Moving Day

My function in life has decidedly changed as of late. Before, I was a husband, a student, a part-time employee at a coffee shop, and every so often, a musician, in that order. But since graduating, my priorities seem to have taken a bit of a mix up, sort of a “shaken, not stirred” kind of deal.

These days, I’ve noticed my life revolving more around the husband, lifter-of-heavy-things, carpenter, slightly more part-time employee of a coffee shop (now we call it a “café”), an amateur musician, and a student of … life … (a scholar?) in that order.

Even as I’ve written this, I’ve done all sorts of things – I’ve hung a flyswatter (“honey, I need a nail!”), I’ve taken the materials out and put them away, I’ve thought about my next project (installing some shelves into the bathroom), decided to ignore said project, tried to help with dinner, gotten in the way, and hoped my wife will finish dinner soon because my stomach can’t take it much longer.

Moving is not easy.

To begin with, you have to put everything into boxes. No, check that, to begin with, you have to go get a lot of boxes from your local whole-sale store (for us it was BJ’s), cart them home, get them into the house, and then put your lifetime accumulations of stuff in them. Then you have to put all those boxes back into your car (and three other of your finest friends’ cars – finest friends because they helped you move the heavy boxes) and cart them off to your new abode. Then you go get the rest of the stuff that doesn’t fit into boxes, like the couch, the bed, the bookshelves, the table … the list goes on … and bring that down.

Then you try to cram it all in. Space is short, as are tempers and emotions, and you pray to God that your marriage survives something as simple as moving from point A to point B.

The next two weeks are spent asking “do we really need this?” through everything you own, and trying to look as far down the road as possible to see if you do, in fact, really need that. Then you throw out or donate all the stuff you decide you don’t need, and probably a few other things.

And then you spend all of monday afternoon slacking off. It's a beautiful thing.