Settling In. Or, rather, heading steadily in that direction
August 12, 2007
Julie closed on the house on Friday afternoon, then picked up the kids from the Leathermans’ house and detoured back to the house so they could see their new home en route to Wadsworth. Grandma Pam had the kids through the weekend while Bob and Julie (and, separately, Brett) headed out early Saturday morning to meet the movers.
The movers arrived at 8:00 AM and “finished” at 10:30 PM that night. Rightly so, Julie was somewhat miffed, as the driver (the one guy who was in Austin as well and, it turns out, is compensated, basically, on the delta between some fixed amount based on Graebel’s quote and how much he can actually get the job done for — he has to find and hire all of the helpers, and his philosophy, clearly, was to underhire on both ends) explained that he had trouble finding movers to hire in Columbus, so he only had two of his friends with him. Needless to say, since Graebel picked the date they were going to deliver, and Julie had agreed to a Friday-through-Monday window, it did not really seem acceptable that they picked a date that they were not then adequately able to staff.
In the end, Julie and her dad wound up doing some of the re-assembly of furniture that the movers should have done. But, according to Julie, the movers were so dead on their feet by the end of the evening that she was concerned for both their safety and the safety of our stuff if they tried to continue. The “biggest casualty,” of the move (not counting the hot tub, which didn’t make the trip at all) were the bookshelves that Tim built with Gregg Sales back in 2000. They snapped the top completely off of it. Our guess is that they lifted it from the top — we’d always been careful not to do that in the past, but I completely forgot that we probably needed to put a sign on the shelves to pass that information along. So, I’ll have that repair job to tackle at some point.
As the movers slogged along, Julie did manage to get ~50 boxes unpacked. And, when I talked to her late this afternoon, she indicated she was surprised at how much additional unpacking she had accomplished today. She and Bob were heading back to Wadsworth this evening. Julie, the kids, and Marilyn will then be heading back down on Thursday. I’ll arrive either late, late Saturday night or some time on Sunday morning depending on what kind of time I make on the drive.
For my part, I did a good amount of loafing on Saturday. My mom and I spent several hours going through her lists of questions related to her new computer, many of which required making tweaks to her system setup. She’s now in good shape and relieved to have that task out of the way.
For dinner, we met up with Kim at Threadgill’s, where Driver was playing — the CEO of my company is the drummer, and they’re a fun band to go see. I then swung by Ron and Andrea’s house, as there was a mini-Hardin-Jefferson reunion of sorts under way due to a confluence of circumstances. The discussion teetered on the brink of too many, “Remember when…” stories, but then seemed to get pulled back from that brink, much to the relief of the various spouses who were not Hardin-Jefferson alumni of the late 80s/early 90s…and to me!
My parents are off to Nevada tomorrow morning in a quest of a Himalayan Snowcock sighting. Their schedule allows for two ascents in their quest. With luck, though, they’ll see it on Tuesday and will have some added flexibility to do some other birding and meet up with some family in Reno.