Moving Day

Back in our own bed.

Oh, the glory of being back in our own bed. It's been four months to the day: March 18th was our last night at home in San Jose, and tonight our old friend is back. A bit musty, but at this point I don't care. Our washer is all hooked up, but we won't have gas hooked into the dryer until tomorrow, so the sheets still smell a bit like moist cardboard. (Paul ran a load to test the washer, so we have damp T-shirts draped all about the house like exhausted kites that fluttered down when they lost their wind. I'm sure we'll be finding them over the next couple of days.)

But as I said: I don't really care about the funny smell. Today has been so very wet that the entire house smells of damp cardboard, so the bed is really no different. Here we are then, each enjoying a classy plastic cup of Riesling while Paul settles in with the newest Harry Dresden novel and I spend a little time writing. If all goes well, we are supposed to have cable internet hooked up tomorrow and I'll be able to post this, but I'm still wary. I would not be at all surprised if the installer showed up tomorrow only to tell us that Comcast had made a gross error, and cable is still not available way out here. We shall see.

Today was moving day, so of course it poured rain for hours. The movers got to the storage unit at 8 AM sharp, inspected the unit, and predicted it would be an easy 5-hour day. No way that could be an 8,000 lb load, they told me. Your last mover ripped you off.

I smiled quietly to myself. "We'll see", I said. We do have a lot of books. And some of the furniture is a little heavy. And don't forget the piano.

They put in an eleven hour day. Believe me, I would have been much happier with their original assessment, as we paid them by the hour, but I'd seen it all go into the unit back in March and I knew it was very dense inside. The aforementioned piano was the star attraction of the day. It's a 107-year-old upright, also very dense inside. Lots of thick wood. And Paul had originally envisioned it going in his office/music room upstairs. Yeah.

Well, the rain in the morning prevented the guys from getting it on the truck in the first place. The ramp was too wet and slippery. So they decided they'd make a second trip in the afternoon and come back for it ($$$). But after seeing these guys in action for three hours, I was not overwhelmed with confidence that they'd be able to pull it off on the other side. (Or rather, push it up, as it were.) It was a little bit like being moved by the Three Stooges. We considered leaving the piano there and going with dedicated, professional piano movers, but by that time we were already in pretty deep. Our movers decided to bring in an extra three guys for round two, Man vs. Musical Instrument, and that pretty much doubled the mayhem. We couldn't quite see how they were going to even use six guys on the piano, stairs or not, so it all got curiouser and curiouser.

About an hour before they all showed up with six heads, twenty-four limbs and one really huge upright piano, Paul and I began considering how nice it might be to have it in the library. Downstairs. For so many reasons, not the least of which was our fondness for the walls and staircase we'd only just started getting to know a little better. So I called the guy in charge and told him that I hated to disappoint them all, but we'd changed our mind. We'd be putting it downstairs, did they mind? Luckily, they'd already headed our to our place with all six guys, otherwise we would have never met Peanut, a wacky older fellow with a grizzled grey beard and a very pronounced limp. Had they actually moved the monster upstairs, I'm sure Peanut's job would have been comic relief. (Thankfully, the foreman cut us a break and did not charge us for Peanut's help. We got Peanut for free.)

It was somewhere about that time we considered measuring the library doors.

So, we have a very nice, very large, antique piano in our family room. Not to sure yet how we will arrange our other furniture around it, but hey, we like a challenge.