We were originally planning on leaving last week, but it turns out that packing boxes of stuff into a truck is like trying to move a slinky dog by pulling on its head. Instead of moving the hindquarters, the body keeps expanding until what should have been “only a few things” fills half of your available space.
That being said, Rachel and her dad managed to save us a bunch of money by fitting all of our belongings into ten feet of truck space instead of the sixteen we rented. This feat was doubly impressive because of how incredibly hot it was outside, and how much the unventilated trailer amplified that. Example: Rachel burned herself more than once simply touching the metal sides. On days like this, 7-11s with inactive or unready slurpee machines should be summarily stripped of their franchise.
It’s nice to finally be done sorting through my belongings and separating the dermal layer from my fingertips with pieces of packing tape. That stuff is dangerous: at one point, Rachel tried to hold a piece in her teeth and wound up taking off the inside of her lip.
Finally, while we were looking for tissues to wad in Rachel’s lip to staunch the bleeding, Comcast characteristically added its own kicks. While they have no problem charging you immediately when you open an account and taking their sweet time to actually set you up, apparently when you cancel your service “Saturday” means “Friday afternoon.” We had to wardrive our last few days in the apartment and I didn’t get the chance to add my planned suite of additional podcasts to my iPod.
I’m going to be using Posterous to hold my bigger-than-a-tweet, not-quite-a-blog picture posts from the trip. My plan was to have a section of mistypedURL to integrate that stuff but like many things, it just didn’t quite get finished before we left the house.
Was it good for you, too?
What podcasts do you listen to?
For spoken word stuff, I listen to WireTap, This American Life, Freakonomics, and The New Yorker: Fiction.
For music I have All Songs Considered, Dance Department, and A State of Trance.
I used to listen to Downloadable Content from Penny Arcade, but they switched to videos and I haven’t had the spare attention to devote to watching.
That’s why when I canceled my Internet and electricity, I said to turn it off the day AFTER I moved out. Gotta be smart there Michael.
Adding insult to injury, when Rachel called to cancel she told them we’d return the equipment on Sunday. Their response? “Okay.” When we called on Sunday to find out their hours, it turns out they are closed all day on Sundays, and opened long after our departure time on Monday.
We still have the junk in the backseat of the car with the intent of mailing it back at some point.
“On days like this, 7-11s with inactive or unready slurpee machines should be summarily stripped of their franchise.”
Best line ever.