doesn’t really matter how tired from cleaning I am, apparently, I’m still not going to fall asleep that ‘early’ at night. I remember looking at a clock at 2:15, I remember looking at a clock at 3:00, and I think I dozed a little inbetween that. About 3:45, AH (who’d woken up at 3:00) checked to see if I was awake, and five minutes later, we were heading out the door in the dark, back to the old place one last time.
Last minute cleaning wasn’t too bad, and the cab driver showed up early, and we started hauling our 2 gigantic (and two regular sized) suitcases, one backpack or shoulder bag each, and two not-so-thrilled cats in Paris Hilton style over-the-shoulder carriers out to the car. The driver mentions that he thinks one of our bags is overweight. Argh. Awesome. We decide to deal with it at the airport, if necessary.
The cab ride is about the time that Snafu started bitching, just meowing again and again, in various volumes and levels of pissed-offedness. By the time we were heading into the airport, both Fubar and Snafu were protesting Loudly (yay for having part-Siamese cats *headdesk*), and I figure that we’re just gonna be the most popular people on the plane, apart from whoever brings on the traditional screaming and pissed off two year old.
We get up to the check in desk, where we tell the woman that we’ve got a bag that’s probably overweight and might have to do some shuffling. She tells us to chuck the smaller bags up first—including the one that’s filled with yarn and is pretty damned light, and we could easily move stuff about in—we do, and instead of hanging on to them so we can move stuff about, she hits the button, and they disappear on the conveyer belt. Freck. So, we weigh the heavy one, which is over 14 pounds over limit. Oops.
She tells AH to pull a few things out of it and move them into carryon—never mind that our carryon is already pretty heavy and full of every DVD we own, pretty much—and then comes around and murmurs to us that she’s not going to charge us for the overweight, just shift a few things so that it looks like we’re doing it, and she’ll let us slide this time. So for this alone (overweight baggage=not cheap) she becomes our new favorite person, but then she checks the flight for us while she’s getting our seat assignments dealt with, and says that since the flight isn’t full, she’s going to block out the third seat in our row so that it’s just the two of us with the cats, and it’ll give us a bit more room. Plus, she tells us that just to give ourselves a bit more time to get the cats settled, we can go ahead and pre-board with the old people and the folk with wee kids. I could have hugged her, I swear.
So, because of the pre-boarding (and the cats), we have to go to security right away. Well, when you have animals that you’re taking actually on the plane, you have to actually take them out of the carriers and hold them in your arms while you walk through the metal detectors. I really want to know how often it happens that some creature gets loose and runs amok. I figure it has to happen often. We just ended up with really squirmy wiggly cats who first didn’t want out of the carriers because there were scary people around, and then once they were out, really, REALLY didn’t want to go back in. Nothing quite as much fun as stuffing a reluctant cat back into a carrier while a room full of people watch, and while one of the incredibly allergic security guards (HUGE tall guy, like, Padalecki tall) sneezes every two seconds. And the whole time, every couple of seconds, Snafu keeps meowing and crying and whining and protesting that he Does Not Want!
We pre-board and get settled, and the meowing and crying and whining and protesting and Do Not Want? Kept going for over an hour. He’d only just started to chill out when we took off, which Snafu freaked the hell out at (can’t really blame him, that must be really strange for a cat and more than a little scary). AH was getting a little worried about him because he kept panting really hard between cries, which is something we’ve never seen him do, but after we leveled off to our cruising altitude, he finally, finally (a half hour afterwards) finally chilled out and settled down and shut up. Which really, could have been worse. Luckily enough, he only reacted like that the first time we took off (we had a layover in Calgary), and for the second take off, he just settled back in his carrier and ignored the whole thing.
We got picked up from our house in Ontario at 5:30am EST, and got to my in-laws place at landed at 12:00pm PST, so when you factor in the time change, our total travel time to get here was just short of nine hours. For the next 3 days—minimum—I don’t want to travel any farther than from here to the grocery store, or perhaps the mall.
And just to show again how wonderful-sweet my inlaws are, they decided that it would be a big enough transition for us to have moved all this way, so they would take off and spend the weekend at their trailer at the lake, so we could have some time by ourselves (of course, there’s another person who’s spending the summer here, so it’s not alone-alone, but still) and just kick back and relax. I have the best inlaws in the WORLD.
So, that’s The Move to British Columbia. Wow, I really babble. 30 second version—cats were bitchy, we survived, never moving again. Well, until the next time, a couple months from now, anyway.
For the rest of today? I think some jelly beans, Pepsi, and curling up with the AH and watching Casino Royale sounds just about perfect. Then dinner, writing, posting (I hope!) and internet-hanging-about. See some of y’all later!
*hugs to all*
So, moving. Thursday was more or less just packing until the movers showed up, and shock of all shocks we were actually just about ready when they arrived. About 65 boxes and 26 additional things (bins, chairs, desks, and whatever else) got picked up and tossed in a truck—and just for reference point, I completely loved having someone else do the lifting and toting and playing truck tetris. LOVED it. I’ve literally lost track of how many times I’ve moved at this point, and the lifting and toting and all has just gotten completely old, especially since the Academic Husband has seven thousand boxes of text books to lug about.
Everything’s loaded and in a truck that’s lord knows where—Toronto, I think—and it’ll be getting driven out here sometime in the next 2-4 weeks. I’m betting it’ll be closer to 4, AH thinks closer to 2, I don’t really care because it was so relaxing to know that I wasn’t going to have to climb out of a vehicle after traveling across the country and start lugging boxes right away. And when it gets here, it’s almost all just going to get loaded straight into a storage locker until we find an actual home, so even then it’s not going to be that big of a deal.
Of course, once everything was out that was being moved, that meant we had to deal with throwing out the rest of our crap/having people pick up the stuff they said they’d buy and/or put in a garage sale for us, and cleaning. UGH. Even though in Ontario you don’t have to go quite as nuts with the cleaning stuff because they don’t take a damage deposit that they hold hostage unless you’ve got the floors clean enough to eat off of, it still took longer than I’d like—10:30pm or so was when we finally gave up for the night and headed down to a friend of the AH’s who lived about a 10 minute walk from where we did, since he said we could spend the night on his sofabed so we didn’t have to sleep on the carpet at our old place. Which, y’know, much better, really. Floors=overrated, especially when it’s just a thin layer of carpet over concrete.
When we got to the guys house, there was a small group of folk that AH knew from university who were all there for the visiting and saying goodbye and drinking beer and all, which was good for the AH, but a little less good for me since really, threeish hours of talking about the hiring structure/shenanigans in the history department of a university just really doesn’t interest me all that much when I’m not in the history department and don’t know any of the people involved.
They all finally took off at about 1:00ish, and we got to crash on the sofa bed for a few, since we had to be up by 4am at the latest, because there was a little last minute cleaning had to happen at our old place before the cab came to pick us up at 5:30am. AH crashed after a little while but it doesn’t really matter how tired from cleaning I am, apparently, I’m still not going to fall asleep that ‘early’ at night. I remember looking at a clock at 2:15, I remember looking at a clock at 3:00, and I think I dozed a little inbetween that. About 3:45, AH (who’d woken up at 3:00) checked to see if I was awake, and five minutes later, we were heading out the door in the dark, back to the old place one last time.
Last minute cleaning wasn’t too bad, and the cab driver showed up early, and we started hauling our 2 gigantic (and two regular sized) suitcases, one backpack or shoulder bag each, and two not-so-thrilled cats in Paris Hilton style over-the-shoulder carriers out to the car. The driver mentions that he thinks one of our bags is overweight. Argh. Awesome. We decide to deal with it at the airport, if necessary.
The cab ride is about the time that Snafu started bitching, just meowing again and again, in various volumes and levels of pissed-offedness. By the time we were heading into the airport, both Fubar and Snafu were protesting Loudly (yay for having part-Siamese cats *headdesk*), and I figure that we’re just gonna be the most popular people on the plane, apart from whoever brings on the traditional screaming and pissed off two year old.
We get up to the check in desk, where we tell the woman that we’ve got a bag that’s probably overweight and might have to do some shuffling. She tells us to chuck the smaller bags up first—including the one that’s filled with yarn and is pretty damned light, and we could easily move stuff about in—we do, and instead of hanging on to them so we can move stuff about, she hits the button, and they disappear on the conveyer belt. Freck. So, we weigh the heavy one, which is over 14 pounds over limit. Oops.
She tells AH to pull a few things out of it and move them into carryon—never mind that our carryon is already pretty heavy and full of every DVD we own, pretty much—and then comes around and murmurs to us that she’s not going to charge us for the overweight, just shift a few things so that it looks like we’re doing it, and she’ll let us slide this time. So for this alone (overweight baggage=not cheap) she becomes our new favorite person, but then she checks the flight for us while she’s getting our seat assignments dealt with, and says that since the flight isn’t full, she’s going to block out the third seat in our row so that it’s just the two of us with the cats, and it’ll give us a bit more room. Plus, she tells us that just to give ourselves a bit more time to get the cats settled, we can go ahead and pre-board with the old people and the folk with wee kids. I could have hugged her, I swear.
So, because of the pre-boarding (and the cats), we have to go to security right away. Well, when you have animals that you’re taking actually on the plane, you have to actually take them out of the carriers and hold them in your arms while you walk through the metal detectors. I really want to know how often it happens that some creature gets loose and runs amok. I figure it has to happen often. We just ended up with really squirmy wiggly cats who first didn’t want out of the carriers because there were scary people around, and then once they were out, really, REALLY didn’t want to go back in. Nothing quite as much fun as stuffing a reluctant cat back into a carrier while a room full of people watch, and while one of the incredibly allergic security guards (HUGE tall guy, like, Padalecki tall) sneezes every two seconds. And the whole time, every couple of seconds, Snafu keeps meowing and crying and whining and protesting that he Does Not Want!
We pre-board and get settled, and the meowing and crying and whining and protesting and Do Not Want? Kept going for over an hour. He’d only just started to chill out when we took off, which Snafu freaked the hell out at (can’t really blame him, that must be really strange for a cat and more than a little scary). AH was getting a little worried about him because he kept panting really hard between cries, which is something we’ve never seen him do, but after we leveled off to our cruising altitude, he finally, finally (a half hour afterwards) finally chilled out and settled down and shut up. Which really, could have been worse. Luckily enough, he only reacted like that the first time we took off (we had a layover in Calgary), and for the second take off, he just settled back in his carrier and ignored the whole thing.
We got picked up from our house in Ontario at 5:30am EST, and got to my in-laws place at landed at 12:00pm PST, so when you factor in the time change, our total travel time to get here was just short of nine hours. For the next 3 days—minimum—I don’t want to travel any farther than from here to the grocery store, or perhaps the mall.
And just to show again how wonderful-sweet my inlaws are, they decided that it would be a big enough transition for us to have moved all this way, so they would take off and spend the weekend at their trailer at the lake, so we could have some time by ourselves (of course, there’s another person who’s spending the summer here, so it’s not alone-alone, but still) and just kick back and relax. I have the best inlaws in the WORLD.
So, that’s The Move to British Columbia. Wow, I really babble. 30 second version—cats were bitchy, we survived, never moving again. Well, until the next time, a couple months from now, anyway.
For the rest of today? I think some jelly beans, Pepsi, and curling up with the AH and watching Casino Royale sounds just about perfect. Then dinner, writing, posting (I hope!) and internet-hanging-about. See some of y’all later!
*hugs to all*
