I feel like my life for the last few weeks revolved around packing boxes, and for the next few months or years it’s going to revolve around unpacking boxes.
Tuesday was moving day. I guess the movers did an adequate job, except it seems that they were hampered by the fact that the guy who was supposed to pack us up the day before did about 1/4 of what he was supposed to do and buggered off at 11:30am when we had stepped out to do other stuff. But over all I’m not impressed with how much work we had to do before, during and after. I thought paying movers meant that muscular young men would do all the work while Vicki and I could sit around sipping our mai tais saying “oh, put that in that room, and be sure not to scratch it.” The reality was a lot sweatier, and a lot less satisfactory in terms of collatoral damage to furniture, door frames, plaster, etc.
For the last two days, I’ve been stuggling to get my office set up. It’s the most complicated, because of course I have to keep downtime on my server (this very server that hosts this blog) up and running as much as possible. Plus I’m trying (and not succeeding very well) to avoid having a rats nest of wires like I kept having at the old place, and also I’m trying to set aside an area for bill paying and other important papers, and another area for aviation stuff (charts and passenger headsets etc) so I can find it all when I want to plan a trip or leave for one. I’m slightly hampered in this by the fact that I can’t find one of my desks, one I took apart and now I can’t find where the movers put the bits.
Two days of work, and all I have to show for it are four empty boxes and a bunch of full shelves. Only about 6 billion more boxes to empty.
Another problem hampering this whole process is the fact that in many ways this house seems more cramped than the old house. This isn’t totally crazy, because this house is bigger, but most of that bigger-ness is in the living room, the dining room and the master bed room , and the hallways. The biggest problem is that we don’t have an equivalent to the finished basement in the old house. That was one large room that acted as library, computer room and entertainment center, and sometimes a bird room. In this house, we’ve got separate bird room, library, office/computer room, and the TV/TiVo/DVD/Stereo are going into the living room.
Oh well, back to the boxes.
Well, you seem to have been pretty successful on the “keeping downtime to a minimum” front — I only noticed a brief outage on the news server front in the office this afternoon. I hope the rest of the move goes as smoothly as possible for you!
As for avoiding rats’ nests, I used to have the most disgusting tangle of cables under my desks in the office. After one too many incidents of dead keyboard due to kicking the plug out of the KVM switch, I set aside a Saturday to unplug everything and do a proper job with properly-spaced cable ties, sensible routing and anchoring, and newly-assembled-to-length cables wherever possible. It was worth every sweaty minute.