moving
Moving to a new faraway place is very stressful. Moving across the Sierras in the dead of winter is even more stressful. Planning the move is a slow motion meat-grinder where the tension ratchets up a little each day as you scan the weather forecast for the best time to lock in the moving van until eventually the Big Day comes when you somehow get it done, and when it's over you're left in a post-traumatic haze, alone in a cold and alien place. (but perhaps I over-dramitize :)
Going Away
The coolest thing I did was organize a going away party for myself (Saturday, January 8) that was, if I may say so, a Great Success, possibly even Epic! I took lots of pictures that I will post, and over the course of the afternoon about eighty people passed through. Thank you friends!
When am I moving?
Good question. My stock answer was when there are three consecutive days of good weather. As you may remember, a generational, hundred-year series of storms hit the California coast in the days before and right after that weekend, dumping seven feet of snow in the Truckee Pass and three feet right here in Reno, which averages 2-3 inches a year! This did ratchet the stress again.
Early in the week, Saturday-Sunday looked plausible so I booked the U-Haul for Thursday, figuring the extra day(s) of truck rental would be worth it to take my time packing the truck.
By Thursday the forecast had morphed to chance of snow on Saturday, so I made the decision to wait until Monday. Thank you Chris Salisbury for the kind offer of helping on Saturday. Also, my friend Austin stepped up to the plate to help me move at a reasonable hourly rate!
Things started off very badly, the nadir was at the beginning, I'm happy to say, when another friend put >$1000 damage into MY truck by starting it, putting it into reverse and jamming it up against a telephone pole two feet away. Oh, the stress!
After that, things went pretty well:
Thursday
- got the truck
- got my stuff out of Martha's storage area
- drove Austin's truck over to IKEA to pick up the Alesund bed upon which I had become fixated
- moved big items out of my apartment
Friday
- cleared out my storage area in Sausalito
- I packed more, ferreted all my shizzle of from among everyone else's shizzle in the crawl space of the big yellow house, started piling boxes outside, broke down my shelving, all that depressing stuff.
- made my valedictory Friday Happy Hour appearance, then Daniel came over to help me watch the Warriors lose, then I returned for a very forgettable Sweetwater band, but the wondrous Holly was there to dance with, so yee haw!
Saturday
- clean the apartment
- made my valedictory Sweetwater visit for the always enjoyable Austin deLone. I seem to recall being a little drunk and hyper-reactive to the buttheads around me -- there's that stress again!
Sunday
- My whole life is now either in the truck or outside my apartment in boxes, and there is a LOT of it. So we unpack and repack the truck, boxes first. Took about three hours and went remarkably well! Austin is a good packer.
Monday, the Big Day
- 5:30 Austin wakes me up, we carry out the TV (had to have it last night), bedding and food.
- 6:00 we leave
It was an amazing, dreamy trip.
-dark when we leave,
-pretty heavy fog from Novato to Auburn, about 120 miles,
-cleared a tad at Vallejo, got a smidge of really pretty-looking sunrise, then back into the fog,
-the Sacramento River area was weird in the fog, little glimpses of rice fields and endless flatlands.
-Austin driving the U-Haul like a maniac. I was supposed to follow right behind him, but I lost him in MV and never saw him again till Auburn -- how did we ever function without cell phones?
-At Auburn more or less exactly, we drove above the fog. This is pretty common, I think. Auburn is right at the edge of tea Great Valley, when one finally starts to get a little elevation. It also fits with my last trip from Reno, where I descended into the soup at pretty much the exact same place.
-Within twenty miles, somewhere between 3000 and 4000 feet, the snow started lining the road. Then the trip stayed weird because there was 6-8 feet of snow lining the highway all the way over the top and down the grade to Reno. Beautiful!
Coming into Reno (10 AM-ish) capped the other-worldly feel of the journey.
The whole valley (Truckee Meadows, as the locals call it) was covered in a thick haze. Ice haze it's called, and it s been there every one of the three mornings I've lived here. Yesterday it caused something like sixty accidents including a nasty pileup on I-80.
Amazingly, Austin and I emptied the truck in less than three hours. The truck would not fit into the parking garage, so the basic flow was that Austin would unload the truck and roll stuff over to my elevator (a couple of shopping carts are kept around for just this sort of thing). I would schlep it into the elevator, ride up, schlep it back out again and into my new home. This had many advantages, the best was that the guy schlepping through the snow was NOT the same guy making tracks across my clean carpet. Not to mention A had packed the truck, so who better to unpack it, and I presumably had a better idea where things things should be dropped in my new home.
By 2:30 we had returned the truck and were back at my happy home. I bought A a plane ticket home, forked over the ca$h, and he walked out the door! Amazing. I don't know if he was just sick of looking at me or wanted to give me the private joy of starting my new nest or if he was that hot to sample the joys of downtown Reno (probably all three), but it sure could not have worked better for me!
Going Away
The coolest thing I did was organize a going away party for myself (Saturday, January 8) that was, if I may say so, a Great Success, possibly even Epic! I took lots of pictures that I will post, and over the course of the afternoon about eighty people passed through. Thank you friends!
When am I moving?
Good question. My stock answer was when there are three consecutive days of good weather. As you may remember, a generational, hundred-year series of storms hit the California coast in the days before and right after that weekend, dumping seven feet of snow in the Truckee Pass and three feet right here in Reno, which averages 2-3 inches a year! This did ratchet the stress again.
Early in the week, Saturday-Sunday looked plausible so I booked the U-Haul for Thursday, figuring the extra day(s) of truck rental would be worth it to take my time packing the truck.
By Thursday the forecast had morphed to chance of snow on Saturday, so I made the decision to wait until Monday. Thank you Chris Salisbury for the kind offer of helping on Saturday. Also, my friend Austin stepped up to the plate to help me move at a reasonable hourly rate!
Things started off very badly, the nadir was at the beginning, I'm happy to say, when another friend put >$1000 damage into MY truck by starting it, putting it into reverse and jamming it up against a telephone pole two feet away. Oh, the stress!
After that, things went pretty well:
Thursday
- got the truck
- got my stuff out of Martha's storage area
- drove Austin's truck over to IKEA to pick up the Alesund bed upon which I had become fixated
- moved big items out of my apartment
Friday
- cleared out my storage area in Sausalito
- I packed more, ferreted all my shizzle of from among everyone else's shizzle in the crawl space of the big yellow house, started piling boxes outside, broke down my shelving, all that depressing stuff.
- made my valedictory Friday Happy Hour appearance, then Daniel came over to help me watch the Warriors lose, then I returned for a very forgettable Sweetwater band, but the wondrous Holly was there to dance with, so yee haw!
Saturday
- clean the apartment
- made my valedictory Sweetwater visit for the always enjoyable Austin deLone. I seem to recall being a little drunk and hyper-reactive to the buttheads around me -- there's that stress again!
Sunday
- My whole life is now either in the truck or outside my apartment in boxes, and there is a LOT of it. So we unpack and repack the truck, boxes first. Took about three hours and went remarkably well! Austin is a good packer.
Monday, the Big Day
- 5:30 Austin wakes me up, we carry out the TV (had to have it last night), bedding and food.
- 6:00 we leave
It was an amazing, dreamy trip.
-dark when we leave,
-pretty heavy fog from Novato to Auburn, about 120 miles,
-cleared a tad at Vallejo, got a smidge of really pretty-looking sunrise, then back into the fog,
-the Sacramento River area was weird in the fog, little glimpses of rice fields and endless flatlands.
-Austin driving the U-Haul like a maniac. I was supposed to follow right behind him, but I lost him in MV and never saw him again till Auburn -- how did we ever function without cell phones?
-At Auburn more or less exactly, we drove above the fog. This is pretty common, I think. Auburn is right at the edge of tea Great Valley, when one finally starts to get a little elevation. It also fits with my last trip from Reno, where I descended into the soup at pretty much the exact same place.
-Within twenty miles, somewhere between 3000 and 4000 feet, the snow started lining the road. Then the trip stayed weird because there was 6-8 feet of snow lining the highway all the way over the top and down the grade to Reno. Beautiful!
Coming into Reno (10 AM-ish) capped the other-worldly feel of the journey.
The whole valley (Truckee Meadows, as the locals call it) was covered in a thick haze. Ice haze it's called, and it s been there every one of the three mornings I've lived here. Yesterday it caused something like sixty accidents including a nasty pileup on I-80.
Amazingly, Austin and I emptied the truck in less than three hours. The truck would not fit into the parking garage, so the basic flow was that Austin would unload the truck and roll stuff over to my elevator (a couple of shopping carts are kept around for just this sort of thing). I would schlep it into the elevator, ride up, schlep it back out again and into my new home. This had many advantages, the best was that the guy schlepping through the snow was NOT the same guy making tracks across my clean carpet. Not to mention A had packed the truck, so who better to unpack it, and I presumably had a better idea where things things should be dropped in my new home.
By 2:30 we had returned the truck and were back at my happy home. I bought A a plane ticket home, forked over the ca$h, and he walked out the door! Amazing. I don't know if he was just sick of looking at me or wanted to give me the private joy of starting my new nest or if he was that hot to sample the joys of downtown Reno (probably all three), but it sure could not have worked better for me!