Moving In

Well, we're in the new house. It's been a pretty busy past few days. On Friday we drove up with Shelby's dad to San Jose and picked up a 25-foot moving truck from Penske Truck Rental. Bright and early on Saturday morning, we drove over to the storage space and started loading up the truck -- I thought that this was something that would only take a few hours (ha!) and that we'd be on the road around noon (ha!), but I was wrong -- for us to have any hope of fitting our stuff in, the whole process called for mathematical precision and much deliberation. We finally started back towards SoCal around 6 PM, and pulled into Torrance around 1:30 on Sunday morning.

(Side note: if you need a moving truck, go to Penske! They charged us several hundred dollars less than U-Haul would have, and our truck was in pristine, nearly-new condition -- whereas anything I've ever rented from U-Haul was a rolling jalopy just one falling-off body part away from some kind of major accident.)

Things really swung into high gear on Sunday, starting at eight in the morning, when I had to call AAA for someone to come unlock the rental truck -- in my bleary state upon that morning's arrival, I'd locked the keys in the truck. After a titanic struggle (and a $45 charge for unlocking a "commercial vehicle"), the AAA guy finally got the truck open and I made it to Anaheim, getting there an hour after I'd told everyone helping us to show up. In the alley behind the house, I finally did what I'd managed not to do, after four hundred miles of driving oh-so-carefully all the way across California -- coming around a corner, I scraped against a brick wall and left a nice, noticeable scratch/dent in the metal rub bars lining the sides of the truck.

After that, though, everything went pretty smoothly. Our combined families -- Shelby's parents and brother, my parents and brother -- got everything out of the truck in good order, with only a few scratches here and there (to furniture, not people; I swear that IKEA furniture has a special coating that invites scratches and marring whenever you move it ...)

Monday wasn't much different. The day began with a nice "welcome to the neighborhood" present from the City of Anaheim -- it turns out that Monday morning is streetsweeping time, and for leaving both our car and the moving truck out on the street, I collected $59 in parking tickets! (Yes, the "no parking" signs were there; I was just oblivious.) Next came the gas woman, to turn our gas back on; the exterminators that fumigated our house had the gas turned off to put their tent on, but neglected to tell the gas company that it was safe to come back and turn service back on. Then there was the Sears repairman, to replace our brand-new refrigerator's icemaker supply hose, which had sprung a leak around 11:30 PM the night before. (He didn't have the right hose -- we'll have to wait a week -- but juryrigged a repair that seems to be lasting for now.) After that, a deliveryman came and brought our brand-new wine cooler, which is still sitting all wrapped up on a shipping pallet in the garage. I spent the rest of the day unpacking boxes and waiting for a FedEx guy to bring my new office chair -- he'd tried to deliver twice before on Friday and Saturday, and left a tag saying that he'd come on Monday "between ____ AM and ____ PM". Of course, he never showed up. Two bright spots in the day occurred later in the afternoon, when we took the truck back to Penske -- not only did they overlook the mark I'd left in the side of the truck, they also didn't seem to mind that I'd only left it 7/8ths full (I tried to get in that last little bit, honest -- but achieving a full tank seems to require some kind of special secret trucker voodoo that I don't have).

And now we're at the Anaheim Public Library, using their (free!) WiFi hotspot, because not only has our DSL at the house not been turned on yet, they can't even give us an activation date for when it will be turned on. Grrr. I guess that it's all part of our induction into the exciting new world of home ownership.

Box unpacking continues at a decent clip; it's not the unpacking itself that's the problem, but the preparation of the space for the soon-to-be-unpacked items that's slowing us down. This is particularly true for the kitchen -- the previous owners covered every shelf and drawer with this awful shelf paper that's achieved a molecular bond with all surfaces, and then covered that with a layer of grease and unidentifiable stains. At least they patched and painted any holes that they left in the walls, though!

Someday things will calm down, we'll have the boxes unpacked, I can catch up on my sleep, and I'll finally be able to relax and enjoy having this new house ...