Today is the big day, Brian and Tara left Little Rock, Arkansas this morning to drive the last stretch of highway to Irving with the UHaul full of our stuff. How exciting.
I went to the office this morning but had an interview to do over lunch so I came home to do that by phone. I’m willing to post that I did an interview because I already posted elsewhere how I was just doing it because they begged and begged me to do the interview and I had already turned them down several times. No one expects me to never, ever interview and I don’t do it casually but this was a ridiculous interview that, while being “tough”, even if I did well (later I was told that I did awesome) there is practically no way that they could even convince me to go do a face to face interview let alone take the position. And that’s exactly what ended up happening. The interview went fine and they really liked me but I turned down a second interview as the company just has nothing to offer. I had had to do the Brainbench Red Hat Linux technical assessment to get into this interview which, of course, I aced as I wrote it – ha ha. Which the very fact that I am the assessor for this job as well as the interviewee means that they can’t possibly be prepared to hire someone at my level if I am the bar by which they measure others!
While I was on the phone I saw Brian and Tara drive past the window with the trailer. I was not expecting them until late this afternoon and we had not even gotten around to arranging a storage unit yet! Oops.
I called into work and took the afternoon off so that we could deal with the trailer. Brian and I then went to the apartment management to see if there was any chance of being able to get a storage unit in our building. They have them but they are both too small and none are currently available. So that isn’t going to be an option.
Dominica hopped online and found that Public Storage had a location right down the street so we called down there and they were able to get us straight in for dirt cheap ($20 move in and $83 per month as opposed to $215 per month up in Peekskill!) So we set that up and we drove straight down to start unloading the UHaul.
It took a couple of hours but we got it all done this afternoon. The ten foot by ten foot storage unit filled up quite quickly. Dominica stood at the back of the UHaul doing her best to sort through everything as it came out of the trailer. This is important as she needs to take a large load of baby stuff down to League City in several days for Francesca because Clara is going to need things and she is due to join us in just twelve days. So we can’t bury that stuff in the storage unit today or we will be in big trouble.
It felt great to get the storage unit packed. That has been weighing on us for some time. Now we are saving money and our stuff is closer to us. We ran across the street to fuel up the Trailblazer and for me to grab ice cream. This was my first time ever getting ice cream at Marble Slab Creamery. It was very good but the portions are way larger than they should be.
Then it was back to the apartment where we had to unload the rest of the stuff – the stuff that we knew was going to go into the apartment rather than into storage. This included a lot of boxes and bins. It probably took another hour to get the UHaul completely unloaded. We were exhausted by this point.
The last major task of the day is to dump the UHaul. We looked up where it could be returned and raced across town to get there before the place was set to close at eight. We made it just as they were locking the door. So they let us just drop the trailer and leave it for them in the morning. Brian was quite excited to have the UHaul removed from the Trailblazer. He’s had to deal with that for about ten days now!
Brian and Tara decided that they were not going to stay in Las Colinas tonight and instead they got back into the truck and drove on down to Temple, Texas where they will be staying for almost a week. That is another two or two and a half hours of driving for them today. A very long day for them, definitely. We will see them again this weekend when we go down to Round Rock.
Dominica, Liesl and I just took the evening off and watched Soap. We were pretty tired. We also started going through all of these boxes that need to be sorted out. There is a lot of stuff to sort through. That is going to be our big project for the next few months. We need to find anything that we can do without and get rid of it while repacking, labeling, etc. what is left so that we are as prepared as possible for our next move.
