"Worst" is Relative

Our little white dog practices his stealth camouflage
skills in a pile of white packing paper.

So here's the truth. I haven't yet figured out what I want this blog to really be. I like to write--a lot--but I also like to bake. It was supposed to be a place to showcase my baked goods for potential customers. But every once in a while, I just want to write something and know that someone out there is reading it--even if it was only an accident. So I suppose I'll settle for 90-10 or 80-20.... 90 percent baking, 10 percent random musings (or there about).

If you've read my earlier posts, you know that we've just moved. We're no strangers to moving. We've been shuffling our stuff all over this vast expanse of a nation, and even globally once or twice. But the thing is, most of the time the move is work-related, so my husband's company chips in for some of the relocation. Usually we're (I'm) a little bitter and disillusioned with the process when it happens, so I don't really touch much of anything before movers come. That means that we've been moved at least twice and I haven't culled anything out. Well, that's not strictly true. I got rid of some stuff when we moved to Alaska. Kind of a lot really, but just the easy stuff. My husband hadn't really sorted through much, either.

This time it was our choice to move, so no movers--just us. It took us so incredibly long to pack, mostly because 50 percent of the time was spent unpacking stuff that we hadn't even looked at in years in order to either get rid of it or re-pack it.

Through Craigslist and donations, we got rid of a small UHaul's worth of stuff. That is a lot of stuff  to get rid of. I felt pretty good about it and about us. We were making progress. It felt cathartic. I have a friend who works on a farm, and she recruited some of her friends to help us move. We stayed up until midnight the night before the move to make sure everything was as organized as it could be. We were good. It was going to be hard, but should flow well. And we got rid of a whole truck's worth of junk. And UHaul swore that our 26-foot truck would move a 3-4 bedroom house, and we only had 1.5 bedrooms and an office. We were golden!

Oh, my. How far the righteous can fall.

We got up early to move things from our storage unit to the freight elevator and the loading dock, and were immediately stymied by locked doors and passenger elevators that weren't working. And then the freight elevator wouldn't work, but by happy coincidence we caught the weekend maintenance man as he was walking in. By then we had gotten nearly nothing out of the storage unit, but it was time to back the truck up and meet the crew that was going to help us--who all showed up right on time.

One thing maybe I haven't mentioned is that the apartment we were moving out of was in an old, renovated cotton mill that was originally built in 1870. At the time, it was the longest continuous manufacturing/mill building in the world, which means it's about 3-4 blocks long. We lived on the far end of it, as far as you can get from the loading dock. Delivery men have told me that they called our unit the "apartment at the end of the hallway from The Shining." Everything we moved, we had to shuttle two blocks, inside, down a hallway to the elevator, from the elevator to the dock, and from the dock to the truck. And we had a fridge and a stove and a washer and dryer, and furniture, and an upright piano... anyway, this post is getting really long, so I'll try to wrap it up.

The apartment wouldn't let us reserve the dock for more than 3 hours. 3 hours is not near enough when you're traipsing your stuff two blocks down a hallway. UHaul lied. No way in heck that truck was going to take all our stuff in one go. The freight elevator broke down. The fridge turned into the fridge from hell, because it wouldn't fit through any of the doors without severe jimmying, bending, pushing, huffing, puffing, rolling, cursing, and high blood pressure. We got kicked out of the loading dock--while all of our stuff was still scattered around it. It was one of the hottest and most humid days of the summer. We made trip #1 to the house, and while backing into the driveway I put a nice set of deep, muddy ruts in my new neighbor's still-growing lawn. We unloaded most of the truck and then we released the farm helpers, and our friends stayed on to help us. We went back to the loading dock. We couldn't get the elevator. We finally got the elevator. We packed up the truck with round 2. We got all the easy stuff off the truck. We couldn't get the piano in the house. We left it in the garage. We got the fridge into the house... barely. We couldn't fit the fridge in the kitchen. At all. The kitchen that was built for this fridge. We couldn't maneuver it around the island. We messed with it for about 2 hours. I have begun to hate that fridge. We ran to Lowes 15 minutes before closing and picked up a cheapo garage fridge/freezer that I'll use for baking.

We finally said goodbye to our loyal, loyal friends at about 11 pm--who had shown up promptly at 8 am and live an hour away--and who wouldn't take payment. We were tired, and cranky, and for about the fourth time that day I felt like breaking down in tears. Except for the tears part, Sean felt the same. The whole thing had taken about 3 times longer than we thought, we weren't even able to get everything in the house with help, and we couldn't even feel like we'd accomplished anything, because now it was time for all the unpacking. We decided that we'd run to the store to get a very, very, very late dinner, and treat ourselves to a soda and a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone at McDonald's.

McDonald's was out of chocolate for the chocolate-dipped cones. And they were out of diet soda. That was the moment that I think Sean wanted to burst into tears. "This whole day should just be called The Day of Disappointment," he said (with quite a bit of passion, I might add).

I had to agree. The next day I woke up tired and achy and cranky and just generally no fun to be around, and I told my mom that the move day had been my worst day in recent memory. But at some point I had a major change of heart. I don't know what triggered it, but it's amazing how my outlook changed.

We are lucky enough to be moving into a new house. Poor us. We are lucky enough that when our massive fridge didn't fit in the kitchen, we could go buy another one, just because we didn't want our food to spoil-- which also means that we had food and more to spare. We have jobs. We live in a free country. As a woman, I enjoy equal rights with men. I have education. I have freedom of religion. I have the right to vote. I don't have to worry about being killed like that poor woman in Afghanistan who was filmed as she was executed for alleged adultery. I don't live somewhere with a horrible regime like Syria. I can go to the grocery store, with its aisles and aisles of food and fresh produce and get whatever I want. I don't wake up each morning and wonder how in the world I'm simply going to survive. On my worst day, 98% of the world would still envy me. "Worst" is very, very relative.

It's amazing how trivial your problems become when you stop to count your blessings.