Moving, part I

After zillions of hours and packing and then just a couple of hours of moving, Traci, Paige and I now live in a new house.

I have been paranoid for weeks about the big move. I helped a lot of people move when I was in the Elders Quorum and it was basically always miserable. We'd usually show up and the people's stuff would still be lying on the floor, unboxed. One lady didn't even have boxes. She thought she'd just put everything in her car. We got her some and by the time we had finished the move, her whole apartment was filled from floor to ceiling with boxes.

Not wanting to be an awful movee, I had grand ambitions of not only having ever single item boxed, but having the boxes moved as well. We did pretty good on moving all of the boxes out - I took a truckload every time I went to the new house - but at midnight the night before moving day, there was still stuff lying around the house everywhere. Luckily, it all worked out okay. We had tons of help from family and the ward and it ended up only taking a few hours.

I rented the giganticest U-haul in the world. The biggest size (26') was only $39 so I figured I just go for it. When they pulled it around for me, and it was the size of my entire house, I got a little nervous about driving it. I also regretted not having paid for the insurance. As I drove the two blocks to my house very, very slowly, I thought that this was probably another one of those rites of passage to manhood. (I don't think I got full credit toward since my dad drove the U-haul from the old house to the new house.)

U-haul is a racket, I tell ya. They charge $39 for the truck, plus $.79 per mile, and then you still have to fill it up with gas. To make sure you have to put as much gas in as possible, they give it to you at half full and then make you bring it back half full. That way, you have to guess if you are putting in the right amount of gas, you can't just know it's full when it stops pumping. This worked to our advantage because the last person had filled it up to 5/8ths. We only drove 12 miles round trip so that extra 1/8th was all we needed. (We drove home with the air conditioning turned off to be extra careful.) I couldn't image trying to pull that monster into a gas station just to put a gallon of gas in it. If you don't fill it up to halfway they charge you $40 up front and then still charge you for the gas they put in. And the ripoff continues. They charge $25 if you forget to fold up your moving blankets.

The truck was so big that we probably had five extra feet in the back. I guess we need more stuff.