Moved

My apologies to my four readers for the lack of entries last month; it was a busy time for me.

Moving is a painful process. I tried to make it easier by breaking it down into stages and doing a little bit each day, but that just spread the pain out over three weeks instead of one condensed day. I hoarded every empty box from my work and we started packing the day we signed the lease. Soon the garage was full, but it seemed as if we hadn’t done a thing. We got approval to start moving things in early, so I spent the last week of July shipping boxes while my brother in law painted a couple of rooms in the new house. My goal was to have all of the small stuff moved by Saturday the 30^th so all we would have left was the large furniture.

I failed in that endeavor; despite spending what seemed like every waking moment after work on moving, there were still three rooms left to go by Saturday. We started at 8am and didn’t finish until 4pm. Most of the stuff ended up in the new garage or the basement; we’ve started to sort that stuff, but there’s so much of it, it’s going to be 2008 before we’re fully in.

It’s amazing how much a family of seven can accumulate over the course of a few years. I blame my wife; she can’t turn down good deals on things like frames or vases, even though we have tons of each. She also keeps a bushel of the plastic grocery bags, although I’m not sure what for. And she wouldn’t let me throw anything away, even though we have more toys than our boys could possibly play with and the majority of them have been sitting unused in boxes. I could have pitched 80% of them without anyone noticing.

Just to top everything off, I also got poison ivy from somewhere. I don’t know where; as far as I can tell, there is none in the yard. My guess is that it was mixed in with the mulch we put down at the new house. When I get poison ivy, I get it everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I’ve been miserable for the past week. Thank god for Diphenhydramine.