Moving is soooo awesome

We are officially knee deep, well actually more like chest deep in boxes. Quinny is being oh so helpful. For every box you tape and write the contents on he'll come around behind you rip the tape off and relabel (in his own handwriting of course). Every task is a cat and mouse game. Our dining room has officially morphed into a storage shed with boxes stacked to eye level. We are using the dining room table itself as our wrapping station so when we sit down to eat dinner we are placing our plates on top of the 25 pounds, literally 25 pounds, of paper we use to wrap the valuables. When we moved in we didn't own a table, a couch or a toddler. Now we own all three and another couple thousand square feet of belongings. It was significantly easier to move into our home. I can remember being on conference calls with colleagues and being asked if I was in the bathroom. It would of course surprise me that someone would be thinking I would be doing, well leave that up to the imagination while in the bathroom. So you think I'm brushing my teeth and holding this conference call or....? The house was so devoid of furniture it didn't matter what room you were in, it echoed when you talked. When moving in I remember trying to get Carrie's desk out of her apartment. It broke maneuvering it out the front door. Well, that solves trying to fit that into the truck. I then threw it off the second story balcony to save time. I miss the good old days. Today we don't even have a balcony to chuck our belongings over.

Carrie's favorite moving story is when she drove down ahead of me to let the gas guy in the house for hot water usage. She wasn't used to a door that when locked would open from the inside but not the outside. She promptly locked herself out. The gas guy couldn't get in. We spent our first weekend with no stove or hot water. It was the 4th of July holiday weekend so it was extended and my brother was in town to help us move. It makes for a great story and something we are aiming to avoid by a large margin.

Tampa and Gainesville are two hours apart with Gainesville a little more centered in the state and 100 miles farther north. I asked my brother to fly into Tampa so I could drive down with a car load of belongings to drop off at the house. It's the holiday weekend so the interstate is jammed with people heading to their weekend destinations. I get 30 miles outside of Gainesville and blow a tire doing 80 in the fast lane of a 6 lane highway. As I am negotiating my way across those lanes to the relative safety of the right hand shoulder with three tires I am thinking about my spare tire and how it is buried underneath a car packed full of things to be moved. I get to the side of the road. Cars and more frightening semi trucks are flying by me as I come to the realization that I am going to have to empty my life's collection of stuff on the side of the road. Fantastic! So I get all my stuff on the side of the busiest highway in Florida and pull out my pansy size tire. I get the old tire into the trunk. I load up my belongings and I begin to drive 45 MPH on my teeny little sorry excuse of a tire. My brother lands. I have about 1 hour 45 minutes left to go on the drive. What to do, what to do? I call Carrie freaking out and think about switching cars, but as I make methodical progress down the freeway the next exit miraculously has a tire shop. I am saved. I exit off, find the tire shop. I pay a ridiculous price for a tire brand usually reserved for vehicles made in China. Oh, don't forget I had to unload all my belongings again, but this time at the tire shop parking lot (which happened to be next to a Dairy Queen with lots of ice cream eaters googling my collection of stuff) to get to the blown tire/rim. I changed the tire, got the donut back, loaded it back into the trunk, put my gear back in the car and began my journey to pick up my brother who has been stranded at the airport for hours at this point. I have now packed and unpacked the car 5 times and I am really looking forward to doing it a sixth if I ever reach my "dream home."

I pick up my brother, drop the stuff off and head back to Gainesville. Tomorrow we are to get up at dawn to pick up the biggest truck someone will rent us which we reserved months in advance. We wake up the next morning and I make a call to make sure everything is in order. Well, apparently, just like the Seinfeld episode these rental places don't quite grasp the definition of reserved. There isn't a truck. If one wants they can just keep the truck for as long as they like while racking up charges. No one turned in any trucks so there were none to rent out. Maybe I can tell that to the apartment people that said I have until midnight to move out. I find a new place with two little trucks half way between Gainesville and Tampa. It's around 11. I drive the hour down there pick up one truck because logistically we don't have enough drivers to take two and get our cars there. Carrie drops us off and begins on her lock herself out of the house saga.

I now have a truck a third of the size I need. It's after 12 noon. I have to drive back to Gainesville and I have two apartments I have to move out of. This was one of the major reasons the desk was sacrificed. There was significantly less space than we thought we would have. By the time my brother and I had both trucks loaded up it was around 12:30 am. We were left to clean Carrie's apartment. I just paid the fine at my place. We're dudes and we had been living in the same place for three years. Trust me when I say it wasn't worth saving the $250. But Carrie is a girl and unfortunately for her my brother and I are not. So even after carefully cleaning her whole apartment with a toothbrush for endless hours in the pre-dawn morning she still incurred a hefty fine. Is there no justice to this day?

My brother and I finally roll into Tampa around 3 am to move in. We opened the truck found a few chairs, closed it up and began eating dinner; wings, pizza and a couple of much earned adult beverages. Carrie broke in to the house eventually (it's amazing what you can learn with 8 hours of free time) so she wasn't on the porch looking dejected for a full 12 hours. Our new neighbor did offer her a beer so that was a good sign. Nothing like a hot shower after a day like that. Oh, wait it would be another 4 days before the gas guy could come and turn on the gas to give us hot water and allow us to use our stove. At any rate that's our gold standard for moving. We vowed that day to pay whomever how ever much it took to never take on a moving project again. For this move we have hired help. We are hoping we survive.

Here is a pic of Quinny cleaning up the door. This time we don't have anyone to take care of it and just fine us. So we had a kid to do the cleaning. He's working the front door.

Signs your wife is out of town

This week Carrie and Q left at dawn on Monday morning, which was a change of pace. I am not understanding the effects of being alone with nobody around but the NFL network and Lucky. Here are a few observations I have made this week with the absences of Carrie an Q.

Apparently, the house does not magically clean itself. This whole time I assumed some maid just took care of this task but after two days at home I can attest this is not the case. I have left numerous times hoping to reenter the house cleaner than I left it but to no avail. I now understand the house does not magically clean itself when you leave on a business trip. I am not missing anything right? There isn't a secret password or something is there? I googled it and came up with nothing.

I have eaten pizza five of the last six days. No that is not a typo. I thought pizza night was a once in a week event but after spending the weekend eating pizza and the week days and the weekends and the week days I now realize that frozen pizza may represent all 8 food groups. That is how many food groups there are right? I am not sure how to work that machine people refer to as a stove if there isn't something frozen to put inside. If I did I would like some pasta and maybe some chicken. I keep hoping but I keeping getting pizza. Is there an instructional manual? Maybe my wife has it. I can't find it anywhere.

We are out of coffee. I sleep four hours a night. I need a pot of coffee. I'm not sure how one procures coffee but I am pretty sure it just shows up next to the coffee pot in its neat little container. I like Starbucks. At this point I will settle for Folgers. Does that guy from Venezuela just show up at your door on the donkey with the kind of coffee you like? Seriously, where does this much needed staple come from? How do I get a hold of the guy on the donkey? I think his name is Juan. If you see him let him know I am looking for him.

Laundry is stacking up. I thought I paid good money for this laundry machine. Why isn't it doing my laundry? I keep throwing my clothes in the laundry basket but I am not seeing any new clean clothes in my closet. I have a Kenmore. Do I need to call the maintenance guy? Maytag? Do I have the wrong brand?

Clearly, I am lost. The only thing I do know is I am watching a lot less wheel of fortune and a lot more of ESPN. So apparently the TV is fixed. That's all I know. If you see my wife let her know she needs to call some repair people. Oh ya, and tell her to come home!

Goofy was on the case

We put an APB out on our video camera and hired the majority of Disney characters to see if they could sniff it out. Soon after employing these characters we realized they don't talk so that caused a problem. There is only so much pantomiming one can do to find a camera. Donald Duck was especially worthless. All that quacking and nothing to show for it. Mickey, well known, but all that fame has gone to his head. He's constantly showing off. Probably for Minnie's attention. Those two spent the entire week flirting. Then we met Goofy. We know he's not the smartest pup at the pound but he's got a good sniffer. On Tuesday we got a call that Goofy picked up the trail of our ineptness and followed the scent of happier days in the magic kingdom only to discover good things do happen there. Tinkerbell of all people found our camera flying around and apparently all that pixie dust she spreads around actually works. She has some weird thing for Goofy and gave him the heads up. So Goofy comes out of this thing looking like a hero. We get a call on Wednesday morning and all we can hear is dead air on the end of the line. I thought it was a prank call. Turns out it was Goofy pantomiming he found the camera. We hang up. We get a call a minute later from lost and found saying they found it and they will ship it to us. Well, well, well. Who knew? Just when all faith in humanity is lost Goofy comes through in the heat of sincere disappointment to add a little hocuspocus to your pedestrian work day.

In the mean time I went out and bought a mirror hard drive with data encryption that holds 2 terabytes of data. Exactly. I don't even know what a terabyte is but this "system" is designed to back up a network of 20 PC's in a small business environment. Clearly, this was the solution to losing our video camera. I bought the terabyte system when we lost the camera. It was the moment when your wife cleans the fridge and you go out and do the man thing. You know, buy the biggest, most obnoxious over the top solution you can find to prove your point that even though you are a first class moron you are still a man and can fix this situation. Yup, well have that base covered. So the multi-terabyte machine arrives the same day the video camera shows up. Huh, well I guess I will be spending my weekend running back ups that apparently this over the top system can do automatically on a nightly basis and is big enough to add data for the rest of our lives without running out of space. It's sort of funny how one situation allows for such redemption later in the week.

On the Quinny front he is officially the bruiser of daycare. Wonderful. He's biting everyone in sight. It's weird. I haven't seen him attempt to bite anyone at home in months but he is chomping through his peers at a record rate. We got a call during the day today to let us know we may need a conference. We just need to stall a little while longer. We haven't told them we are leaving yet and they like us. We pay on time. Apparently, that's odd these days. So, we aren't quite sure if our duty is to go through with the conference or simply let them know our days our numbered. We anticipate retaliation so we think the best strategy is to continue to stall. I'm not sure how we can change his behavior when he doesn't do it at home. Obviously, I don't want him staking out his territory by biting the other kids I want him manning up and punching those kids. Kidding! Only kidding.

I was in Cedar Rapids, are soon to be new home in less than 5 weeks. I need to pack! And my duty this week was to visit daycares. I walk in and say, "Well, I am a bit out of my element. I have a list of questions I need to ask that my wife prepared for me. And if you could just tell me what a good mom would ask and answer those questions too I would appreciate it." She was very nice but I noticed the kids in the place weren't very big. Not sure what those Iowa people are fed up there but it appears steroids aren't in the water table. I know he's going to be biting all of them so I ask how they handle that sort of thing. She explained territorial biting. This is when you are in my space and I don't use my words so good yet so I explain my position by taking a healthy chunk out of your forearm. Take that communication. I can only imagine how effective that would be in the work place. I guarantee there would be significantly less conflict. If one, however, goes for the face, well that's a sign of a future serial killer so you're probably going to want to get some counseling. Glad we cleared that up. My kid is only going for your hands and arms. If they would stop taking his toys he would stop eating them. It seems simple enough.

He weighed in this week at 33 pounds. He's going to be a monster. He's wearing size 3. As in nearly twice his age. Yowsers. I am going to be buying a lot of clothes. I hope number two isn't shrimpy or we are going to be doling out a lot of groundings for sibling poundings. Here are a few pics. I hope everyone has a great weekend. Finding the camera was a serious highlight so we are looking forward to backing up everything including our 1984 Polaroids and wearing a smile while doing it.