February 3, 2014: The Ralstons Arrive with the Truck

When I woke up this morning Dominica said that she thought that she had heard a snowplow so it must be snowing. I peeked out of the bedroom window and indeed, there was a lot of snow on the cars and the parking lot had been plowed. This is not going to be a good day for the U-haul to arrive and to deal with getting everything moved.

We talked to the Ralstons this morning and there it was sleeting in Winchester, Virginia where they spent the night so they were going to wait it out this morning and see how the weather progressed before deciding on what to do today. The twenty foot box truck is not something that you want to be driving in bad weather.

It took me two hours to get into the office. The roads were not atrocious but they were not good. I slipped and slid a bit on the way in, but overall it was fine just slow to progress.

Once in the office, much of the talk was about how bad the weather was going to be today. The snow was coming down even harder in Connecticut than in Westchester and it came down steadily all day. Very solid snow with the skies and ground white and only the dark of trees really visible outside.

I have discovered that both my Blackberry and my Windows phone are not working anymore. I got a replacement battery for the Blackberry, it fired up, I charged it and immediately the device was toast again. Putting this all together, I am pretty sure that the charger on my desk is bad and killed all three batteries. This is a huge pain. Thankfully that charger cannot be used with my iPhone or iPad.

Art and Danielle were on the road shortly after noon and were making good progress. I did not want to wait in the office to head home until it was dark so left early to take advantage of the sunlight and to stay ahead of them to make sure that I could get home and be ready before they go there.

The drive home really was not bad. I was ahead of rush hour so there was very little traffic.

I got home and we set about getting everything cleared and ready for the truck to unload. I beat the truck by about an hour. The girls are very excited that the truck is coming. They cannot wait for their stuff to be here. Luciana has been going on and on about wanting her table to get unloaded because she wants to be able to paint and she needs her table to do that. She probably asked to paint more than a dozen times tonight.

It was dark when Art and Danielle arrived. Dark and cold but the snow was not coming down although there was a lot of it on the ground. We got right to unloading the truck.

Dominica came outside to help and on her very first trip down the sidewalk, before making it up into the truck to get the first box, she twisted her ankle and fell off of the sidewalk spraining her ankle badly. She had to go inside and sit down. She could not walk at all. So we were down one person before we even got started. (Dominica later realized that this was probably a blessing, hurting her ankle saved her from possibly hurting her back which would have been far worse.)

It took many hours to unload the truck. Twenty feet of floor to ceiling, tightly packed boxes and stuff. It is truly insane how much stuff we own and move around. I cannot believe that we still have that much stuff and some small stuff could not make it and had to stay behind still in Texas: like our dehumidifier.

It was exhausting work and the outside was probably twenty degrees and the inside we let drop to sixty. Still I was drenched with sweat so going outside was horrific but I could not wear anything more than a polo or I would get too warm when I went inside and that would just make it worse.

We filled the living room and the kitchen and a number of things went straight to the basement and top floor too. Pretty early on we found Liesl’s dollhouse and she asked that that go straight to the basement as she had been missing it and she spent a few hours quietly playing with that all on her own. She also found a plastic bin of toys that she unloaded completely on her own too putting them all away in the basement. I have no idea even what was in that bin as it was empty by the time that I found it.

At about the sixty percent unloaded mark we ordered pizza from Nonna’s and had that delivered. Dominica had attempted to get Domino’s but due to the weather they had no means of doing delivery.

It was probably four but possibly five hours to unload the truck. Completely exhausting. Once it was empty we set about getting the bedrooms set up. We moved the queen bed into the girls’ room for Art and Danielle to use. We switched out the old beat up mattress that Dominica and I have been using for the last several months for the really good queen mattress that had been on the truck. We will be throwing out the beat up one that we have been using. We assembled our king frame and put the king mattress on there for us. This is the one that we were sleeping on in Texas most of the time. Now our bedroom feels very small. We brought up the black dresser too so we went from one queen bed to a king plus a dresser. But boy is the king bed more comfortable! Both more space and a firmer mattress that is not all beat up.

Tonight the girls are sleeping with us. With the king they actually fit with room to spare – although Liesl still tries to push me off of the bed most of the time. Dominica and the girls all went to bed and I took a long shower before turning in for the night. It was exhausting but it is done. Done for us at least.

Tomorrow morning Art and Danielle have to return the U-haul and pick up a Ford Fusion rental car. Then they are loading up several servers, the SAN and tons of miscellaneous stuff and shipping it all up to their place. So they have a bit to do yet in the morning and a full day of driving.

Hopefully Dominica’s foot will not be too much of a problem tomorrow. We are going to be very anxious to begin the process of unpacking everything. This is going to be hard as there is no room at all to maneuver anything around. And we really want to get the living room cleared so that we can vacuum and then Rug Doctor the entire thing. We are so excited to be able to actually clean the floors now. Oh, and somewhere in all of those boxes is the Roomba too!

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