Distorted Sense of Scale

We've been doing a lot lately. A move across the country brings a lot of things with it. We decided to sell our house in Charlottesville, so that included a lot of updating and refreshing. Fresh paint in every room, new floor in the kitchen and bathroom, appliances, landscaping, chimney re-pointing, light plumbing, plaster patching, etc... If nothing else, it's really given us a sense of what we can do and maybe even more important, how long it takes to do things.

So, on top of refurbishing and selling the house, we've been doing a lot of purging. Donating surplus clothes, selling bikes, going through reams and reams of paper, trashing old bike parts. It's a lot of work but it's been great to have a little more breathing room in the house. It's amazing how much crap one can accumulate in a few years.

So, on top of the purging, cleaning and selling, there's the moving. We are headed to Fort Collins, CO, 1,600 miles from our current home of Charlottesville, VA; And even with all of the cleaning, trashing and donating, we still have a LOT of stuff. Clothes, tools, bikes, furniture, poker table, paintball gear, more bikes.

In order to keep things a little easier we decided to go with a mover. We will pack everything and they will load-transport-unload. Sounds pretty simple right? well, not really. There's still the research. Apparently there's a lot of potential to get very screwed. My sister-in-law turned me on to www.movingscam.com. There's some great information on the homework that you should do before, during and after choosing a mover.

There's a few other things we've been squeezing between the packing, selling and moving...like two full time jobs and the holidays. The latest thing we decided to do was to drive a 16' truck into New York City. Why? you ask...well, to give our bed away of course! We figure we'll avoid the expense and trouble of moving our bed to Colorado by giving it to Jo's folks. They are long overdue for a decent guest bed so we figured it was a perfect fit...we would just rent a truck, load our bed and drive it up to Manhattan. I mean how bad could it be? It's just one more thing right? I don't think we would even consider trying to pull this off any other year. It would be "too much". But we had a ton of stuff that had to get done, so you switch modes and get it done. The bed was just one more thing...so we did it.

I am looking forward to switching back out of this mode, playing more paintball and bike polo but for now it is what it is and it's nice to know what we are capable of.