Perhaps Record Time!
Budget came through with a 15 foot truck. Avery and I drove over to Clinton at 9:30am to pick it up. I have to tell you I was very nervous that we wouldn't be able to get all of our stuff into one little 15 foot truck. Avery said not to worry. I worried. I filled out all the forms, opting out of all the emergency insurances and damange waivers. By 9:42am the truck was ours, by 10:10am we were back in the driveway in Berlin.
My friend and neighbor Mark S. arrived just after we returned to 60 Pleasant to help out with the loading of the truck. I had contacted Ives, Joe and Mark about helping out later in the day with the loading. My estimates, based on previous moves, were that it would take all day to move things into the truck and arrange everything into place. Avery guessed a hour or two. We started right in at 10:15 with two bureaus. Then boxes, then dining room sets, then living room furniture, then boxes and boxes and more boxes. Then we added in office stuff, desks and chairs. More boxes and bins, more giant tupperwares and OfficeMax storage boxes. Finally we were ready for the chairs. We found a place (well, Mark and Avery found a place - I was mostly just a bystander, doing lifting) for every chair, including my office chair.
At 11:45 we tried to close the door - it closed! We opened it back up, surveyed what was left and called it a day. Everything that remained we would be putting in the Jetta, the Jetta's car top carrier (that we bought for the roadtrip), or my parent's Jeep. By noon I had called off the reenforcements and by 12:15 Avery and I were relaxing, having some cool drinks and resting on the couch. It must have been both a record time for loading a truck of this size (no doubt helped by our meticulous stacking of boxes, large furniture and small furniture), as well as a record for the amount of stuff we stuck into that little 800 square foot space. Mark and Avery did a magnificient job in making use of every little space and making sure that nothing moved while we traveled west. All we had left to do was take care of some clothes packing, computer packing and we would be ready to jet west tomorrow morning. It was 2:00pm when we finished lunch and took a break from watching the olympics on television.
I found inside of a box, inside of a paper bag, inside of a cabinet in my soon to be vacated home office a bunch of diskettes. From the looks of some of hte labels, they are up to 10 years old. In 1995, and probably through 1999, the biggest file I ever created, edited, referenced, copied or deleted was 1.44 MB. I used a camera during the convention that at high quality snapped and stored pictures that were individually 1.5 MB. What a difference a decade makes. Today, this afternoon and into the evening, I'm going to ply through all of these diskettes and scrap off any relavent info. Then, I'm going to delete whatever remains and toss them into a box for the salvation army. One less bag of things to drag along with Ithaca. 