/mike

Each of the last few days has been interesting to say the least. With my move currently about 25% finished I am definitely dreading the time it’s taken so far. There have been casualties on both sides and the coming weeks I can’t even guess as to how things will progress.

The weekend was full of packing and cleaning, more of the former than the latter though. During the entire week leading up to last weekend I had packed two or three boxes, not entirely enough to say the least. Saturday saw much more progress and Sunday was definitely crunch day.

Where things started to go wrong was with Uhaul. When I received my confirmation call I was told my truck would be a day late. Great way to start a move eh? A phone call to my parents to work out the details of family waiting a day before making the trip to help me out seemed to sort out that issue, although it still wasn’t easy with my Dad possibly not getting the day off work.

Hurdle number two was the pressure from our landlords wanting us out of the house by 4pm on July 31st. I’m not sure about you guys but normally that time is noon on the first of the month. Add to that the fact that my roommate was a bit of a procrastinator when it came to packing made Sunday night and Monday a bit hectic to say the least. Whatever, it was a problem and it was dealt with — boy do mood swings suck on moving day.

A casualty

Because we couldn’t get the keys for the new place until 2pm on August 1st, we had to set up shop in a hotel for the night. Since my roommate still had some connections at a place in town we ended up getting a sweet rate for the night. There were six of us staying in the room and there was enough bedding for everyone — told you she had connections.

My pet snake Phillip, an Albino Corn Snake, was making the move with us he waited in my car while I took my clothes up to the room. After about 20 minutes I went down to bring him up. In the room he was being a chicken and kept hiding under his water bowl but we could see that he was still there.

Morning came and we checked out of the room. I still have a couple friends that work at the hotel front desk and one of them wanted to see Phillip before we left. Due to the size of his aquarium I left it as the last thing to bring down. When I got to the front desk and took the lid off to show my friend I couldn’t seem to find Phillip. Since there is quite a bit of wood chip bedding in the aquarium I started to fish around — he likes to burrow in the bedding.

After a thorough search it became evident that Phillip had gone missing. A number of profanities and an extensive search of the hotel room yielded no results. Best bet was that he stowed away in someone’s bag or got loose in the hotel. As I found out this morning it seems that the most likely situation is the hotel. A casualty has been claimed. Dammit!

The one where I got internet access again

After a few interesting exchanges with my roommate — who, to her own defense was combating a headache, hunger and stress — I went to the Rob Zombie concert last night. I enjoyed the show and ended up back at the new place around 12:30am. My duties, since I’m house-sitting while my roommate is on vacation, were to stick around the house for the carpet cleaners and cable guy. Both decided to show up at the same time.

Neither worker got in the others way and the carpet cleaner was here for about 15-20 minutes total, including checking out the rooms and setting up the hoses. About half-an-hour later the internet was hooked up. I readied myself for the onslaught of unread emails and high count of RSS unread items. So far, after being online for two hours I’ve managed to take care of the emails and a few address changes. NetNewsWire is going to be a bitch when I open that up.

The part where I swear even more

Because I’m expecting a wire transfer any time this week I thought it would be fun to see if it’s gone through yet. As I quickly log into my online banking I’m slammed with a very odd number calling itself my balance. Oddly enough it looks like this so-called balance has lost some weight since I last saw him.

For the past few months I’ve been saving up in order to facilitate this move I’m making. I won’t say I’m rich but I’ve got enough to move, at least I used to. Curious about this new balance of mine I looked into my transaction history and there is a withdrawal of over $1,000 that I didn’t make. It would seem my balance went on the Atkins-South-beach-lipo-all-at-the-same-time diet.

After calling my bank the only information available about the transfer was that it was initiated by their head office. At that point there was no way to track the transaction. Oh lordy isn’t that just perfect. Now I have to pay $5 for my bank to put a tracer on the transaction just so I can find out where it may have gone. I’ll find out what happened in approximately 3 business days. Excellent.

The diet

Yesterday was weigh-in day and I missed it. The scale was somewhere in one of the trucks packed away in a box that I couldn’t get to. I did take a look at my body in the mirror though and damn I look good. Of course, by that I mean I couldn’t tell any difference from last week whatsoever. I feel good though and I definitely burned a lot of calories loading up two moving trucks, cleaning and unloading a moving truck over the last three days.

And how about you?

This has been one long-winded explanation of the last week of my life. Here’s the sad bit, I now get to sleep on an air mattress for two weeks, eat in a kitchen full of unpacked boxes — all of which contain the actual items I need to cook — and that’s not everything.

But really, who cares. How was your weekend?