Moving is fun!

Coming home after a long car drive from Christmas in SoCal [in which The Man Club puked all over the back seat about 30 minutes into the 7-hour trip] to find a week’s worth of rain-soaked, moldering newspapers piled up outside our apartment door – after having spent literally twenty minutes fucking around on the phone to get a vacation hold placed – that’s fun, too. It’s so much fun, I had a complete shitfit and kicked the whole soggy mess off our 2nd floor corridor down to the ground floor below, taking out one of the complex’s carefully potted plants in the doing.

That actually was fun.

I was already in a mood. We got a late start home because instead of setting an alarm clock to wake us at the desired time, I allowed myself to be convinced to let The Man Cub get us up when he awoke, in the apparent assumption that he would rise at the exact time we needed him to.

Hard to believe a rock-solid plan like that didn’t pan out, but so it goes.

Every time I abdicate responsibility in a decision-making process, things end up going badly. But I never learn, mainly because I don’t want to come off as a tyrant, insisting on my own way all the time, but when I don’t… well, things just don’t pan out.

So yesterday was supposed to be our big pack-up-everything-the-movers-aren’t-moving day. I rose before dawn and began packing up everything the movers weren’t going to be moving. When The Missus woke up, she approached me about the babysitter we had engaged for the day. She began, “About the babysitter…”

“Ooh,” I said excitedly, my eyes alight with new hope. “You want to have her come over an hour early?!”

To make a long story short, it turned out, no, she wanted to do some shopping first, then take the babysitter out to lunch and then begin the big final push. So instead of the 10am start that would have allowed us to dispatch all the work we had left to do, her efforts started at 2pm and concluded a couple hours later when she informed me she had ‘hit a wall.’ So our apartment remains full of most of the stuff I had delegated to her, except for the stuff that we don’t have boxes for, that had we stayed on schedule yesterday we would have had time to go out and buy the extra boxes we need. So we’ll pay the movers to move it instead. It’s only money, after all.

So now it’s the big day of the Big Move. The movers are late, so I call them up. The home office is puzzled – they should be here by now! I concurred. They should be here by now. The home office promises to call the guys in the truck and get back to me. A couple minutes later my cell phone rings, it’s the truck guys. They had a little truck problem, and the truck is in the shop. Clearly, they didn’t think this was the sort of information the client would like to know. They promised me that they’d be here in 30-45 minutes. That was an hour ago, and counting.

Naturally, one of my newspapers deadlines at noon today. Had all our shit been out of here except for the furniture like it was supposed to be, I might have been able to hit my deadline, even with the truck late. Had the truck been on time, I might have been able to hit my deadline even with all the extra shit left to be moved.

As it is, I’ll undoubtedly blow my deadline. Sure do hope I get fired. That’ll show me!

I’m so excited to see what happens tomorrow when two more items outside of my area of absolute control are scheduled to occur – the satellite-TV guy and the internet guy both have appointments to come over and hook us up. I’ll bet they both go swimmingly.

I’m telling you, moving is fun. It must be, because we’ve moved an average of once a year since relocating to Christmas Island. This after having lived in my previous place eight years, and the one before that five.

I suppose I could just keep on writing forever this morning, waiting for the movers to arrive, but if I’m not careful, my carefully concealed mask of cynicism and dismay may begin to crack, just a little.

And I totally wouldn’t want to give the impression that moving is anything less than fun, fun, fun.