Archives for June 2021

Not Quite the Catastrophe Which Seemed to Loom

June 30, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

The “moving and storage” aisle at Home Depot. I’d been sent there in a rush because the mover said we’d need about ten “small boxes like that one [points to Home Depot small box on floor].” The aisle wasn’t closed that long — the forklift operator just had to take down a pallet of something-or-other, so it was actually a wise precaution to bar customers. But it did make me laugh — laugh hard — although I forced myself to pause long enough to get the photo.

That headline is a joke, of course. It seems to suggest it might’ve turned out to be a different catastrophe altogether — but no catastrophe at all, really… just really, really, really hard work for about four straight days.

We’re still not really done as of today, Wednesday. I have a few things to move to the storage units. (That assumes I can fit them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of the larger boxes and other loose items get, uh, “lost” should I pass a generic construction dumpster en route.) We still have a few things to get out of the refrigerator to be thrown out/recycled. We’re also storing a few things at our friend Leah’s house. And, finally, we’ve got several boxes of what-not to take down to The Stepdaughter’s house, for our first several nights “away” — that’s gotta be put in the car just for tonight.

…but all that stuff has to happen this morning, in anticipation of the arrival of the cleaning crew “sometime” this afternoon. (The woman who owns the cleaning service is Hispanic, and she and The Missus have been communicating via text messages in Spanish (at The Missus’s end, with the assistance of Google Translate). So there’s apparently a dense fog of gray clouding the arrival time.)

The agenda tomorrow suddenly much simpler: we get up, take showers, load our luggage into the car, check out of the hotel, head to have our routine labwork done prior to next week’s doctor’s appointments…

…and then we are g, o, n, e.

Packing for the Apocalypse (or Something Very Much Like It)

June 26, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

*Overload.* Hence, why I have to think really, really hard about the difference between “reasonably needed” and “”nice to have, just in case.” Note, for instance, the absence of anything that looks like toiletries. Note, too, my failure to restrict the colors to just a single pallette — at the “cool” gray-blue-black-and-white end of the spectrum. Sigh.

While The Missus was out yesterday afternoon, I took advantage of the absence of distraction (ha) to do my final-cut packing of clothes. Objective: aim to take no more than one large hardsided suitcase (with the zippered expandable option) and one good sized backpack. (Camera gear is already stowed separately.)

I think I can still get there, although I think the backpack may be too ambitious. Instead, at the moment I’ve got it down to the big suitcase, the smaller version of the same thing, and a small tote.

The basic problem: failing to make really hard choices, even allowing for the six-month cross-country climate. I made much of my original intentions: I figured I’d be able to get by on a couple pairs of jeans and a decent pair of slacks; maybe three pairs of socks; four sets of underwear; a couple T-shirts; two-three long-sleeved T-shirts — like that. And two pairs of shoes. My thinking has been that it’s no problem to look — especially to strangers — as though you’re decently dressed, even for two or three days running; you just have to do some judicious juggling of wardrobe, wearing everything a couple-three times, in different mix-and-match combinations, between laundry cycles. (Pandemic lesson #1!)

Surprise, surprise: it seems I have grown much more fond of a variety of clothing than I ever thought possible.

So at the moment I’ve got four pairs of jeans (Jeans, for gods’ sake!) Also four pairs of shoes,. The socks-and-underwear situation: ridiculous. Shirts and T-shirts are the worst offenders, through no fault of their own: “How can I leave THIS one unworn for six months to a year? And, oh, wait, THIS T-shirt and THIS overshirt look just right together…!”

It really is like the title of this post says — I’ve got to make myself think in terms of the emergency cliche: “The air-raid sirens are warbling. What must you absolutely grab before running out the door?” At least I have the luxury of stopping to select items only by considering their versatility, and just letting the rest go to storage.

And now, of course, the situation grows desperate, because there’s so much stuff still to do other than Taking Care of My Wardrobe.

P.S. Remind me to tell you about the time I wasted yesterday simply getting a couple of duplicate keys made. And I did manage to (a) get boxes for a big-screen TV and a medium-sized one, and (b) drop off a couple bags of Goodwill donations, while failing to take care of the key situation. So, not a total loss.

A Final-Week-Here Night’s Dream

June 22, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

I guess it’s no surprise that my sleep “pattern” has been all over the map for the last few weeks. But last night, I had an especially vivid dream — dream fragment, really…

As you read below, it might help to know that I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon organizing our main storage unit: trying to clear some floor space by shifting cartons around, stacking them higher, and so on. (Not as easy as it might sound; some of those boxes are h,e,a,v,y. To say nothing of the challenges of, say, lifting weird-shaped objects — wicker furniture and so on — so they’re on top of all the square/rectangle-type items.) The idea is to be absolutely sure we have enough empty space to store our furniture and other things we’re not taking with us on the trip (including the spare refrigerator in the garage). By last night, oh boy howdy how my arms and legs ached! So when I got into bed, I figured I’d conk out pretty quickly.

That didn’t happen. First, I read for about an hour. When I finally turned out the light a little after midnight, I tossed and turned for an hour, my mind a-roil with all the things I needed to remember to do today, or tomorrow, or this weekend… which (naturally enough, I suppose) led me to remember related things I had not yet done.

But finally I entered that blissful sort of half-consciousness in the last 15 minutes when I know, yes, “I am falling asleep now…!” And that’s when I had this dream (fragment):

I was in an enclosed space, darkened but not pitch-black, surrounded — crowded, really — by all kinds of objects bigger than myself. I had some narrow sort of alleyways I could walk around in; at the end of one of these, a sort of cul-de-sac, my attention was focused on one thing: atop a stack of cubical objects, about head-high, I was struggling not to let another pile topple over on my head. Specifically, the avalanche threatening me was a to-the-ceiling pile of…

…bicycles.

*Yeah, kinda like this. Only imagine these things piled atop a wobbly stack of cardboard moving boxes — the stack itself about five feet high — which you must stop from falling on you.*
[Photo edited from one posted on Flickr by a Mary Anne Clarke Scott, whom I don’t know.]

You probably don’t need to be a psychologist to read much into this, and i don’t think it has a damned thing to do with an exercise program.

Making Room (or Trying to, Anyhow)

June 19, 2021 by John 3 Comments

Important: **not** one of our suitcases. (Found it on Flickr, title “Broken Luggage,” by a photographer — Swedish, I think — named Mats Linander.) It just seemed to get the right idea for this post across, visually.

Packing clothes for a five- to six-month (or longer) road trip involves waaaaay more hair-splitting and decision-making than I’m comfortable with. While I was working I might have, say, 15-20 “business shirts” hanging in the closet — not counting the dozen or so which might be in the laundry basket after a couple weeks. So now, suddenly, I’ve gotta think, Let’s see: say I want to get everything into no more than one big suitcase for extended stays and one “go bag” for overnight stays… Suppose I want to pack for 2-3 weeks between laundry cycles, averaging 2-3 days per shirt (keeping them in rotation so no strangers would ever see the same ones twice… So I should be able to get by on maybe five shirts? In varying combinations with different undershirts, and of course socks and such? It’s hard to think in these terms. (Aside: yes, I know — this is very much a First World problem!)

You better believe the anguish is not confined to my own wardrobe. (You should see The Missus practically weeping as she packs away pairs of shoes for storage while we’re gone.)

It’s kinda funny to think about those old Hollywood movies in which people board a train for a two-week trip to California, say, and a porter follows along behind them, pulling a dolly piled high with trunks, suitcases, duffel bags, hatboxes, maybe a potted plant…

The problem of course: our “closet space” en route — the interior of the car — is so constricted. Besides clothes, shoes, and toiletries, we also need room for:

the “car emergency” stuff I mentioned a couple days ago, and the “passenger emergency” stuff I haven’t said anything at all about;
a cooler;
my camera-gear backpack;
a couple full-size pillows, maybe a blanket or two, and a “travel pillow” (I think that’s the technical term for the little thing The Missus likes to have on long trips);
various electronic devices (laptops, phones, Kindles, and the cords we might need to charge them all);
entertainment for the stays of more than 1-2 nights (cards, board games, Nintendo Switch, and the Roku and Chromecast devices which will let us watch all our regular TV)…

…and that’s just the stuff I remember off the top of my head.

Anyhow, we spent today boxing up (or holding for donation, or throwing away) the clothes we definitely will not be taking along with us in a couple weeks. All of this stuff (plus much else, of course) will end up in storage for however long we’re gone. I can’t speak for The Missus, but I can’t help wondering why I bothered accumulating it all in the first place.

On Not Worrying About the Car

June 17, 2021 by John 4 Comments

Some of you, like us, may be wondering about our car’s condition for a 15-20,000 mile road trip… Shown here is the “car emergency” kit, as distinguished from the “passenger emergency” kit. (I’ll have more about the latter later.) It seemed important to put this together… even with our premium-level Triple A service, we can’t count on their reaching us if we’re stranded in, say, Death Valley. (Gulp.)

In this plastic bin, if you look hard enough and in the right places, you’ll see these things:

Various instruction booklets/pamphlets for everything else. Especially important since we’ve actually used none of them yet!
A little doo-dad — the technical term is “dongle” — providing some spare USB data and charging ports. The car already has two of these, both in the front seat. This dongle thing plugs into the old-style cigarette-lighter outlet, adding up to five additional USB ports. Especially important since we’ve got two phones, two tablet-type devices (The Missus’s iPad, my Google Chromebook), and several other things we may need to (re)charge along the way.
A car-tire compressor, to inflate all four tires, if we need it.
A car-tire repair kit for patching flats, slow leaks, and so on. Especially important if the previously bulleted item comes into play (haha (ha?)).
A car jump-starter power pack, including jumper cables.

I was most impressed with just the existence of the latter. All the jump-starter thingums I’ve ever dealt with, in the absence of another car battery of course, have been fairly bulky things which require being plugged into an AC outlet. But these new devices are 100% portable, powered by lithium-ion batteries which can — yes! — restart a freaking car. It can be recharged from the car’s cigarette-lighter port, once you get the car restarted (duh), and also has a couple USB ports of its own for powering phones etc. while en route, as well as a gonzo flashlight.

P.S. I should add, on this general subject: the car is spending the day at our regularly reliable mechanic today — doing the complete 50,000-mile checkup (with repairs/replacement as needed), and also getting four new all-weather tires. So you (we) can all stop sweating over this stuff… due diligence done!