Day 240, Year 11: Great Moving Day
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2016
Weather: Beautiful Sunny Day; High Temp 77 degrees F
Location: At Home with the Goldstones, East Falmouth, MA
We had a great moving day—great weather and great help. We made the move from the two storage units into the new apartment with loads of help from family, friends, and four college kids we paid to help us. If we have ever done good deeds for others, we were paid back in spades today. Mark was planning to be the ‘director’ of the kids we hired, telling them how to pack the moving van. But Mark woke up with pains in his stomach for the first time in weeks. We decided that I would take him to the apartment to rest while the moving van was being packed. But since I needed to be in the storage unit telling the kids what to load in the van, someone had to be on the other end to oversee the packing. In Mark’s absence, good friend Tom Porat did that. He and Detta drove down from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, this morning to help out. And in addition to bringing their expertise help, they brought a chest-of-drawers and a dresser from Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg’s home in Bow, New Hampshire. The college students did a great job. Thank you to Vincent (West Virginia University), Alex (Barry University in Miami, Florida), Kanieka (University of Maryland, Eastern Shore), and Thooba (University of California, Santa Cruz). These students are here from all around the country to study in Woods Hole for the summer. While they worked to load the van, Heather and boys arrived and by noon the moving van was full. We all drove to the apartment, ate some lunch, unloaded and headed back to get a few more boxes out of the long-term storage unit. We didn’t empty it because much of the stuff that is left there just won’t fit into the apartment. My hope is to find a new home for all the things left behind by the end of June so we will be rid of storage unit payments. But if that doesn’t happen, we’ll just keep paying for that one unit for a couple more months. But the new storage unit we rented to hold things that came north from Windbird and the things from my niece Lynn’s condo in Lowell is now empty. Hurray! And our apartment is stuffed.
While Heather and Tom worked to assemble the bed in the guest bedroom and the dining table, Detta and I took the crew back to get that second load from storage. About that time my niece Candi and her husband Char arrived with the storage cabinet I bought from the Restore in South Yarmouth here on the Cape. Mark and I drove there on Thursday looking for a massive storage cabinet that would fit in our back hallway, but we came home empty-handed. We were looking for something a little more than four feet wide and two feet deep going from floor to ceiling. But we wanted something that looked like a piece of furniture, not storage shelves. What we found at the Restore were various entertainment center cabinets ranging from $50 to $350. We actually liked the cheapest one the best, but we just couldn’t figure out how to get it here. When we got home we searched online, IKEA and Amazon, and the cheapest thing we could find was $250 to $2,000. So that $50 cabinet at the Restore started looking really good. But it is an hour away from here and we didn’t think it would fit in the van. Then my niece Candi offered to drive down from Boston to deliver it to us today. That put the icing on the cake. So now we have all the furniture we can use in the apartment and we spent the last couple of hours of the afternoon actually starting to put things away in the kitchen. But it was getting late and Candi and Char needed to get back to Boston and Detta and Tom needed to get back to New Hampshire. And Heather, Mark, and I were all exhausted. So we called it a day and will continue tomorrow. Sam, Jonah, and Oliver had played beautifully all day, but they were getting tired as well. So we sent Heather home with the boys and Mark and I stayed in town to pick-up a sushi order for dinner. In this family, all good days have to end with a sushi dinner.
A special note of thanks to Heather and family for the house warming gifts they gave us today. We got two new sets of queen-sized sheets for our new bed and a fantastic little red canvas beach wagon. One reason the boys were so good today is because they gave each other rides in the wagon all afternoon. They went right to sleep tonight, so I think they wore themselves out. And I don’t think we’ll be far behind him. It was a great day that should be celebrated with a great night’s sleep.
