A recounting of the past three move-infested days:
Saturday: 8am-3:15pm: Work. Activities include reading, consuming Otter Pops, reading, making a RR
3:15-3:30pm: Drive to parents’ house to commence with the moving, which is to be brief this afternoon as we have recently discovered that the owners of the house to which we are relocating for the summer aren’t ready for our arrival. Realize that while I have been stuck in an office, it has been upward of eighty degrees all day long.
3:30-4:00pm: Pow-wow with Mammason and babycarrot sister in an attempt to formulate a plan to avoid a week of vagrancy.
4:00pm-5:00pm: Be mostly less than helpful save the half hour spent aiding in the moving of two couches that once occupied our basement living room as I realize: a. I am exhausted, b. I haven’t eaten since 11:15am, and am getting hungry, and c. It’s upward of eighty degrees outside, and I want to sit by the pool.
5:00-5:30pm: Sigh joyously as my burning limbs receive grace and liquid sunblocking from The Pool, which so brilliantly and conveniently occupies the backyard of my grandma’s house where it has been decided I will be staying for the upcoming eight days of transience.
5:30pm-9:00pm: Memorial Day BBQ it up with my grandma, grandpa, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Burgers, Budweiser and Fat Tire consumed by all. Except for the little’ns, who are thus far only allowed to consume liquid crack
9:00pm-Goodnight Moon*Time: Quality ladies’ night with The Future Interior Designer at her place, wherein we run to the store to purchase broccoli and cheddar soup (see: odd, unexplainable cravings.) and watch In Good Company, which is, in a word: notworthwatching. Unless you find Dennis Quaid foxy (a premise for which I’m sure many a good case has been and could be made), and thus do not mind squandering 120 of your life minutes oogling his buns and subpar acting.
Sunday: 9:30am-4:00pm: Pack and re-pack and slide and pull and tug and sweat and lift and carry and stack and unpack a houseful of items deemed worthy enough to be transported to a new abode, or new comfy storage space. Somewhere within all of the sweating, stacking, and packing, I also: Playfully hurt my stomach laughing so hard at my mom and our uncanny and yet effective methods to fill the back of her truck (four times!) with our junk;
inhaled a slurpy from the nearby 7-Eleven; managed not to seriously break anything we moved, or myself, or any innocent bystanders. The managing not to damage anything in our outside of my personal space remains more than can be said of the two mystery tree killers who were apparently hired by Landlordio to fell a tree on our required day of moving, and did I mention it was a Sunday?, and in the process of chopping to bits a perfectly nice shade and oxygen providing tree, managed to deconstruct the backside of our side of the duplex when they chainsawed a top chunk of the stump and it came careening down and landed loudly atop of the kitchen area, after which we all watched with mouths agape as a large portion of the outside siding/gutters/roof overhang came tumbling down to the ground.
4:00pm-5:00pm: Too. Tired. To. Move; fall asleep on my grandma’s heavenly black leather couch while my grandpa watches Nascar.
5:00-6:00pm: Wake up long enough to stuff my face with Chinese take-out, and to listen to my grandma tell me and
cousin Kyle about the time her girlfriends ripped off her school uniform on the last day of school, as a joke, because they were funny, and because my grandma’s uniform was ratty and tattered, and besides my grandma was hot, and oh yeah, she was thankfully wearing a slip.
6:00pm-9:30pm: Feel mostly comatose as I attempt to interact with family, and unpack my bedding so I can finally fall asleep for more than a few hours, and watch the season finale (yes, a week later) of Alias wherein I decide that even Michael Vartan can’t save this show, and besides, it would appear the producers just killed his character, and anyway, if I wanted to watch zombie-like people hobbling about the streets, killing people for no reason, I would rent Shaun of the Dead, because at least that movie is funny.
9:30pm: Sleep. Blessed, blessed sleep.
Today, Monday: 11:30am: Awake to find that I have slept for fourteen! hours.
11:45am: Decide not to feel guilty for sleeping for fourteen! hours! after realizing that the sum total of my nightly sleep for the past two weeks has probably not exceeded five hours per night. Noon: Walk upstairs and yawn and watch as my grandma smiles knowingly and my grandpa laughs and commences with the teasing about how long I slept, as I comment on how the perpetual darkness that is the basement bedroom could prove to be problematic for
productivity this week.
12:30-1:30pm: Get my lazy fourteen hour sleeping behind into the pool for a much needed and refreshing workout.
2pm-6pm: Try not to feel guilty as I make an absurd hourly wage (holiday pay= double-time, baby, yeah!) to do literally nothing work related, because the majority of the city’s population assumes that we, like most medical/dental clinics in the area, are closed for Memorial Day, thus leaving the seven of us forced to work today with little to do besides read and paint our nails and stare out the windows imagining basking in the sun as opposed to basking in neon lighting.
6pm-8:30pm: Continue unpacking, and coffee consumption. Still battling leftover comatose feeling from yesterday. Realize that yesterday I also managed, for the first time in the history of my being, to sunburn my toes.
8:30pm: Call Daddy-O, the crossword puzzle savvy, golf-loving, basketball coaching, no baldness in his genes, kindly faced man, who came into our lives when I was five and has stayed ever since, and thank him for serving our country in Vietnam (among other places), and for surviving, and for the paying of the college tuition.
*For years when I was a child my mom finished every night’s bedtime ritual by reading us Goodnight Moon. Thus, the book to me is forever associated with being forced to prove I brushed my teeth, and with asking for one more glass of water, and with the inevitable embracing of Bedtime. If you’ve never heard of Goodnight Moon, chances are, your parents didn’t love you.