Today, right as Jarrod was getting ready to run out the door and drive the kids to school, he got a call from the U-Haul store. We were scheduled to pick up our truck on Tuesday evening, but the store closes at 1 pm this week, so could we possibly pick up the truck today? Answer: absolutely yes. An extra day to fill our truck? For free? 100%. I took the kids to school while Jarrod went into a minor spiral about how we would rearrange the next couple days.
The answer ended up being this: he would call the guys we had scheduled to help us load and see if they could come tomorrow, instead of Wednesday. Then we would finish packing today and do a leisurely load tomorrow. Well, minor issue: the guys couldn’t come tomorrow. They could come today. At noon.
So we spiraled a bit more, then ran out the door to drive to STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT, where we had scheduled our U-Haul pickup — it being the only location with a big enough truck available to us. Jarrod got the details of the truck worked out and gassed it up while I drove back with Liesl to meet the movers. The house? Total disaster. Not ready to load at all.
And yet, somehow, it happened. They got everything out that was ready to go — which was actually darn near all of it (thanks to my efforts of incremental packing, go me). Jarrod’s bedroom is still a disaster zone, but that’s his own thing to deal with. The rest of the house looked hideous after the guys left at 4:30, but I shuffled stuff around and organized it into zones, and things make sense to me now. Just as long as I don’t go into the bedroom. Which…is where I have to sleep tonight. Ugh.
Anyway, this leads me to the meat of this post: THE RANDOM STUFF BAG! I need to think of a better name for it. It’s this amazing hack that I sort of stumbled into when we moved from Alabama to Las Vegas and completely forgot about until today, when I re-discovered its amazingness.
Here’s the deal: kids are messy AF. They leave behind a tiny snail-trail of chaos everywhere they go. Doll earrings, K’Nex, LEGO, puzzle pieces, art supplies, whatever. You name it. So when we move our furniture out of the way, it’s all there: the coins, the PlusPlus pieces, the random keys that go to random diaries. Where to put it? You don’t want to just stash it at the bottom of random boxes. You want to make sure the pieces are eventually reunited to their respective LEGO sets, puzzles, and crayon boxes.
So here’s what you do: You get a Ziploc bag and just start throwing stuff in there. Anything small that has a home that’s probably packed away goes in there. You hand-carry that Ziploc bag to your new place like the precious cargo it is, then when you get there and unpack boxes, you put everything back in its place. Can I tell you how immensely satisfying that is? Because it is. It really, really is. Back in Alabama we had a little counting board that was made up of felt balls in 10 different colors, 10 balls each. Those suckers got everywhere. It was great to put the set back together when we rolled into Vegas.
It’s a bit of a silly hack, and I’m sure everyone who has ever moved with small children has figured it out one way or another, but I want to commemorate just how cool it is. So there.
Today, as you may have ascertained, was crazy. But I still got a little bit done out of my regular lineup of things.
Listened To: All of the K-Pop Demon Hunters album
Read: Most of the rest of Vol. 2 of The Unselected Diaries of Emma M. Lion. Onto 3 tomorrow, eeeep! Also read more of Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, and I’m planning on reading a couple more chapters (they’re short) of The Eyes of the Dragon tonight.
Ate: A McDonald’s hash brown two exits before we got to the U-Haul place, yum. I also made a Trader Joe’s frozen lasagna that nobody but myself touched. Also yum. These people don’t know what they’re missing out on.
Wrote: Aside from this, nothing — it’s late, and I won’t get a chance to do any scene work.