I realized that our new high-tech cyclonic vacuum cleaner has a whole lot of catch points along its hose that seem to bite down on anything that’s any rougher than a ball bearing, thus bunging up the works and causing 6-inch columns of solidly packed-in dust. On the other hand, I got to know my vacuum cleaner intimately in this process.
I got home and
pirateguillermo had been a busy little bee himself, unpacking and making decisions about the eventual home of our stuff. Packing is easy – everything goes into a box. Unpacking is so difficult because nothing already has a home and you have to look at each individual thing and make a decision. Most of my decisions are starting to involve the trash. I realized why I was so unprepared for the move. My expectations of the capacity of a box and the actuality are far different. For instance: I believe that I should be able to put the entire contents of my dresser into a single box. After all, I can quite capably pack for a two-week vacation in a single suitcase, so why not one box? The reality is that it took something like four boxes for just my dresser. Four. This is why it took hundreds of boxes to pack my house, rather than the 50 or so that I was thinking it should take.
We went up to the road to check out our mailbox and came to the realization that the people that had lived there before us had taken it. There were the neighbors mailboxes, nailed to their posts. And a giant hole where ours would have been, had the prior tenant not ripped it clean out of the ground with the cement it was anchored in. Bastard.
