Friday. We are home and today we have to unload the truck. I slept poorly last night, I’m not even sure that I got any sleep at all. I had some insomnia from staying up too late. Then I had a bit of a stomach ache that made falling asleep harder. I might have drifted off some, but was never really sure that I got any sleep.
So Dominica got me up just after ten and said that it was time to clean out the garage. We have to completely empty the garage before we can do anything else. So that was the first job of the day. Opening the garage door (it is so full that we cannot enter from the house!) and starting to move everything out into the drive way.
We immediately discovered so much stuff that we had no idea was in there. Rachel even found some of her stuff, and some of her mom’s stuff. Everyone has stuff that has been forgotten about in our garage!
With pulling everything out, we managed to go through all of the boxes and throw out loads and loads of stuff. And we found stuff to donate. There really was not all that much left when we were all done. We put that stuff back in and got it all organized. With the garage cleaned up and swept, it really doesn’t look too bad.
Then the real fun began. Paul pulled the moving truck into the alley and got it backed up to the garage door. I can’t believe that he was able to maneuver it in that tiny alley. With the back of the truck at our garage door, the front was in the middle of the alley. So we fully blocked it.
Rachel took off around noon. She is staying at her grandmother’s tonight, and might go to Austin this weekend. She isn’t sure yet.
Early in the day, Paul had used his pickup to move the CanAm side by side on its trailer back onto the front yard where it now sits against the fence. That will not be able to stay there for long. But at least it is out of the street.
We opened up the truck and started unloading. We took it in spurts and it went on all day. A twenty four foot box truck is not small. We put boxes and stuff all over the house, trying to get everything as close to where it would eventually go as possible. The dining room (the school room) is filled with boxes. There are boxes in every room. My office filled up quite quickly, too.
The garage is so full that you can barely walk through it. But it is all neat and orderly. We have it set up so that we can pretty much find everything and we will be able to just take down one box at a time and go through it all. Our plan is to go box by box and make sure that we are only keeping absolutely essential things and not a bunch of stuff just planning to be in storage indefinitely. And what is left to put around the house or to heavily compress like the DVDs. Those we plan to go through, convert all onto our NAS, throw out all of the cases and stuff, and to just store the DVDs themselves on big spindles and likely store those up in the attic purely for legal reasons, not because we will ever want them again. That alone will eliminate nearly twenty boxes! We need to do something kinda of similar with the CDs, although I am not too sure about the cases with those. But we might deal with them in a similar way. That’s nearly another twenty boxes. There are thousands of DVDs and CDs. At some point, we need to do it with BluRays, too. But they take up a lot less space.
The girls kept themselves busy playing House Flipper, which Liesl got for her birthday all morning. Then mid-afternoon they switched to playing Broken Age together. Luciana has never played Broken Age before even though it is Liesl’s favourite game and she can even do speed runs on it now. For days they have been talking about it and Liesl has been explaining all of it to Luciana in the hopes that they will be able to play it together. So now they are.
The truck was totally empty by probably around six. We put on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the one where Tess is taken over by the alien and tries to overthrow a government. Paul ran out and picked up Taco Bell for dinner. The house has no food in it, and no one has any energy at all. I can barely move, I am so stiff. Nothing really hurts, my muscles are just really, really tight.
Tomorrow is Isabella’s birthday party that we raced back from New York so that the girls could attend. There has not been a moment to take them to go shopping for gifts yet. So once we were done eating, Dominica and Paul took the girls out to Justice to see what they could find. They have to be up early in the morning to get to the party. That is going to be rough.
I took a long, hot shower, which I really needed after today. That helped my muscles some. When I got out I was so tired and it occurred to me that I am an adult and I can go to bed whenever I felt like it. So at eight o’clock, after having been awake for only ten hours and having moved boxes and stuff all day long, I just went to bed.
So a very short, but extremely productive day. There is more to do tomorrow. We did not take the big furniture items off of the truck today, those are for the morning, hopefully when we might have a little help. There is no way that we could handle doing them today.
I am worn out, but so happy with our progress. It was so much easier to unload the truck than to load it. Not so cold, either. Ha. It is nice knowing that this massive job of cleaning up the barn and storage in New York, getting the truck to Texas, getting things unloaded, cleaning up the garage, is all done. This has been hanging over us for so long. And there were so many unknowns. We didn’t know if we were really going to be able to get all of this into the garage of not. It easily might not have fit.
Now for sleep and recovery. One more day and we will be done with it all. Then we can get down to the job of unpacking, deciding, and getting the house in order.