Moving On Up

Moving is never fun. I know I’m being Captain Obvious again. No really I hate moving even though I’ve done it 47 bazillion times.

Alphacouriers.com

Moving is actually a good thing. It forces you to clean out closets and go through your garage. Now I have a question here and tell me if this happens to you too. Have you ever cleaned out a closet, garage, storage shed or your car and found items that do not belong to you. Not only do these items not belong to you but you have no idea from where they came? Then you start asking around and no one in your family knows anything about these items and denies ever seeing them before. Now you are faced with a dilemma. Do I take this doomahitchee to Goodwill or do I keep it. What if it belongs to Uncle Fred and he asks me for it back. What if Aunt Lulu left it in my hands for safe keeping and she asks me about it next Christmas at the family feud dinner? What do you do? You do the only thing you can do. You pack it up and get ready to move it with you. You label the box “DOOMAHITCHEE FROM UNKNOWN ORIGIN” and go on about your packing still scratching your head and wondering why you have a doomahitchee in the first place that you can find but for the life of you, you can not find your favorite black t-shirt that makes you feel like a supermodel.

You know the drill. You schlep all over town and get boxes to put your stuff in. Then you go get more boxes because you have so much stuff that it doesn’t all fit in the boxes you got before. Then you go rent a storage facility. You and your spouse, significant other or Rottweiler talk it over and decide that a 40 X 80 should be plenty of room for your stuff. Then you rent a truck to move all of your stuff into the 40 X 80 storage shed only to find that it won’t all fit into the truck. Once again you schlep all the way across town driving a U-Haul which you are being charged 87 trillion dollars by the millimeter and take load by load to the 40 X 80 shed.

You beg and plead with all your big burly male family members and friends to come help you move the ginormous curio cabinet that belonged to your Great Great Great Grandmother Pernecious and watch horrified as they break every 150 year old rounded glass panel and rip off the ever so delicate eagle claw feet trying to squeeze it between the huge Thingamagig that you found in the garage that once again you know not the origin.

Finally you have everything stowed that can be stowed in the 40 X 80 storage facility and you still have 14 more truckloads of stuff. Oh shut up, you know you have it too. There in front of you sit the boxes of Christmas ornaments, Halloween decorations and of course your Super Bowl Party Box which contains all of your favorite team memorabilia as well as the dip and chip containers and your 60 gallon chili pot. What to do, what to do?

You slink back into the Store Your Crap Here storage facility and tell the desk clerk you need another storage locker. She looks at you with raised eyebrows and says “I only have one left and it’s an 80 X 200’ warehouse.” You drop down and kiss her feet and pay out a years worth of salary to store your crap for one month.

You fire up the U-Haul and speed back to your humble abode to retrieve the remainder of your stuff. You pile up the truck as high as the boxes will go. You fold and bend and squeeze as much stuff into the moving van as you dare and head back to the Store Your Crap warehouse. You unload the truck only to find that, yes; you have run out of storage space once again. Where did all this stuff come from you wonder? Why do I have all of this stuff of which half I don’t even know what it is or from where it came?

You crawl in shame up to the desk clerk and beg for yet another space. She smiles and tells you that she just happened to have one move out. So once again you go back and stack the van to the hilt. You have pushed shoved and forced stuff into every available nook and cranny. Which brings me to another question, just what the heck is a cranny? Is it something to do with a granny? I digress.

You stop and fill the van up with $6.00 gasoline and once again enter the gates to the Store Your Crap Here facility. You back the van up to the door and roll it open. Tools and furniture spill out onto the asphalt as you try to get some semblance of order. Then you notice that one of the mattresses seems to be moving all on its own. You watch as it shakes and trembles and then bursts forth from the wall of stuff. That is when you realize that you have packed one of your helpers into the middle of your stuff and you wonder if you have by chance left some of them in the other storage facilities.

Finally 6000 square feet of storage and $4000 worth of mileage later you have everything in storage. Your whole life is stuffed and pushed and piled into a building that someone else owns and you pay to store your stuff. You return to your house to begin the next phase of the move, the clean-up. You walk into the house only to realize that your children have brought down more stuff from the upstairs. They have clothing and bedding, personal items and the left over plutonium from their 7th grade science fair project.

 They have their whole lives on the empty living room floor. That is when you sit down in the middle of the left over packing paper and tape and cry out to the moving gods, WHY HAVE YOU FORESAKEN ME? WHY?

*disclaimer:  None of the junk in the above pictures is mine.  These pictures came from estate sales and a sundry of other websites.  I just wanted you to know because this is all much neater and better stuff than I have.  Besides I was much too busy going through stuff to take pictures of my stuff.  I did however get rid of a lot of stuff and now I am going to have to go out and buy more stuff to replace the stuff I got rid of.  You don't believe me?  Watch George Carlin Stuff: