moving

Okay, I had no time to blog this weekend since we were moving the other half of our stuff and, yet again, we ran into problems.

We are moving less than 200 miles away and yet eight things have managed to go wrong during the move. Now if they had ruined the move or destroyed our belongings it would be sad and frustrating. Fortunately it somehow all managed to work out in spite of all of the bad stuff that kept happening which turns a poor me story into a great cocktail party story. It almost verges on being hysterically funny if you know me well enough to imagine my face as each new thing happened. Hint, I do not handle stress well.

Three weekends ago we rent a Uhaul van and schedule movers to help us unload the van when we get down to Claremont (Pomona area just east of Pasadena for those not familiar with the area).

We get to the Uhaul place just before 10am (when they are supposed to open) to find a sign on the door saying that they are experiencing a power outage and will open once ComEd has fixed it. The only problem being that the place had power as did the rest of the building. I called Uhaul in a panic and they couldn't get me another truck until 2 pm, way too late to meet the movers. The folks on the phone promise to try and find another truck. Meanwhile I am also desperately trying to reach this guy that we bought a sofa from and had made arrangements to see once we had the van to pick up the afore mentioned sofa. So we had no truck and I couldn't reach the guy with the sofa OR our movers to make sure that the delay wasn't ruining our chances of moving that day.

At around 11am, this guy shows up and opens the store. He tries to support his sign by claiming that the locks are electric and that he can't open them until the power comes on and uses his car key in the lock to show that it won't open (charming fellow clearly). Marius is really ticked off at this point and starts lambasting the fellow who tries to argue back -very badly I might add given that we've just seen him try to use his car key to open the door. Since none of the yelling was getting us our van, I interrupted to suggest that we would file an official complaint and start the paperwork so we can get the van. He claims that he can't print anything out due to the power outage and so begins to fill out paperwork by hand. By the time we leave the place, it is noon and, as we will later find out, we are missing a second copy of our rental contract.

We do manage to get the sofa and get the van loaded but the delay has put us smack in the middle of Saturday afternoon traffic and it takes us an extra hour to get down to Claremont where the movers have been waiting for us for hours at this point. They were very kind and did really wait in a fast food place near our new complex until we got there at 5:30pm (2.5 hours later than our contract with the movers stated). They didn't have the third person I had paid for but it turned out they could get everything into the apartment in plenty of time and we even had time left over to go and pick up a used refrigerator that we got off of Craig's List. We then drive to drop off the van. I'm sitting in the van trying to see all of the paperwork before locking up and depositing the key in the drop box when I hear what sounds like gun fire (it wasn't but I won't tell you what it was or you'll laugh at us). Marius suggests we get moving and we discover that we don't have the second copy of our contract to deposit with the key and there is a $50 fee if you don't deposit a copy of your contract with the key. We finally decide to drop our only copy of the rental agreement and figure we'll be completely over charged and will have no evidence to support our claim but hope it will be less than $50.

This was our first weekend in the place. Marius drove me back to Santa Barbara after we dropped off the van and life was good (once we had gotten the light bulbs that exploded upon our arrival replaced and put in a request for new keys since the first set we got didn't fit).

I drove back down the following Sunday for a new faculty orientation.

The orientation was fun and useful. The apartment was not. During the 48 hours I was there, the clothes washer flooded the closet and guest room that it was in (to the point of water seeping through the ceiling below), a stove burner wouldn't turn off and got stuck on high for several hours and we lost several more light bulbs, each one in sequence timed to a few hours after the previous one had been replaced by our lovely new maintenance man, Jorge. He really is nice and we should know given the time the poor man had to spend in our place.

It turns out that the stove has a faulty wire that was quickly fixed. The washer was a different story. Jorge checks the installation and there is nothing wrong with it. The official appliance repair guy comes and says that the pipe feeding water into the washer is cracked. Marius takes a closer look and realizes the "cracks" are actually rodent teeth marks. Oh yes. That's right, a mouse is eating our clothes washer. To make it even better, we think that we may have brought the mouse down with us when we moved as we had stored a few boxes in a shed that then developed a rodent problem. But we really have no idea about the mouse except that, of course, it is the one mouse that our cats have no interest in killing.

Move forward to this weekend. Uhaul has confirmed our van rental. I talk to a woman who tells me that the only truck available is in Oxnard (45 minutes down the highway) but that the office will open at 7am and we can pick it up at any time from then on. A few hours after this phone call, I get a second one from the Oxnard office confirming our pick-up for 2pm!!! When I pitch a fit (albeit a polite one) the guy tells me to call back in an hour to see if they are expecting more vans that might be available earlier. I do and am told that there should be one free around 10:30 or 11ish and that we should just call to confirm before we leave to pick it up.

I call the following morning and the woman on the phone has no clue that I was told this but manages to arrange for a van for us within 40 minutes. We show up, get the van and one block away I realize that they didn't confirm that they had put the utility cart we had rented into the van. I stop and open up the back to see. No cart. So I run back to the place and ask for one and just as I get it, Marius pulls up to make sure that I got the van and everything. This is a very good thing as it means I can just throw the cart into the back of his car and run back to the van before getting a ticket for parking in a no parking zone. We get back to Santa Barbara around 2pm. We had scheduled a mover to arrive a 2pm. The last time when we had used movers to help unload, they called us repeatedly to verify time, location and other fun details. We didn't hear once from the mover in Santa Barbara. We were beginning to think the guy wasn't going to show. We were right.

Fortunately we really only had half a van worth of stuff to take down so Marius managed it all without developing back problems to match my own. Moving is fun!

P.S. The mouse is now dead and the gun fire we thought we heard was a big fireworks display that was timed to only have one explosion at a time. We did eventually look up.