Back in Action

Here I am, blogging from my new place! Fair warning, I'm probably going to be full of tales of and thoughts on moving for the next little while. You can help make this a not-boring experience by sharing any tales and thoughts of your own on the subject!

I'm still in the process of unpacking, of course, but it's going rather quickly. I think the unpacking goes a whole lot faster than the packing... which matches up with the fact that on the actual day of the move, the unloading goes much faster than the loading. "Un" is speedier.

And while there are still boxes to explore, I've gone through all the breakables. I think I can state with some confidence that there was only one casualty of the move. And there's a sad/funny story to go with it.

Many of you know I have a rather ponderous DVD collection. And while I've stopped adding to it at the ludicrous rate I did a few years ago, it still grew enough last year that I went out and bought this giant, six foot tall rack to hold some of it. It looked really nice, held nearly half the collection, and generally felt like a good purchase.

But the thing was rickety as hell from the day I put it together. Nothing I'd done wrong... it's just I think the thing was engineered to hold the weight of what you'd put on the shelves, barely, and nothing else. I remember pushing into place against the wall felt a bit suspect to me originally.

One of my friends took charge when we came to move this thing. She'd had one just like it, and it had unfortunately gotten destroyed in her last move. So here's the plan, she says. We have to tip it sideways, not on its front or back, and walk with it like this, watch that we support it there... and so on. And sure enough, she and I carried the thing all the way down from my third floor apartment and out to the rental truck without a scratch.

Then we stood the thing up while we stopped to play "Tetris" in the back of the truck, trying to figure out where to put that, a dresser, and a bookcase that were all down there waiting to get on the truck.

And while we're there in the truck planning, a gust of wind comes along and blows the giant DVD rack over. It didn't just break, it shattered, into about a dozen little pieces.

Sigh. Nobody's fault but ours. But now, if we should ever have to move a third rack like this one, we've added one more data point about how to successfully do so.

In the meantime, I'm gonna have to pick up another thing to hold my DVDs.